How to Decide What to Build

Basically, it's difficult for me to imagine personally paying for any type of SAAS offering, so when I'm working on a project with a paid model, sometimes I have to employ a 'suspension of disbelief' because I'm working on something that I know I probably wouldn't be willing to pay for (not because it sucks, just because I'm hesitant to pay for any software or online service).

Your cooking annoyance is a good place to do thought experiments. I don't always want to cook, but in cases where I don't want to cook I don't always want to go out. Proposed solution: Get my neighbours to cook for me. It's a good idea, but after you investigated, it was infeasible.

There are two ways you can go with this. First, you now have a new annoyance: normal people can't sell their own food creations without poisoning people (or, alternatively, the government discourages people poisoning each other :-) ). Nothing is saying that you have to stay with your original annoyance. You can move. And since this is a thought experiment, maybe you might come up with another idea and investigate that. If it doesn't pan out, then you will get new annoyances.

This technique is pretty similar to Toyota's "5 whys". Before they decide on how to fix a problem they first ask why the problem exists. When they answer that question, they ask why that situation exists. They go down 5 times (I don't think that number is actually carved out in stone, but you get the idea). At that point they have a much better idea of the situation and can choose the most effective place to solve their problem.

But you may come to a realisation that "getting my neighbours to cook for me" is not going to be feasible -- and that nothing down that chain is going to work out. That's not a problem, because it's not the only solution to the problem.

For example (and feel free to steal this idea) I live in Japan and my wife was ill the other day. Normally she makes me a packed lunch. I was too busy with work to return the favour, so instead I went to the convenience store and bought some instant ramen.

You may have eaten instant ramen before. When I lived in Canada, I learned how horrible it is. But in Japan, if you spend $2 instead of $1 the instant ramen is pretty freaking good. If you spend $3 instead of $2, it's almost as good as I can make myself (the only real downside is that the toppings are not really numerous enough).

I thought to myself, "I wonder if I could export these amazing ramen soups to the US. I'm sure you can get them in specialty stores, but this is absolutely ripe for exploitation on the web. These things weigh nothing and they will ship perfectly. And they don't rot in any reasonable time frame. Why the heck is there not anything like this?"

So I did my 5 why's and realised that if you want to do it, you have to be in the US (or wherever you want to sell) because you need to order container sized amounts to make the overseas shipping reasonable. This means you need a distribution centre at the destination. But I absolutely guarantee that Nissin (or whoever you want to talk to) would be thrilled to sell you a container of ramen, with which you can do a "Ramen of the week club" on the internet (surely this already exists... surely... I haven't actually checked).

Anyway, that's an example. Don't give up is the answer. One idea is nothing. Let it go. Use it to inform your next move. Keep going and never stop.

Edit: I just had a quick look. There are internet ramen clubs, but their ramen is all crap. Ripe for disruption -- look for ramen in a bowl shaped container.

Edit Edit: Darn: https://japanramenbox.com This is exactly what I was thinking. Hope they do well (though you might be able to undercut them ;-) ).

(Obviously I’m massively generalising. I’m not having a dig at anyone here.)

I’ve realised recently that there’s good money to be made solving little problems. Not Zuckerberg money, but who wants that lifestyle. Ramen money.

Example: my partner is a medical copywriter. Some jobs, she spends hours reformatting journal citations. All she’s doing is making part of it italic, making sure the dashes are all en-dashes, whatever.

How many medical copywriters are there? How many people have this problem? Now, it’s not a life-changing thing, but it’s what computers are for! So we’re building a little tool that will make this easier for us.

What’s our goal? I don’t know. To make enough to pay our rent? That’d be lovely for starters and what is that, a thousand people giving us $5/month each? That’s nothing.

It also helps, of course, that she’s in this industry. She knows where to go to find other people with the same problem. Solve something in your domain, and everything’s going to be easier. (It’s also why I’m not afraid of telling everyone here what the idea is. Chances of someone else being passionate and knowledgeable about this, enough to steal the idea, are near nil.)

That’s where my head’s at, and it makes thinking about this stuff much easier for me, at least.

Anyway, regarding food you could have thought about a machine/robot based solution, at least to begin with :)