What is your thought sequence, particuarlly in a new venture that you're thinking about or have already started. Do cool things just randomly pop in your head after whatever things you do through life? As a follow-up, how do you actually validate whether or not you will actually move forward with it (market opportunity, personal problem, growth potential, ease/challenge of problem, customer validation)?
How Do You Find New Problems to Solve or Ideas for Products To Work On?
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Re: How Do You Find New Problems to Solve or Ideas for Products To Work On?
#2There are tricks to get more of any kind of idea, like keeping a notebook with you and jotting down suggestions to yourself during the day, then doing triage and record the best ones at the end of the day. Once you get into the habit of looking for ideas, you'll start to see them everywhere. Most will have fatal problems (and practice also makes you better at seeing these quickly), but some won't.
The next step is to break out of your personal routine and small circle of problems. If you're only building ideas based of your own life, and your life is generally pretty comfortable, you'll only be solving problems that are relatively meaningless in the grand scheme of things. So get out of your own neighborhood and immediate circle of friends, and learn how to talk to people everywhere. Everyone has problems (and ideas on how they should be solved).
For validation: you definitely need to put in the time talking with the people who you imagine most need what you're building. People have habits, and solutions of some kind already in place for any problem -- you need to give them a solution that better enough that they'll change their habits for it. Find out in detail what they already do before you try to "fix" it.
Re: How Do You Find New Problems to Solve or Ideas for Products To Work On?
#3There are tricks to get more of any kind of idea, like keeping a notebook with you and jotting down suggestions to yourself during the day, then doing triage and record the best ones at the end of the day. Once you get into the habit of looking for ideas, you'll start to see them everywhere. Most will have fatal problems (and practice also makes you better at seeing these quickly), but some won't. The next step is to…
If you're only building ideas based of your own life, and your life is generally pretty comfortable, you'll only be solving problems that are relatively meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
There's so much truth in this. This combined with the other idea that you should 'scratch your own itch' can result in bit of frustration. Many (myself included) fall into this trap and find ourselves trying to dig deep to find problems we can solve. Sometimes we fool ourselves in thinking we have problems that we really don't have. Then you end up with meaningless solutions or even worse, solutions looking for a problem.
Re: How Do You Find New Problems to Solve or Ideas for Products To Work On?
#4One of the ways is to go out of your niche. Out of the high tech stuff, and see what "ordinary" people with uncool professions need. Other option is to transfer ideas from one niche to another - it may look odd and weird at first but then lots of ideas will pop up.
I even do get some of my ideas from TV. From the news. From seeing a problem or someone's business model that can be transferred elsewhere.
Re: How Do You Find New Problems to Solve or Ideas for Products To Work On?
#5To be honest. The best ideas come when you are not even trying hard at it. Like walking down the street, overhearing an argument, or my personal favourite - in the shower.
But no matter what just keep a notebook.if that is too big, use the note pad on your phone. so that when even the smallest idea pops in your head (which you think is cool) write it down.
It is not enough to just write it down either, don't stop mulling over it, for about an hour or so. (Because from a zen advice, if you go chasing your thoughts, you get too obsessed and lose opportunity for new and greater ones.) Consider a few things like possibility, implementation, improvement etc.
After a while (say a day or two) read over your notes, if you still like the ideas, you just might have yourself a viable project.
Re: How Do You Find New Problems to Solve or Ideas for Products To Work On?
#6I'm still trying to figure out the answers to these questions. I get ideas about anything I pay enough attention to. Mostly this has happened in an academic context, so far. I had an idea that I intend to pursue in a startup-ish way, based on a way to modify to the bitcoin protocol to, roughly speaking, allow people to purchase time on the computational resources devoted to the blockchain lottery[1]. I got the idea when reading a thread on bitcointalk.org about a blockchain dedicated to cracking RSA keys. I went and had a shower shortly afterwards, and at some point during that suddenly it was clear to me how you could arrange such a blockchain in a secure way. It took a few months more thinking in my spare time to make the idea flexible enough to be useful, which sounds laborious, but was actually tremendous fun.
I'm still trying to figure out ways to assess the marketability of the idea. While asking people about the technical feasibility of the idea, I got some useful feedback on how it needs to be improved[2], but I'm still don't have a clear idea about how to reach potential customers[3]. My current plan is to survey people using GPUs for approximately embarassingly parallel Monte Carlo inference and optimization, because the computational constraints in my framework bear some resemblance to those of GPU programs, and I think GPU developers could migrate fairly easily.
[1] https://docs.googlye.com/open?id=0B3qaT-ZL6aeKMWFhNmIwOGYtNW...
[2] E.g., https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=64421.msg757930#msg7...
Re: How Do You Find New Problems to Solve or Ideas for Products To Work On?
#7One of the ways is to go out of your niche. Out of the high tech stuff, and see what "ordinary" people with uncool professions need. Other option is to transfer ideas from one niche to another - it may look odd and weird at first but then lots of ideas will pop up. I even do get some of my ideas from TV. From the news. From seeing a problem or someone's business model that can be transferred elsewhere.
I did this and I can see how "getting out of your niche" works but be careful that you know who your customers will be. I went into working with the real estate industry, particularly realtors. I now find myself really wanting to get into high tech because my personality clashes with a lot of my customers. For one, they are incredibly un-tech savy and 80% of them use some outdated windows computer with Internet Explorer 6 or something prehistoric.
I had to spend 30 minutes the other day explaining to someone how to download a picture and where it gets saved on her computer.
They also like to have meetings and conference calls on things that can be resolved with a 2 sentence email. There are also some things I'd like to be able to do like build relationships with my customers through social media and although many of them do use it, it's just not the same as interacting with a younger or more tech savy demographic.
So in the end, for my next business, I'm going to look towards finding a market where my customers are better suited with my personality and skills. I think it will not only be more enjoyable for me but also allow me to fully utilize what I am good at.
Re: How Do You Find New Problems to Solve or Ideas for Products To Work On?
#8I keep a notebook on my night table with a pen to catalog my ideas as they popup. My ideas usually come as the result of me reflecting on the past day and letting my mind wander. I write everything down, even if it seems highly unlikely to ever come to fruition. I believe this is important as further ideas can be derived that are slightly more 'approachable'. I try my best not to force this process and let it occur organically. The notes are written as a stream-of-consciousness, I sketch and write to my hearts content hoping to capture the idea envisioned in my minds eye.
Validation: I don't validate my ideas as much as I should, this is a personal failing but its something I am working on. I do perform market research on each product and consider the challenges of getting a MVP out to consumers. I recently watched a talk by DHH at Startup School '08[1] which gave me a personal epiphany, sadly this should have been painfully obvious, that you can still do well aiming to satisfy the niche markets, chances are you will not be making the next facebook. While it is nice to dream of being the next big thing, I personally would be ecstatic to have a handful of people paying 5$ a month for a product that solved their problem.
Re: How Do You Find New Problems to Solve or Ideas for Products To Work On?
#9Regarding your follow-up question, here are a few things I ask myself before moving forward with a new idea:
1. Can I get the expertise/experience to actually create this? I may have the technical expertise to do it, but if I don't have the domain experience I may produce something that makes perfect sense to everyone except someone who actually needs the product. Not having the experience myself is fine, but I need a plan for how I'm going to get it or someone who can provide it.
2. How would I market this? Having a good idea is one thing, but getting it in the hands of people who would actually use it is another. For me this will often mean partnering with someone who is already working with the customers I want to reach.
3. What is the probability of success and what is the potential payback? It is easy to get so enamored with a problem that you stop to think about whether it really makes business sense or not. A project has a 0.1% chance of making $1,000,000, but a 99.9% of losing money is going to be less attractive (from a financial standpoint) than project that has a 25% chance of making $100,000.
Re: How Do You Find New Problems to Solve or Ideas for Products To Work On?
#10One of the ways is to go out of your niche. Out of the high tech stuff, and see what "ordinary" people with uncool professions need. Other option is to transfer ideas from one niche to another - it may look odd and weird at first but then lots of ideas will pop up. I even do get some of my ideas from TV. From the news. From seeing a problem or someone's business model that can be transferred elsewhere.
I did this and I can see how "getting out of your niche" works but be careful that you know who your customers will be. I went into working with the real estate industry, particularly realtors. I now find myself really wanting to get into high tech because my personality clashes with a lot of my customers. For one, they are incredibly un-tech savy and 80% of them use some outdated windows computer with Internet Explo…
On the other hand, if you invest some effort to get more comfortable working with people like these, you could have access to a market that may have fewer competitors, since many tech-oriented people might have the same obstacles you did. And real estate agents may have real money to spend on a product that would make it easier for them to earn their commissions -- you could get a lot more money on a single sale than you could from selling iPhone apps to random people for $4.99 a piece.