Finding Ideas For Your Next Project | Hacker News Reader

Finding Ideas For Your Next Project

nathanbarry.com

118 pointsbr0ke37 comments

I think a better approach is to solve your own problems. This way you don't have to waste time cold calling people and hoping they are sincere with you with their feedback. You are the user and the creator... It's a very powerful position to be in.

I would recommend reading Paul Graham excellent post on "startup ideas" (which could easily translate to "project ideas"):

"The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself." http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

You will just have to make sure many others have the same problem and like your solution.

Upvoted. This is the best way to find genuine ideas in my experience. I also want to add that I've found a good way of finding problems is to constantly keep trying new things.

Also, You can always create new “needs,” after a while people realize that the new need has been a pain. Here is my thoughts:

http://www.drdacademy.com/?id=18

Solving your own problems can be a great source of inspiration. But if your goal is get your project widely used, you need to make sure others share that problem.

Sometimes asking around about pain points in other peoples lives/businesses can also be very fruitful

The problem with that approach is that most of us don't have corporate/business problems when we think about solutions. I can't foresee what a lawyer or advertising agency might struggle with.

Solving your problem is a good way to find ideas. You know the problem well and the context the problem is in. However, if your work life, social life or life in general is not too varied, finding a problem to solve can be a problem in itself. Not being respectful and some people live quite contented lives like these, but living a simple, straight forward, suburban life style can be hard to find pain problems.

So to increase the ways of gaining problem to solve, getting out there to experience different aspects of life and talking to other folks are two sure way of find problems to solve. The side effect is that you will be a more rounded character and will, most probably, enjoy life much more.

Basically, this is what Nathan is saying.

The problem is that people could be insincere, non-rational or ignorant. I doubt they will know what their problems are, what they are willing to pay or what the solution could be. There's a great quote by Henry Ford: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

For Nathan his pain point could be something related to writing and publishing books. I think this would be a much better problem domain since he is a user and I am sure he has some problems regarding this process that could be improved.

Great quote! It stresses the point that a great solution to a problem could comes from a different domain.

I'd prefer to find customers who are richer than I am. That probably means that they have different problems to me, and almost certainly have different worldviews.

That's why the idea he seems to be settling on is exactly that: a problem that he has. (quote from the post: "It solves a problem I have, so I want someone to build this software.") Not only coming up with a problem is easier when you have it yourself, but also execution, making key decisions and keeping up the motivation will be easier.

"I’m doing some research into software used by ________. Just curious, is there any software you’ve been looking for?..."

I think you would be surprised at how many people get confused by "software." I've received answers like "Safari" to this same exact question.

Just a thought, but instead of focusing on providing another piece of software (and phrasing it that way), look to provide business value. I know that's your end result, but I would present it that way from the first interaction.

Also, when you've picked the market/client base you want, I highly recommend seeing if you can visit the business for a day or two (if you can find time.) There's nothing better than immersing yourself...it will lead to better insight.

Reading through, Nathan wasn't expecting any realistic answers to this question. It was just an ice breaker to establish contact for the follow up call.

As to your last paragraph; this is solid advice. I've picked up a few software ideas by viewing businesses "in action" and observing the pain points.

RE: visit and/or getting a chance to sit in

Ditto on the added insight. It also produces a setting where you can ask different questions, on my mind right now are the ones that might have a historical reference. Meaning: was there some reason in the past that made you do things this way now?

Personally, I have seen interesting habits when people switch software and technologies, so they do things a "legacy" way that complicate their process.

Not that I want to advocate for NOT selling a final product, but I find people are sometimes just as happy if you can show them an alternate way of using their current tools. And other times, they end up giving you better feedback on what they really want vs what they think they want.

I stole Drew Houston's idea for ideas by carrying a little notebook around to write down things that annoy me; has lead to the beginning of several little projects.

How do you handle cases when annoyed by lousy implementations of features of existing products? In other words, if the idea resulting from the frustration looks like "feature, not a product". Doing it right now involves not just doing that particular aspect right but also the remaining 95% of the product.

I'd say asking them as well, "What do you think you'd pay for it?" could be useful to establish if it's genuinely worth going after it, but it's a really awkward question to fit in and it's a really awkward question to answer as well.

I like to judge the awkwardness of their response. It helps you learn how serious they are. If they really struggle to find a price they probably don't think their problem is that painful.

You can also focus on how much a problem costs them in wasted time or lost revenue.

That's a pretty awesome kicker to the question, I'd never thought of it in quite those terms.

Not if you're honest about what you're having the conversation about. They know you are doing research for a startup idea. You can even generalize the question... "What do you think solving this problem is worth to businesses in your industry?"

A better question to ask would be "Imagine there is such a product/service that solves your issue, can you guess its price?" Let's say the answer comes out at $100. Follow up question may now be "Would you pay if this was available to you for $80?"

I think it's very difficult to estimate what something is worth to you unless you're actually on the spot for the buy/no-buy choice. As an example, I was looking for some good software to help me write Chinese characters. Before I went looking, I would have thought it was a $10 product, but the leading product is actually $10 a MONTH. Way more than I'd estimated, but there are good business reasons for this. When you're faced with that choice of buying it at $10 a month, it becomes more real. I didn't buy it yet, but it's a very popular product, so for many people it's obviously worth it.

Another option: do what someone else is already doing. For instance, bug tracking and project management apps have proven demand. Sometimes you can steal enough market share by doing things better or by making subtle variations.

There is more than one way to skin a cat. Customer development based approaches like this are effective at birthing certain types of products. But lets not fall into the trap that there is a one-size-fits-all approach to innovation. Necessity is always the mother of invention, but often people can't conceive of what their life is missing or what parts of life could be more enjoyable or less painful.

HN traffic took it down? all I get is "Error establishing a database connection"

Sorry, should be back now.

It seems like it went down again. I'm getting the DB error as well.

There's an idea, scalable cloud service for blogs posted on HN :)

Wouldn't Cloudflare fit that requirement?

Ideas, execution, problems, audience....

They are all part of the same thing.

You can choose to be the gold digger or the merchant. It doesn't matter. One is filled with risk but great fortune. The other is more secure but the prospects of making it big are much less.

Yeah. I always think it is funny when people are talking about ideas as if they are really worth much. I have new business ideas regularly. Ideas are cheap. Execution and access to markets, is where the idea hits the road.

And the likelihood that the idea and execution will make you insanely rich is so small that I have removed it from my equations these days. Just keep executing though.

I dig this overall process (and transparency), but I'm bummed that ultimately it came down to "I have an idea." It's an idea that has some customer validation, but the value of this series of blog posts for folks was to prove a process for creating a web application that didn't start with "an idea."

I didn't start with the idea. It came out of a conversation with a friend last week.

My goal for the post series is to create a web app and be transparent about the process. So finding an idea and validating it matches that goal perfectly.

true, but the idea coming out of the idea finding process that you describe in your post would have been slightly more awesome.

...but only slightly, and i'm still eager to read follow-ups on this experiment!

There are a couple of sites that help for finding or at least verifying viable markets:

1) U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (www.bls.gov) 2) and FreeLunch.com - http://www.economy.com/freelunch/default.asp

I really like articles like this (on how to "find" ideas) and have seen a few on HN. Does anyone have more articles like this book marked? I've seen PG's essay.

Here are a few: - http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html - http://cdixon.org/2010/03/14/developing-new-startup-ideas/ - http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/08/st_qareis/

These are tangentially related: - http://blog.eladgil.com/2012/02/entrepreneurial-turbulence.h... - http://500hats.com/niche-to-win

I have more general "starting a startup" links here: http://bitly.com/bundles/o_7ki5mkvgf8/1

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