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Ask HN: Solopreneurs, how did you come up with your idea?

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Re: Ask HN: Solopreneurs, how did you come up with your idea?

#31

Post by mamcx »

> but everything I create or try to do seems like there are already dozens of other solutions doing the same thing

The major lesson I have after +20 years doing this: WHO CARES.

This concern is valid for a huge company or anybody that wanna get like 70% of the whole market.

For solo/small teams? Think of yourself as a street cart vendor that sells hamburgers, and is located on the front of mac donalds.

They still sell.

What you has but not others is that you are small, and is the actual person other person can , FOR REAL, talk about your product.

That is the whole thing of working as a freelancer, solo, small business. You can, FOR REAL, provide personal training/consulting/support, etc.

And that works even if you just take the product made by the big corporation and just know how to use it. There is business in being the guy who knows Excel well.

Re: Ask HN: Solopreneurs, how did you come up with your idea?

#32

Post by snarf21 »

rglover wrote: post #25

Just fill needs that you have. Don't like how something existing works? Fix it. Think you can offer a better version of an existing idea? Go for it. Also: ideas are far less important than execution [1]. That's why it's best to work on problems you actually care about. If you don't, you'll end up cutting corners or burning out well in advance of success. [1] https://sive.rs/multiply

This is great advice. Ideas are at best a head start, Execution is everything. Solve a problem you know thoroughly. Solve a problem you have yourself. You can pivot later but even if it goes nowhere, you solved something you can use even if no one else does.

Re: Ask HN: Solopreneurs, how did you come up with your idea?

#33

Post by yu3zhou4 »

I have another problem: ideas are cheap, coding is relatively easy, but talking to customers, marketing and sales in general are difficult as hell. Tried to find a sales co-founder on yc matching but gave up after two unsuccessful early stage startups. Did any of you have a similar problem? How did you solve it and become successful solopreneur?

Re: Ask HN: Solopreneurs, how did you come up with your idea?

#34

Post by TrackerFF »

Worked as a consultant. Formed a good "big picture" of how things worked, and got to speak with tons of people in various industries.

Do that enough, and you'll end up with a laundry list of "wish we could have this product/feature/etc."

A lot of the "boring" industries are also entrenched in old solutions that move at snail pace.

Re: Ask HN: Solopreneurs, how did you come up with your idea?

#35

Post by kebsup »

I'm creating a language learning app [0] and I've come up with it using frustration.

When I was in Germany, I wanted to turn my highschool German into something usable, but no apps or techniques worked for me. And I've tried 20+ of them.

Anki was the closest, but I really dreaded the card creation process - sentence, translation, audio...

So when I've finished university, I've found myself in a situation in which: I didn't need a lot of money, didn't have a job, LLMs were a new thing.

So I've started building.

[0] https://vocabuo.com

Re: Ask HN: Solopreneurs, how did you come up with your idea?

#36

Post by notamy »

Look outside of tech.

I found an area far outside of tech that had very real problems that nobody was really solving; in fact, the existing tools that should have solved this problem turned out to be a nightmare for the intended users. I've been working on it for a few months now and gotten very positive feedback, and have a steadily-growing userbase now. It's more of a side-project right now, maybe 10 hours/week, but maybe someday it'll evolve into an actual business (:

Not willing to share specifics about the specific area I'm doing this in, but the general idea stands. It helps a lot that the problem I'm working to solve is one I personally dealt with, so I understood a lot about what the problem was and was able to effectively solve it for myself. This translated into producing something that a lot of people like and use regularly.

Even more broadly: solve your own problems, then generalise out. If you're solving a real problem that you have, that isn't incredibly specific to something about you/your life/the way you do things/..., then odds are there's probably others out there with the same problem. Every even modestly successful project I've had started with solving my own problems, then polishing the solutions for others to use.

Re: Ask HN: Solopreneurs, how did you come up with your idea?

#37

Post by light_triad »

ericmcer wrote: post #23
brotchie wrote: post #14

One sample point of one person's experience: Product's built based on brainstorming: NEVER worked. Product built around solution to actual problems I've experienced: Always worked, BUT may not have a large enough TAM. The best way to actually find problems to solve is to replicate something else (as a learning process to actually find the real product you need to build), or talk to people who have problems: e.g. Try…

That does seem like the best way to go about it, but I have family who are doctors and they frequently talk about how tired they are of tech guys who read "The Mom Test" who now skulk around asking probing questions about pain points in a doctors daily work. It just seems like any time there is a repeatable process for doing something, people will latch onto it and then do it until it is totally exhausted. Tech Entre…

Great point! It's very difficult to build for a domain in which you're not an expert (non doctors building for doctors, non lawyers building for lawyers etc). You're going to lack a lot context, knowing what's important and how people use existing tools (versus what they say about how they use existing tools).

Considering that business is about compounding unfair advantages, if you have to hire people to tell you if you're going in the right direction it's going to be tough.

Re: Ask HN: Solopreneurs, how did you come up with your idea?

#39

Post by fm2606 »

mamcx wrote: post #31

> but everything I create or try to do seems like there are already dozens of other solutions doing the same thing The major lesson I have after +20 years doing this: WHO CARES. This concern is valid for a huge company or anybody that wanna get like 70% of the whole market. For solo/small teams? Think of yourself as a street cart vendor that sells hamburgers, and is located on the front of mac donalds. They still sel…

> For solo/small teams? Think of yourself as a street cart vendor that sells hamburgers, and is located on the front of mac donalds.

What a great analogy! I always thought of how many lawyer offices there are, from single lawyer to multiple lawyers, but I like your take on it much better.

Re: Ask HN: Solopreneurs, how did you come up with your idea?

#40

Post by neilv »

> (specially in the fields of wrapping AI).

Sounds like probably short-term coattail-riding.

You'd have to find some niche that companies like OpenAI won't just cover themselves, with general-purpose solutions (and what they can AI-derive just like you're thinking). They're already marketing to your customers.

And if they won't soon cover what you do, don't be so dependent upon them that they can eat up your margin or cut you off anyway.

The other option is to be an investment scam yourself: ride the hype investment, draw big salaries, puff up resume, hope you get acquired quickly.

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