I’m an engineer and love building things. It feels like I can build anything or at the very least learn what I need to in order to have a serious shot at building something. How do you get from here to the point where there’s a spark that, with enough pivots, can lead to something that adds value? I’ve built and shipped things in the past. Procrastination isn’t my problem (I think).
I’ve digested pg’s essays on the topic and anything else I could find. This is a bit of privileged whining from my end, but would love to hear others thoughts.
Hope everyone has a great weekend!
One possible exercise: Research 20 different potential customer niches, who might have jobs that need doing or frustrating issues they need help with. Reach out and interview a people working in each niche who could be potential customers, learn about their perspective, their challenges and frustrations, the existing tools or services they have tried, and how they fall short.
Another possible exercise: go read a "marketing for developers" book. I enjoyed reading Rob Walling's book "start small, stay small" a decade ago. Rob discusses some approaches to bootstrapping a business, including building things that people are already searching for. Some of the tricks and tools will be a decade out of date, but the mindset will not. It might be worth doing this to start thinking about what kinds of customers or niches would be more or less viable, and what mechanisms you have to learn about their needs or communicate your product/service ideas to them, to define some filtering criteria, before starting to research potential customer niches and interviewing people.
A third possible exercise: ban yourself from using the vague word "idea" when writing and thinking about possible businesses to build. Instead, read the first few chapters of a marketing textbook, and only allow yourself to use terms and language defined in the marketing textbook when writing and thinking about what you are going to do next.
https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/principles-of-m...
(take all these suggestions with a mug of salt, i'm merely a professional builder of software things, i don't have any experience with marketing or how to bootstrap a business)
I shake my head every time I see the "ideas are a dime a dozen" meme parroted on here. Good ideas are actually much rarer, harder to come by.
I'll prove it.
Go to any of the Ask HN "whats your side business" threads [1] and observe the many interesting responses. Here's a good one: [2]. Next, observe the follow-up questions, "What's your niche? How'd you get started? Wow, very interesting, curious about the details." And finally, the answers:
Crickets.
Why? Because the only reason these people are harvesting so many coconuts is because they're the only ones who know about the island - the idea is their only competitive advantage. If they shared that, the party would be over, and they know it.
Ideas are extremely valuable.
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[1] here's a couple:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095
Some ideas I was helping to build were not ideas I would personally call as worth to be built, and yet they ended up to be profitable due to good marketing and sales. I guess my corridor is too short so I have no idea what really good idea looks like...
Ideas are trivial. Follow a person around for 24 hours looking at them doing their job and you will have a dozen. Read a bunch of business books and analyse an old vertical you'll have a dozen. Hell ask chatGPT and you'll have a million.
As others have pointed out, whats seemingly missing from your mix is talking to people. If you talk to be people, they will give you problems, then you go about trying to solve them. Along the way you will have ideas on how to do this, most will not work, some will. The way you mitigate the failure risk is by understanding your users, the market better.
It's all marketing and execution.
Slack started as a gaming company. The idea didn't matter. Many examples like these
Don't overthink this. It is not the idea. It is the execution. I say this as someone who has been running a business for 8 years and we are not at all close to the original idea. In fact I don't even know how to define the original idea anymore.