How to Find a SaaS Idea
elliotbonneville.com
elliotbonneville.com
This is, imo, the biggest hurdle for engineers who want to become entrepreneurs. I've seen so many HN posts about people trying to crowd source startup problems, trying to automate away this piece and just get down to coding. I too struggled with this for the longest time. I felt like a solution looking for a problem. Just give me a problem, any problem, and I'll build the best damn app and be on my way!
But that's not how it works. If you want to stop being an engineer, you need to stop acting like one. Engineers have their problems roughly scoped and entered in a JIRA board. Entrepreneurs have to go find problems to solve. You want to go be an entrepreneur? Go learn to talk to people. Go learn to listen to others, empathize, and to convince people to believe in you. You will be a company of one - so go build out your personal sales & marketing departments.
Nope. Never said anything about "not building." Only you have stated that.
This circles back to my original question/statement; "I wonder why building a business and building a piece of software are so different"
> Building a business can be [fun]
Absolutely! Remove the words "a business" and restate that as:
"Building can be [fun]"
Now you can insert almost anything...
"Building a bike can be fun" "Building a business can be fun" "Building a product can be fun" "Building software can be fun" "Building a computer can be fun" ... ... ...
> Who wants to work in a business where the core product is boring
Remove the words "wants to" in that sentence and you could apply that statement to most of the Software Engineers who work for others. SE's typically work around this limitation by justifying it with the technology they are working on instead.
"I'm learning React!" "I get to use Ruby on Rails everyday!" "I get to learn more about using all the AWS services!" ... ... ...
None of that matters.
The only thing that matters is "building." Building is fun!
Why can't building a business be just as fun as building software? ...and we're right back to my original question :-)
Engineers don't like sales and marketing generally. That's why they're engineers. And unlike as you state, building in general is not necessarily fun, only specific things being built are fun, those that align with the interests of the builder. If you told me to build a house, I wouldn't necessarily consider that fun, so your initial premise is flawed. A business in this case also falls into the "not fun" category, again, in general to engineers.
That's not been my direct experience.
Actually, very much the opposite for myself and many others I know who are software engineers building their own businesses.
> And unlike as you state, building in general is not necessarily fun
No. I said building in general IS fun. That's my premise ;-)
> If you told me to build a house, I wouldn't necessarily consider that fun, so your initial premise is flawed.
No, that's for you as an individual. Not everyone. Yes, there are many people who find building a house fun. Those statements of mine, they were examples. The point is being missed. Engineers like to build.
There is no flawed premise, only an individual looking for flaws.
> A business in this case also falls into the "not fun" category, again, in general to engineers
Again, that's not been my direct experience nor the experience of other Software Engineers that I know who are building businesses.
Most likely you think it's not fun for you. That doesn't mean it's not fun in general, to engineers. Maybe you've chatted about this, anecdotally, with other Software Engineers, maybe you've read some online threads and it's formed a cognitive bias. That's very typical. I can clearly see it in these very generic statements.
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There is whole world out there for people who like to build (e.g. software engineers) and they can do it on their own terms, by better understanding what it is about building they like. Not what they "think" they like, but what actually drives them. That's harder to figure out. The biggest hurdle that I've experienced / seen is not the thousand and one reasons for why software engineers would hate building a business, but rather the biggest hurdle is their own cognitive bias towards it (force fed via generic, and widely accepted statements such as "business is mostly about sales and marketing and not so much about the product").
I'm sure you'll snap back with why I'm wrong. Maybe even sprinkle in some snark. Making sure to get the last word in. Please indulge yourself.
It's now time for me to get back to having fun building my business as a software engineer :-)
> No. I said building in general IS fun. That's my premise ;-)
Then I disagreed with that saying that building in itself is not necessarily fun, only building certain things is fun for certain people, which you seem to take issue with. I posed a counterfactual statement to your general rule, which means that your general rule cannot be true, as in propositional logic.
> Again, that's not been my direct experience nor the experience of other Software Engineers that I know who are building businesses.
> Most likely you think it's not fun for you. That doesn't mean it's not fun in general, to engineers. Maybe you've chatted about this, anecdotally, with other Software Engineers, maybe you've read some online threads and it's formed a cognitive bias. That's very typical. I can clearly see it in these very generic statements.
I said that in general, regardless of one's anecdotal experience, engineers tend towards building technology rather than business aspects like sales and marketing. Much as you disagree with me on anecdotal evidence, I also disagree with you. Whatever, seems to be a disagreement on principles, we can't convince each other.
But, regardless of our disagreements, please don't make statements like these:
> I'm sure you'll snap back with why I'm wrong. Maybe even sprinkle in some snark. Making sure to get the last word in. Please indulge yourself.
> It's now time for me to get back to having fun building my business as a software engineer :-)
When you engage in discourse, you are not above criticism or disagreement. Don't act holier than thou when someone disagrees with you. It harms the nature of argumentation, especially on fora like HN where it's expected more than other fora.
Whenever I come across these, it's in the territory of not worth my free time. But for the more complex projects they want a whole team, and I've found it's difficult as a solo person to sale that.
The problem I had. Is that a majority of what I came across was mobile and web orientated. As a back-end dev, it's not something I can help with. Especially when for the pitch deck metrics/numbers and a pretty demo are the big selling points.
Things you need (in my opinion) for an even semi-successful SaaS platform: Good UI with an easy to understand idea that provides an immediately obvious value, all while being easy to monetize sustainably. Coupled that with being able to actually find + reach customers.
> But let’s reiterate the big advantage you get from considering building a product in an industry outside of yours (software development): It’s just now you’re going to be operating in an industry which has software problems and isn’t particularly optimized to solve them.
Be careful about this. There is money to be made in those industries, and they might not have as much competition as software for software companies do.
But do you really want to be in those industries? Would you enjoy going to industry-specific conferences and mingling with those folks? If your business gets even a modicum of success, you will be working on it for several years to come.
Market/founder fit is something that isn't talked enough: who you choose to serve matters. What good is your business if you feel trapped inside it?
So the next time you set out to build a business, do yourself a favor and think about this from the beginning.
Relevant thread: https://capiche.com/q/looking-back-would-you-have-done-anyth...
"Create a solution to somebody else’s problem, where that problem sits at the intersection of being genuinely interesting / meaningful to you and being something that you are reasonably capable of addressing."
I also want to second his book recommendation [The Mom Test](https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/...). It's really short and will save you a lot of time building things nobody will pay for.
In school, we are trained to solve a problem very well. But the problems are given by teachers. There is no one to train you finding a valuable since kindergarten. That's why it's so hard to find it as an adult.
You may go down a path of a "big problem" that requires tons and tons of effort and overhead, only to find the market is too small, companies rather just do it "the old way", or they simply don't want to pay enough money.
Do your research.
It's an interesting and well written article. Thanks.