Bootstrapper's Guide to Idea Generation

guide-to-idea-generation.png

Who is this guide for

This guide is for the indie hacker, bootstrapper, solopreneur, and entrepreneur seeking to make their first dollar online or build a sustainable seven-figure lifestyle business. It's a resource designed to demonstrate the numerous ways ideas can surface, and how we can become more receptive to spotting and pursuing them.

Often, we put too much effort into searching for a grand idea through brainstorming, not realizing that ideas are abundant. It's important to acknowledge that ideas, while crucial, are just a small part of the entire business.

This is not for those looking to build the next unicorn. For that, go read Peter Thiel's "Zero to One."

What we’re looking for

Start with a problem, not a solution

We don’t want “cool”.

Start with a problem, not a solution. For a business to be viable, it needs to solve a problem. The cost must be less than the value received. Often, when we approach ideation by brainstorming and coming up with ideas out of thin air, we end up with a solution without a problem.

One example was the Segway, the two-wheel motorized vehicle that claimed it would revolutionize transportation. I remember seeing renderings of how cities would be redesigned for these devices, that everybody would be using them. While the Segway is a perfectly useful utility, it did not solve a problem in a way that couldn't be solved much less expensively. If I'm looking to travel a mile or two to work, I have plenty of options, including walking, biking, public transportation, or even inline skating or skateboarding, all of which can cost little to nothing. On the other hand, the Segway costs many thousands of dollars without a noticeably improved experience.

So, we want to pay attention here. There are times when building something "cool" can work and even be big. But generally speaking, especially in the indie hacker community and the types of products that indie hackers create, cool is not what sells.

Common myths

On competition

Let's be honest. Most of us start out afraid of competition. I hear people complaining that they can't come up with an idea that hasn't already been done. If you have an idea, do a quick Google search, see someone else doing it, and move on. Don't flip the question on its head.

I like to challenge those people to tell me about any product or solution where there's only one option or one business doing it. Microsoft and Apple both exist, and there are plenty of smaller operating systems too. There are something like 4 million different types of e-commerce stores built on Shopify alone. Think of all the different types of restaurants in your town that serve the same type of food. There are countless types of toilet paper on the same shelves, yet they all likely have thriving businesses.

So instead of being concerned about competition, I would say the opposite is true, and that we should be concerned when there is no competition. It is far more likely to mean that it is not solving a valuable enough problem more than it is that no one has come up with the idea and attempted it. We're talking about building a viable bootstrap business. So I would instead go out looking for an idea that does indeed have competition because you know there is a market there, you know it's solving a pain.

On differentiation

On differentiation, I won't say we shouldn't have it from our competition, but we can overemphasize the need too early. The reality is we all have unique perspectives on a problem and our ways of solving it. The chances of your solution ending up just like mine, even if you try, are slim. Sure, you could blatantly copy everything, but you wouldn't do that.

If I build an email client and you build one too, even if they generally perform the same functions, they will have unique differentiators. It could be design, messaging, targeting, marketing, usability, pricing, or a specific feature set. As long as you avoid copying an interface pixel for pixel and listen to your customers, you are guaranteed to end up with your own take and differentiators naturally.

On the value of an idea

Another thing to note as we come up with ideas and decide what to work on is recognizing that an idea, problem, or solution alone is not valuable. Paul Graham articulates this well: if ideas were valuable on their own, there would be a marketplace for them. If you've had an idea, executed on it, moved on, and then seen someone else execute the same idea but a hundred times better, that hits home. This has happened to me numerous times, and it elicits a mixed set of emotions. On one hand, my first response is, "I had that idea; that should have been me." Then I realize the value is in the execution. Their solution to the problem was significantly better than mine. This happens all the time.

So, as we come up with ideas, what we choose is important, but not everything rides on it. And this knowledge comes into play later when trying to get our idea out into the world. At that point, it's important to remember that only some variables that determine success are in our control. Timing, luck, skill, and even seemingly irrelevant, unexpected events can affect whether we succeed. So, it's worth vetting our ideas as much as possible early on, but we also shouldn't overthink or overcomplicate it. There's a lot more to building a successful business than the idea itself.

Seth Godin puts it nicely in his book This Is Marketing:

Don't make a key and then look for a lock. Find a lock and then fashion a key.

Deciding on your niche

https://www.nicheprowler.com/

Now that we've set the stage for the general mindset we want to have when honing in on the product we choose to build, there's one more step before we delve into where the ideas come from. We will explore many ways to generate ideas. The best way to keep ourselves in check and be efficient in narrowing down what to build is by pre-defining our criteria checklist. This checklist will outline what we're looking for and what we feel is important. With this in place, once we have a big list of ideas, and as ideas come to us daily, we will have a quick method of sorting them into the discard pile or keep pile.

Along with these criteria is the niche we choose to enter. For some, if you're an expert in a particular field, your niche is already known, clear, and predefined. For others, you may need to discover what niche you want to be in. Your first decision is to decide how important it is for you to be passionate about the niche or already know a lot about it. Either way can work. I built a seven-figure business in a niche that I started off knowing nothing about but quickly became very knowledgeable in. To me, this wasn't much of a problem because I love building businesses and solving the problems that come with them.

I often use the metaphor of a car mechanic who loves to work on engines and likely has a particular favorite type of car. Maybe he loves vintage '60s Mustangs, so it's an extra bonus if he can work on something like that. However, the reality is he's a car mechanic because he loves fixing engines and working on them, and in reality, he's under the hood most of the time anyway. So the type of car itself doesn't ultimately matter so much in the day-to-day.

Now, of course, this can be different in software because we need to be willing to talk to the customers in our niche. But this is where each of us is different. For each of us, there are some niches or target markets we may not necessarily be interested in, but we'd be more than happy to talk to the customers. In my example, I was talking to a lot of salespeople and sales teams, which are not people I normally have in my friend circle. However, I ended up really enjoying most of them. There are certain audiences of people, whom I will leave unnamed here, that sound significantly less enjoyable to talk to. So again, this depends on you, your comfort level, and your goals. Some people try to mesh their passions with their business, others would rather go where the most valuable problem is, and others are somewhere in between.

Idea selection criteria

These are my criteria, and ones I think everyone should think through for themselves before committing to an idea. Some I think every bootstrapper should stick to, others you should decide for yourself.

  1. Must have existing competition

Creating a new market is incredibly difficult, something the bootstrapper generally wants to avoid attempting.

These types of businesses require a lot more resources and funding. The presence of existing competition means you don’t need to validate the idea itself.

  1. No third-party platform dependency

My goal in creating a business is to build something I have control over. Something that can’t be taken away from me at a moment's notice (like a 9-5). I therefore don’t want to be dependent on another platform for controlling what I can and can’t do.

A good example of this is recently, after Elon Musk took over Twitter, they started charging astronomical amounts for use of their previously free API. Overnight, this killed many software businesses and apps built on Twitter.

This is not to be confused with integrating with other platforms, or the use of third-party platforms at all. I have no problem using Stripe as my payment processor, for example, as I could swap that out if needed without it risking my business as a whole.

  1. Can be boiled down to a single high-value problem

As a solo bootstrapped founder, or small team, I want to minimize my initial build out, and this is best done by solving a single problem very well.

This is the difference between trying to compete with Zapier and all if its workflows, versus making the best damn version of a single automated, high-value workflow

If we do that, we can get it into the market fast, get early customers, get feedback, and expand.

  1. Price point

The pros and cons of various price points are fairly obvious; the lower the price point, the more customers you need, and may or may not be an easier sell (depending on the customer type).

I like to look for problems with a price point averaging $49 (or $99 ideally) a month or more, or the ability to grow into that price point.

  1. Not a fad

Fads can’t be predicted, so we just have to make a judgment call here and know what you’re comfortable with.

Are you looking to build a sustainable business or are you okay with possibly riding a short wave?

I’m looking to grow a sustainable business for the long term.

  1. Are you a customer?

In many ways, it doesn't matter to me whether I'm building a product that I am the end user of or not.

However, I know that of the dozens of apps that I've built, the ones that I've also been a user of have ended up dramatically better in terms of user experience.

You can learn a lot from talking to your customers and watching them use your product, but it's nothing like being a user yourself.

  1. The market is easily accessible (for you)

The biggest mistake most early bootstrappers make is focusing on building and putting off the marketing to be figured out later.

The majority of the time, they realize they have no idea how to market or distribute this application. This is when they shut it down and decide to move on to something else.

So I need to know that I can find and get in front of the market I'm planning to target.

If you’re already immersed in an industry, you may know the market is accessible to you.

Other times, this requires validation, and it’s worth doing some early tests to ensure you can capture the attention of our intended audience before building anything.

  1. Mission critical

The more mission-critical the tool is, the higher the value (the more you can charge), but also significantly more pressure on you to deliver.

And when things go wrong, it can be incredibly stressful and scary, and you’re likely to be facing a lot of angry calls and emails very quickly.

On the other hand, a non mission-critical application may not be as valuable, but your life is likely to be significantly more enjoyable and less stressful.

I can tell you from experience, that running a mission-critical application can take its toll. I therefore lean heavily into the non-mission-critical camp now.

  1. B2B versus B2C

B2B products are sold to businesses, while B2C products are sold to customers.

B2B is often considered preferable because businesses are more willing to spend money. These lend themselves to SaaS apps, which are popular for their recurring revenue. For most of my career, I've built B2B apps and focused on SaaS.

However, I was recently listening to an interview with Danny Postma, who has several successful B2C apps. He convinced me that selling B2C has great advantages, especially his one-off B2C apps that generate most of their sales through SEO. While he doesn't have recurring SaaS revenue from the same customers, he does have recurring revenue due to the steady search traffic to his sites.

Some benefits he points out about this product type are less customer support, non-mission critical nature, and if they don't work, someone just moves on. This contrasts with something breaking after a customer has been paying for it for a year, resulting in a very different situation.

Bonus: Can sell multiple seats/team plans

Looking to sell B2B, there's a bonus criterion that I like to look at: whether you can sell multiple seats/users to a single customer, or if you can sell team plans. The ability to sell multiple seats and team plans can dramatically increase your revenue. One sale can easily result in hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month from a single customer.

There's a final thing you may want to consider if you're averse to marketing or don't want to find a partner to handle it. You may want to skip straight to approaches for finding ideas with built-in marketing, such as

Ways to come up with ideas

TODO: Create a ChatGPT prompts for coming up with ideas

The trained mind - scratching our own itch (often)

Stop trying to brainstorm. Train your ability to notice.

Now we get to the fun stuff. We start looking at the different places ideas and problems can come from. Number one, the trained mind. The best place to discover problems to solve is training our mind to be triggered and notice gaps and friction in our day-to-day activities. It's safe to say that none of us would say everything we do in our day in our work is as seamless as possible and as easy as it could or should be. Yet we find ourselves saying we can't find any good ideas. So the work here is to train ourselves to notice. That's it.

We could carry a pen and paper in our pocket or make a little list in the notes app on our phone and throughout our day, no matter what it is, if we find ourselves irritated about something or something's harder than it should be, we can't find a certain software that behaves the way we want, we jot it down. Or you’re using a product that you think could be made better. Especially in the beginning of trying to train our minds to do this, it's best to not put a filter on what we may or may not pay attention to. For example, we may be software developers, but it's still useful to train our mind to notice these things in the physical world. Really, just get in the habit and you never know what you'll uncover.

Finding other people’s problems

Freelance

If you're currently working a job, full-time or freelance, this is a great place to open your eyes to opportunities and become familiar with business processes and tools used. There are usually many gaps to be found that you may be able to fill.

Conversations

Having conversations with people is a great way to uncover their problems. After years of building applications that went nowhere, I adopted this approach, resulting in a seven-figure business. There's now a wonderful book about this called "The Mom Test." Unfortunately, it wasn't available when I was first going through the process. Having read the book, I can vouch that it works, as my approach was very similar to the techniques suggested.

The goal is to go out and focus on people— their processes, pains, and problems— and see what you uncover. This is the opposite of how many people approach customer conversations early on: they focus on their product, not the customer.

Spreadsheets

I have another saying—I don't know if I made it up—but where there's a spreadsheet, there's a SAS. Spreadsheets are a spread; spreadsheet software is some of the most useful software because it lets people create their own solutions, custom to their needs. You can input and organize data almost any way you want. I have a number of spreadsheets solving problems for me that I can't find a better tool for.

So, a goldmine for great problems to solve is by looking through your spreadsheets and asking others if you can look through theirs.

Look at your spreadsheets; where there’s a spreadsheet there’s a potential SaaS.

After all, spreadsheets are a sort of catch-all, providing functionality to organize and sort just about any type of data, any way you want.

But not everyone is satisfied with spreadsheets as a solution because creating a viable solution there can take a lot of time and effort, requiring a deep understanding of data organization, workflows, and advanced spreadsheet knowledge.

SaaS apps generally provide a solution to a specific problem or workflow in a (hopefully) simplified way.

Let’s look at three examples from the sheets I see when I open my Google Sheets folder:

  1. A spreadsheet that lists all my tweets. This gets populated from IFTT. I use this to review my tweets for content repurposing purposes:

Image

  1. A spreadsheet that syncs customer payments from Stripe. I do this to easily view the data in different ways that I can’t do in Stripe:

Image

  1. A spreadsheet that shows all the survey results from my newsletter subscribers. This data tells me what stage they are in their SaaS journey, and what type of content they’re interested in:

Image

Each of these has the potential so be turned into a SaaS app.

Maybe these are good ideas, maybe not - you'd want to dive deeper into how I actually use these.

The more sheets you look at, and the more people you talk to (!) the better chance of finding a killer idea, and solving a big, common pain point.

Go through your sheets. Ask your friends if they can show you their sheets. Talk to your friends in various businesses and ask if they’ll briefly show your their sheets. Have a sheet party!

Once you’ve found a few that you think hit the mark, try to find more people with similar sheets (which means they’re solving the same issue). This would likely be those that have similar titles/roles, in similar departments, or industries, or perform similar functions.

Once you’ve found the pain, and know how to find the people that share that pain, it’s time to build.

Online communities

Looking in online communities is another great way to find problems to solve. If you know your niche, make a list of all the forums and online communities they frequent and sift through them. If you don't know your niche, pick some and see what you find, or look on more general forum sites like Reddit or Quora. One fun trick is to search for keywords that indicate problems and pain, like this... or this…

Frustrating,Hard time,The worst,I hate,hate it,Annoying,It sucks when,I can't because

how do you, how can i, is it possible, is there a way, what is the best, is there an app, what app do you, what apps do you

And…

Any tools,Is there a tool,Any apps,Any websites,Any sites,Any solutions,I wish there was,Any software

You can also look at sites like Upwork, where people post specific jobs to have fulfilled. By looking for common themes, you can get ideas, or you may even find one post that sparks something. What's great is that you know people are willing to pay to have this problem solved, so there's validation.

You can find top-rated workers on these sites, see the services they perform, and the jobs they've completed. Poorly rated products on review sites, such as G2 or Trustpilot, can also spark ideas when you read the bad reviews. Reading the bad reviews of otherwise highly rated products can be especially good for giving you a sense of where you might improve a particular product.

You can also look at sites like Upwork, where people post specific jobs to have fulfilled. By looking for common themes, you can get ideas, or you may even find one post that sparks something. What's great is that you know people are willing to pay to have this problem solved, so there's validation.

You can find top-rated workers on these sites, see the services they perform, and the jobs they've completed. Poorly rated products on review sites, such as G2 or Trustpilot, can also spark ideas when you read the bad reviews. Reading the bad reviews of otherwise highly rated products can be especially good for giving you a sense of where you might improve a particular product.

Product launch sites

To some of the really fun ones: You can browse sites like Product Hunt and BetaList that have endless amounts of products, new and old. On Product Hunt, you can gain a lot of value by seeing what people are building and scrolling back into the archives to find applications that are no longer around, trying to figure out why and what you might do differently. It's possible they weren't solving a valuable problem, but there could be many other reasons too.

SEO keyword first.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZJ9l_8d1CpC80UB4rx8V5v9DxVWDC9gPuJJI003juCM/edit

https://twitter.com/saasmakermac/status/1722311309591527463

This one is especially good for people who don't want to have early customer conversations and don't want to do much marketing. Start by getting a tool such as Ahrefs or SEMrush and spend days searching keywords, trying to come up with ones you think you can rank for easily on Google, yet get a fair amount of traffic. This is the approach Danny Postma talks about in his interview with Arvid Call. It's quite brilliant how he does it, and this is his approach to coming up with what to build. He starts by finding underserved keywords he feels confident he can rank for. He then decides what the product would be that these searches are intending to find. He estimates the price point he thinks he could set it at. From here, he comes up with a ballpark estimate of how much he could generate per month based on that search traffic and price. He can then decide if it's worth building or not. He has done this a number of times and has some very successful applications. The beauty here is that if you're accurate in your ability to rank highly on Google for that term, you are pretty much guaranteed to get traffic. So a fair amount of marketing is, in a sense, built in.

Domain first

This image was popularized by Peter Askew. He monitors expired and aged domains for sale with high domain authority and, ideally, a large volume of backlinks. Similar to the SEO keyword-first method, he considers what kind of business he could build on it that would interest the incoming traffic. The beauty of this is the built-in marketing and traffic that comes as a byproduct of the process.

Other good places to look for ideas include marketplaces like Shopify, monday.com, or those listed on Rocket Gems. You could find an app with low ratings and create a better version. This method does have third-party platform dependency, which poses a risk. However, it also offers built-in marketing, as many people search for specific types of apps in these marketplaces. Often, the platform covers aspects like billing and payment management, so you don't have to handle those.

Similarly, you can explore Chrome extensions. Look for ones with a decent user base but low reviews and develop an improved version.

Read bad reviews of existing products

Pick established product. Pick one of their features, and do that amazingly well

Byproducts

The Mom Test

The Lean Startup

Footnotes

Quotes

“The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not "think up" but "notice." Source

“When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they're making — not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently. Usually this initial group of users is small, for the simple reason that if there were something that large numbers of people urgently needed and that could be built with the amount of effort a startup usually puts into a version one, it would probably already exist. Which means you have to compromise on one dimension: you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. Not all ideas of that type are good startup ideas, but nearly all good startup ideas are of that type.” Source

“Live in the future, then build what's missing.”  Source

“Because a good idea should seem obvious, when you have one you'll tend to feel that you're late. Don't let that deter you. Worrying that you're late is one of the signs of a good idea. Ten minutes of searching the web will usually settle the question. Even if you find someone else working on the same thing, you're probably not too late. It's exceptionally rare for startups to be killed by competitors — so rare that you can almost discount the possibility. So unless you discover a competitor with the sort of lock-in that would prevent users from choosing you, don't discard the idea.”  Source

“A crowded market is actually a good sign, because it means both that there's demand and that none of the existing solutions are good enough.”  Source

“One way to ensure you do a good job solving other people's problems is to make them your own.” Source