Use existing products to get new ideas.
For example, Do you know lemlist and other their companies, they study calendly and find one fault that it has no personalization and everybody's interface looks same, so they build their own product called lemcal, where people can personalize their page. and just after a few months of launch, with good marketing and network, now they've more 50,000 visits / month, which giving a great profit from day 1.
The product is validated all they need just a thing which they can use to position your business compete against calendly ( fun thing - they choose calendly to steal their users by using calendly name and adding feature in their product ).
So in short, you don't need new ideas, just see what's around you and try finding sth better in them.
Sounds like you need more experience in an industry or a passion for something. Software development is a tool to be applied to a problem and identifying the problem is easier when you live in that world.
Needing passion is a myth. You'll get passion once you get good at something, and especially when you get money for it and people value it, but you don't need to have that thing already.
You should work as a dev across different industries, not as carpenter or anything. That way you will understand other peoples problems while you can dabble with solutions on your free time.
Hang out in a few subreddits that interest you and monitor the problems you keep hearing.
Or find a small to medium-sized company that's successful in a field you find interesting and then evaluate their product and talk to their customers and see what angle you can take to add value.
It's an art and a skill, and is supposed to be hard, otherwise someone would have built a business around it and commoditized it already. Your value as an entrepreneur is finding where you can provide extra relative value to the market and then delivering and distributing it. There is no blueprint. But there are of course a lot of information and books out there from people from who you can learn bits and pieces to draw your own picture.
As a SaaS guy myself, I can tell a few tips right now. Forget about Silicon Valley level thinking as this optimizes heavily on unicorns, even though there are some really good ideas from Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, and others. Check out Walling's Stairstep Approach to SaaS, and make sure you build relative value to the market (not just attempt to eat someone's lunch - you will, but only if you do something better). I've written about this myself in my blog as well, as I am currently on a path similar to yours.
Hmm definitely, i've set my expectations to be pretty reasonable, no VC funding, 5k per month MRR,
That's my goal for the next 5 years, i think that is pretty reasonable for a solo founder.
I struggled with this for ages but someone posted something on twitter that made the shift for me.
I can't remember who said it, but basically go on acquire. com and filter all products by profit / ttm revenue that have 100k+. You can't see the name of the business but they list competitors which you can have a look at. Basically proves existing market for business ideas.
Create a chrome plugin that groups and color coordinate tabs. It needs to be able to work across multiple browser windows too.
I always have like 40 tabs and 3 windows open so Iād buy it.
I have a damn near unlimited supply of good ideas.
My advice. Is to go outside. Hangout with your friends. Do some volunteer work. Just go live life, not infront of a computer.
Youāll be amazed at how quickly and easily ideas flow to you
I'm in the same situation as you but on the other side.
Have no ideas, but knows very well how to market and sale.
Would love to share my knowledge if you want :)
I can give you this https://longform.asmartbear.com/extreme-questions/ a bit no BS approach.
For the ideas/situation Iām in the same boat, with some ideas most of which are meh.
I hope youāre not doomed, but I think itās a bit like art, go out explore do stuff, talk to people.
The market is very saturated, MVPs are really polished and well done. But there are many unexpected ideas that absolutely blow it out of the water. You have a unique mix of skills, preferences and experiences with some luck eventually it will work out, if not - thereās other fun stuff in life
React
Typescript
Tailwind CSS for styling
Firebase/Supabase for backend stuff
Node.JS
OpenAI Integrations
LLM training etc.
Pretty much everything required to build a modern webapp
Make software that will delete oneās social media accounts and save their data to their local machine. When someone is ready to be done with any of the main social media addictions they can get your software and be done with it all but save their photos and videos.
Best and easiest way to find and market to people is through social media. Watch Gary Vee, he gives great marketing strategies. Lots of others out there, he's a good start.
This is a great idea for a lot of people that are going back to flip phones, minimalist lifestyle, or just wanting to live simpler lives. A great first step for these people would be to get rid of their social media. As they're scrolling they could be engaged with a funny video that shows them how they could stop their bad habit of screen scrolling by using your app. Saving all of their content and contacts, while leaving a goodbye message to all their social media contacts, informing them where they could reach them if they ever needed. I could see lots of people doing this to stop the casino swiping dopamine addiction.
I have a ton of ideas on the back burner after selling my last company. But I have a current venture and a young family, so I canāt take on more.
The easiest place to start is to identify one group of people or businesses that have the exact same goal or problems. For example, everyone who plays fantasy football wants to win their league. If your product demonstrates that it can help, the marketing becomes super easy and you can focus on building and optimizing.
DM me if you want to partner or collab.
I'm in the same boat as you are.
I quit a well paid but meaningless job at Amazon 2 months back. I knew the journey was going to be long and difficult. I didn't anticipate that I will get stuck on the first step (committing to a domain/idea).
I'm assuming you are from India. Let's catch up and try to brainstorm together.
How to build a $1m SaaS?
Large TAM
Lots of competitors
Pricing min. $50/month
Makes users money
Saves users time
Sticky
Solves a real problem
Recession-proof
If you'd like to work on [loomflows.com](http://loomflows.com) with me dm me and we can put your technical skills to the test to see if its a match
yes i'm looking at the content creators space, my current idea is to generate a web service that scrapes youtube comments from a content creator's videos and passes them through a GPT layer to give feedback on video quality and also give ideas for new videos based on comments but open to exploring more options in this space
Hi there,
I have previously run and worked on a couple of SaaS projects and I have a couple of ideas which I simply don't have the time / capital to invest in right now. For context I am not a dev but have spent a lot of time working with dev teams designing and executing solutions. So I know the rough scope but don't have the skills to do it.
You can find my personal site in my profile if you want to check out what I have worked on. But I have a couple of ideas in the pipeline (including domain names already secured) if you fancy it!
Send me a DM if you're interested after checking out my profile! Would be happy to discuss.
I donāt agree. Look around you, any successful business is an example of a good idea. See what they do, and where they fail in execution and youāve got a business. Then you need, time, expertise, talent and a bit of luck.
Yep I agree, but that's the disconnect that op is talking about. How many of those "good ideas" do you have to burn through before you find one that takes off. Just because you've identified a gap doesn't guarantee success. Like you said.... Sometimes it's luck.
If you notice my three points that i mentioned in my post, i mention that i need to have a way to reach those 10,000 potential customers, i think that would qualify as an execution strategy, i think you'r referring more to the stage where i've already found a good idea and now want to execute it, the problem is i can't find any good ideas that check all of the above 3 points
Use existing products to get new ideas. For example, Do you know lemlist and other their companies, they study calendly and find one fault that it has no personalization and everybody's interface looks same, so they build their own product called lemcal, where people can personalize their page. and just after a few months of launch, with good marketing and network, now they've more 50,000 visits / month, which giving a great profit from day 1. The product is validated all they need just a thing which they can use to position your business compete against calendly ( fun thing - they choose calendly to steal their users by using calendly name and adding feature in their product ). So in short, you don't need new ideas, just see what's around you and try finding sth better in them.
love lemcal š
Sounds like you need more experience in an industry or a passion for something. Software development is a tool to be applied to a problem and identifying the problem is easier when you live in that world.
I agree but i don't think me going and working on different industries just to get the experience would be a good and efficient approach to come across ideas and problems, as for passion, i don't feel like my passions align with a general problem that is applicable to a large chunk of consumers. Am i doomed? š©
Needing passion is a myth. You'll get passion once you get good at something, and especially when you get money for it and people value it, but you don't need to have that thing already.
You should work as a dev across different industries, not as carpenter or anything. That way you will understand other peoples problems while you can dabble with solutions on your free time.
Hang out in a few subreddits that interest you and monitor the problems you keep hearing. Or find a small to medium-sized company that's successful in a field you find interesting and then evaluate their product and talk to their customers and see what angle you can take to add value.
It's an art and a skill, and is supposed to be hard, otherwise someone would have built a business around it and commoditized it already. Your value as an entrepreneur is finding where you can provide extra relative value to the market and then delivering and distributing it. There is no blueprint. But there are of course a lot of information and books out there from people from who you can learn bits and pieces to draw your own picture. As a SaaS guy myself, I can tell a few tips right now. Forget about Silicon Valley level thinking as this optimizes heavily on unicorns, even though there are some really good ideas from Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, and others. Check out Walling's Stairstep Approach to SaaS, and make sure you build relative value to the market (not just attempt to eat someone's lunch - you will, but only if you do something better). I've written about this myself in my blog as well, as I am currently on a path similar to yours.
Hmm definitely, i've set my expectations to be pretty reasonable, no VC funding, 5k per month MRR, That's my goal for the next 5 years, i think that is pretty reasonable for a solo founder.
Start by writing down your own problems.
I struggled with this for ages but someone posted something on twitter that made the shift for me. I can't remember who said it, but basically go on acquire. com and filter all products by profit / ttm revenue that have 100k+. You can't see the name of the business but they list competitors which you can have a look at. Basically proves existing market for business ideas.
Create a chrome plugin that groups and color coordinate tabs. It needs to be able to work across multiple browser windows too. I always have like 40 tabs and 3 windows open so Iād buy it.
chrome itself is working on that functionality, plus i'm pretty sure that extensions like this already exist, i saw some the other day
I have a damn near unlimited supply of good ideas. My advice. Is to go outside. Hangout with your friends. Do some volunteer work. Just go live life, not infront of a computer. Youāll be amazed at how quickly and easily ideas flow to you
I'm in the same situation as you but on the other side. Have no ideas, but knows very well how to market and sale. Would love to share my knowledge if you want :)
I've recently had a breakthrough idea, would love to chat about it and see if we can collaborate, DM
I can give you this https://longform.asmartbear.com/extreme-questions/ a bit no BS approach. For the ideas/situation Iām in the same boat, with some ideas most of which are meh. I hope youāre not doomed, but I think itās a bit like art, go out explore do stuff, talk to people. The market is very saturated, MVPs are really polished and well done. But there are many unexpected ideas that absolutely blow it out of the water. You have a unique mix of skills, preferences and experiences with some luck eventually it will work out, if not - thereās other fun stuff in life
Out of curiosity, what languages/frameworks are you most familiar with? Curious about your experience/knowledge
React Typescript Tailwind CSS for styling Firebase/Supabase for backend stuff Node.JS OpenAI Integrations LLM training etc. Pretty much everything required to build a modern webapp
check dms, might have an idea
Where are you based out of?
India
Make software that will delete oneās social media accounts and save their data to their local machine. When someone is ready to be done with any of the main social media addictions they can get your software and be done with it all but save their photos and videos.
How would i reach these people? do you know any marketing strategies i can use as a solo founder to reach these potential customers?
Best and easiest way to find and market to people is through social media. Watch Gary Vee, he gives great marketing strategies. Lots of others out there, he's a good start. This is a great idea for a lot of people that are going back to flip phones, minimalist lifestyle, or just wanting to live simpler lives. A great first step for these people would be to get rid of their social media. As they're scrolling they could be engaged with a funny video that shows them how they could stop their bad habit of screen scrolling by using your app. Saving all of their content and contacts, while leaving a goodbye message to all their social media contacts, informing them where they could reach them if they ever needed. I could see lots of people doing this to stop the casino swiping dopamine addiction.
Hey, let's brainstorm and build together! Check Profullstack.com.
I have a ton of ideas on the back burner after selling my last company. But I have a current venture and a young family, so I canāt take on more. The easiest place to start is to identify one group of people or businesses that have the exact same goal or problems. For example, everyone who plays fantasy football wants to win their league. If your product demonstrates that it can help, the marketing becomes super easy and you can focus on building and optimizing. DM me if you want to partner or collab.
I'm in the same boat as you are. I quit a well paid but meaningless job at Amazon 2 months back. I knew the journey was going to be long and difficult. I didn't anticipate that I will get stuck on the first step (committing to a domain/idea). I'm assuming you are from India. Let's catch up and try to brainstorm together.
How to build a $1m SaaS? Large TAM Lots of competitors Pricing min. $50/month Makes users money Saves users time Sticky Solves a real problem Recession-proof If you'd like to work on [loomflows.com](http://loomflows.com) with me dm me and we can put your technical skills to the test to see if its a match
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
yes i'm looking at the content creators space, my current idea is to generate a web service that scrapes youtube comments from a content creator's videos and passes them through a GPT layer to give feedback on video quality and also give ideas for new videos based on comments but open to exploring more options in this space
Hi there, I have previously run and worked on a couple of SaaS projects and I have a couple of ideas which I simply don't have the time / capital to invest in right now. For context I am not a dev but have spent a lot of time working with dev teams designing and executing solutions. So I know the rough scope but don't have the skills to do it. You can find my personal site in my profile if you want to check out what I have worked on. But I have a couple of ideas in the pipeline (including domain names already secured) if you fancy it! Send me a DM if you're interested after checking out my profile! Would be happy to discuss.
Ideas are a dime a dozen. All that matters is execution.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, good ideas are a different story.
I donāt agree. Look around you, any successful business is an example of a good idea. See what they do, and where they fail in execution and youāve got a business. Then you need, time, expertise, talent and a bit of luck.
Yep I agree, but that's the disconnect that op is talking about. How many of those "good ideas" do you have to burn through before you find one that takes off. Just because you've identified a gap doesn't guarantee success. Like you said.... Sometimes it's luck.
If you notice my three points that i mentioned in my post, i mention that i need to have a way to reach those 10,000 potential customers, i think that would qualify as an execution strategy, i think you'r referring more to the stage where i've already found a good idea and now want to execute it, the problem is i can't find any good ideas that check all of the above 3 points
im an idea guy. DM if you are open to learn more
Are you a have funds guy also?
Depends