I am good at execution and getting things done. But, I am not sure what to build or where to invest time and money such that it pays off in 6-12 months. I have been involved in backend work and have good knowledge of "how to use" cloud like AWS.
It is said that you scratch your own itch. But, I don't know if that will pay or not to create successful business.
Thoughts on gathering or finding profitable ideas that can scale up to 1-10 MM revenue in 5 years?
The only way of validation is getting paid. Don't write any line of code before getting payment.
You can accomplish very much with current available tooling.
If your project requires some sort of implementation, don't spent more than two weeks on it. You could create landing and forms using services as typeform and others. Then gather several hundreds of signups and talk to this people.
The failing rate is high and last thing you want is to spend 2 years on validating your idea.
As a technical founder it'll be hard to avoid hacking right away but the coding skill is required only if you get after validation stage.
Try to come up with idea per day, then at the end of the month pick most promising and validate it.
Every week, he finds VC-backed or profitable, upmarket companies that bootstrappers can compete with.
It addresses your question of what to build by looking at big players in different industries and coming up with downmarket opportunities.
Talk to people outside your field about their problems? There was a guy on a professional machinist's forum where I hang out who simply asked "How can I help you with an IT problem?" and IIRC, the resulting thread is over 20 pages long. He's probably gotten tons of business by simply offering free IT help over the internet.
Go places where programmers aren't!
Build a small version just for you to start, then validate with others being willing to pay for it and it providing them value. Then build it out in to a SaaS.
Check out StartupsForTheRestOfUs.com Podcast
It's a great podcast that answers a lot of your questions.
You can follow Rob Walling along going from Drop Shipping, Job Boards, Invoicing Software, an SEO Tool, then building and existing Drip to forming Tiny Seed.
Lots of great SaaS related content over the years.
For inspiration check out @DHH Startup School Talk from 2008, still relevant today, and entertaining. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY
You might also like the Build Your SaaS podcast.
all i can say is avoid cloud like a plague and look for stupid-simple-things. even if it does not excite you, those ideas usually work the best. don't try to outsmart people, you will fail. look for simple opportunities. and if you cannot make MVP within 3 months, forget the idea and move on.