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Comment by leorio | Hacker News Reader

I would probably get downvoted for this..

It's very rare to find those "scratch your own itch problems", the solution to that itch is most likely a google search away.

Pick a good product that you use and clone it. Keep an open mind because you can never copy the entire business since there is only so much you can see. Atleast you get some direction to start and you know that you are not trapped in building something people don't want.

Since you mentioned making your skillset strong(technical?), either way you win by just starting something.

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I'm not a SWE, but this is how I sometimes make music if I'm starting without an idea.

Take a song you love—or even a song you've just heard 15 seconds of—and try to recreate it, but extremely loosely, taking as many liberties as possible exploring directions the initial inspiration leads you towards.

More often than not, it'll morph into something unrecognizable compared to the source inspiration, and quickly become it's own thing.

Staring at a blank sheet of paper, or the the void of limitless options, is frozen death. Give yourself a limited toolset and an inspired spark of imagination to get yourself going, and incredible things are possible.

I discovered a long time ago that I often get lyric ideas while listening to other songs, usually in the car. What I find interesting is that most of the time the ideas that pop into my head are completely unrelated to the lyrics of the song I'm listening to.

Excellent advice.

You can even go further and you'll notice that the vast number of VC backed companies are just focused snippets of Microsoft Office Apps.

Or even just full-featured craigslist pages: https://i.imgur.com/9WM1PPE.png

I agree, trying to scratch your own itch is complicated and frustrating and if you really actually need whatever you’re building, chances are you could solve the problem in an easier way. After that, you’re not scratching your own itch anymore, you’re making it easier for others to scratch the same itch that you’ve already solved. It’s just not that easy to say “build something you need”.

Chances are you can do it in an Excel spreadsheet without writing a single line of code, but where’s the business in that?

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