How many companies have you worked for in your career? How many different places have you lived? Different experiences?

I've found that ideas for new apps or products come from my previous jobs and from things that I see as 'missing' or weak in these jobs. From my way of life and things I see as 'missing' there. And from my partners work and things I see as she talks to me about it.

I work as a contractor and I've worked for 10 or so companies in the past 8 years. At almost every company I've found things that don't work well and sometimes ideas for products to build.

We've bounced around a lot between Spain, the Canary Islands, and Ireland during Covid and I have some ideas based on that for companies that should exist but don't.

Ideas flow from diversity of experience and from where those experiences intersect. If you've worked for the same company for 10 years, lived in the same place, and done the same things every week and month, you lack that diversity.

I'm currently building a tool for developers working with healthcare APIs. ( https://vanyalabs.com/ ) The idea came to me a few weeks into a new contract working for a healthcare company last year. It's a big app, but it's not too big for one developer to make a start on.

edit: As for search engines, I was thinking about building a search engine for finance / private equity companies a few years ago. Very specific and very niche, but something that I felt my partner and her company would benefit from and pay for. (the idea is still an idea) Around the same time I met a guy who was working for a 2 person startup building a search engine for medical workers.

The standard advice I've read is "find a problem you need solved".

Do you collect stamps and wish you could quickly check the price of a given stamp? There's a problem you can solve. Do you wish you could sync your music to your exercise level? There's another. Make a list of those problems, and then pick one.

I agree that's a good way to find a problem. However I would add that it should be a problem you are willing to pay to be solved.

thats not necessarily true.

even if you weren't going to pay, someone might. The solution must first exist though, and having yourself as the first customer is valuable enough.

The solution does not need to exist first. It's often said in books like Lean Startup to presell your solution and then build it based on having that initial income as validation.

Talk to your potential customers before writing any code. It will save you years of wasted effort.

You nailed it. Ask your stamp collectors how much they are willing to pay for a solution before writing even 1 line of code.

I can give you a concrete example if that helps.

I looked at the "secrets automation" space and my background is cryptography and web development.

I'm a solo developer so when I look at a problem I have to make the solution small enough that I can actually build it.

I also have to have an idea about how I will get people to use my product i.e. marketing.

In my case 1Password raised 620million in funding based on their acquisition of Secretshub which for me proves there is a market in secrets automation for developers.

I looked at the secretshub product and I was confident I could build it better with easier to use encryption and make it open source.

As the market is developers I feel writing blog articles about software development will give me a route to market.

So I started about 4 months ago. The product is now here https://cloak.software and source code is here https://github.com/purton-tech/cloak

My first article about web development with rust has already had 16K views so I'm confident with the marketing approach. Now the hard works starts of turning visitors into paying users.

Hope this helps.

"I looked at the secretshub product and I was confident I could build it better with easier to use encryption and make it open source."

Rarely is the success of the product due to the software. The software is a small part, important, but small. The important part is the company around the software, things like sale,marketing,engineering, management.... Keep that in mind.

Are you currently making a living from your product?

Amazing story. Good luck!

I think its more about the distribution and customer than the product. If you have those two, a product would come to you naturally.

For instance, suppose your father is a dentist. Just take a look at the shitty dentist software they're using. Or maybe some process with dealing with notes, or customers, or whatever. I'm sure some of those processes could be improved through technology. Learn what he needs, build software around that, and try to get in the mindset of a dentist. Expand the network to his dentist friends and go from there.

You can do this without have a connection to dentistry but it would be a lot harder. You can build the product, but you'd have a lot of blind spots. Maybe some of the antiquated processes exist that way for a reason. You may not know the mindset of a dentist. Are you just going to go door to door trying to sell to dentists?

Figure out what distribution you channel you have access to and focus on that. That's why you see a lot of dev tooling, because devs know how to solicit and sell to other devs. Whereas the intersect of knowledge of dentistry, software background, entrepreneurial risk profile and access to distribution is much rarer, and you can tell by some of their processes.

Talk to lots of dentists first. And find out how much better your software has to be for them to switch. You also need to think about data transfer from the old app etc. It might surprise you how hard it is to compete with a shitty but already established solution.

I think it's good to be full of more ideas than you could pursue in a lifetime, before becoming a solo founder.

It's just one of the things you have to depend more strongly on yourself for.

If your ambition is to have lots of employees eventually anyway, you should have plans for more than enough work to keep them all productively in action.

1. A high-performing solo operator will often be capable of outperforming a small team of established workers doing acceptable work elsewhere, especially considering technology or motivational advantages.

2. More money will always be capable of being made from meaningless BS. Until you have the most meaningful offerings you may need to sell things that are only somewhat meaningful for a while. You're going to need a strong marketing effort no matter what and as long as you're committed to no BS and giving the client their money's worth, nobody will think you are shady.

3. Some things are so massive and so important that it's best for most people not to rule them out entirely. Sometimes you can't afford not to address things that are too big to handle solo.

Yes!! As a solo founder, one should have a million ideas to continue operating their business. I sometimes take insipiration from other founders in Founders Cafe https://founderscafe.io/. They're really creative and business-minded people. I've been talking to some of them regularly to keep the ideas coming. :-)

List of HN projects making $500 / month, might give you some ideas: https://lachlan-miller.me/articles/side-projects-of-hacker-n...

Similar answer, this project https://ideasfilter.com/

I believe strongly that there is a good market for doing things well.

My wife had to do a survey for her studies and everyone at the LMU is using SoSci Survey.

That tool does what it does but it's unintuitive and difficult to configure.

Just one example of plenty of software which has the same issue.

A lot of people use it, no one is doing it right and margin/interest is not high.

Another niche are teachers: not very technical but lots of teachers who need good material like a page with numbers or small excercises.

Consider changing your attitude towards your point 2. There are thousands of non-unicorn startups successfully serving their niches. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25614966 for plenty of examples. Go to a trade show/conference that exhibits software solutions for a certain business vertical and you will return inspired.

None of these are actionable problems is the issues. Focus on 'smaller' things.

How about a place for “founders” to solicit ideas from people? A marketplace or service to match people with ideas they can’t execute with people who want to execute but have no ideas?

You know tiny teams created Unix, Google, and Facebook, right?

Kern.al is something like this

Your worldview is ok. Slightly non-friendly, but ok.

Real problem is globalization.

- In the past, also most problems fall in the same 3 categories, but not existed internet and people does not traveled as much as now. So, in most cases, if you suffer such problems in past, you just moved to other city and there you easily found paid customers.

Now, everybody have access to internet and to fast/cheap world transport, so too many people could just buy something cheaper from somewhere, and you have to deal with this.

But if you will not stuck in making something valuable for everyone in whole world, you could find some niches and live making something valuable for them.

And you will make mistake if avoid such niches. Because, even them are small, but this littleness deter large companies from them. So living in niche you will be safe for significant time, before you will accumulate resources to enter open market.

For example, from words of Wallmart founder, Sam Watson, they occasionally started on periphery, where non existed large, dangerous concurrents, and than they slowly accumulated resources and created finance backbone, so later they easily conquered large cities.

Sure, all that time you should study, you should train your intellect and imagination, so you will see more opportunities. But this is next step, first you must accept truth, that you don't need to start large.

To be honest, sometimes appear humans, who start large and win, but mostly this is exception, not rule.

Find the spreadsheets people run their business with on a daily basis and turn them into web apps. Instant SaaS ideas.

I agree it might be an okay starting point, but it should not taken literally.

It's a really hard sell. People really rely on the comfort of their formulas and being able to debug it. Even if they have no idea about the formulas, they need them there. And you're essentially fighting a losing battle as 95% of things you would want to do are easily extendable on a spreadsheet compared to a web app. Want to change the name and color of something? Congrats, you're building a no-code app. Create a chart? Now you're a charting app. Rename something? New formula? Slight variation to some formula? Do you want to upend your entire workflow on some startup you just heard about? It's a losing battle.

The one exception is spreadsheets that do heavy calculation, and even then its not a clear win. If you have a 5 mb workbook that crunches a bunch of numbers, in which you have to create all this intermediate data to recreate what is essentially a for single for loop in code.

The truth is spreadsheets are perfectly acceptable for many applications. They're a database mixed in with a logic engine. There's big issues around version control and there are companies trying to solve that like xltrail. But in general I think losing game

I've encountered problems like this as a solo founder. The thing is if the problem is too general/abstract, try to make it into smaller one to be more specific. In this way, you're like micromanaging and slowly building a solution to your problems.

If this doesn't fit your needs, you can ask our fellow founders in Founders Cafe https://founderscafe.io/. They've been successful in their journey and shared a lot of tips to solve problems just like yours. :))

Find a thing people already do and will want to do no matter what, insert yourself between them in a way that makes original ways of doing things not viable/hard/insecure. Then start charging rent on normal human behaviour.

ps. do not call yourself Uber of Sex.

Totally agree here. Let me give you an example: I was reading the WSJ paper last weekend and there was half page article dedicated to complaining how Yankees games are spread across 5 streaming services this year. There was a quote that literally said “Now I am going to have to figure out where to watch the Yankees every Saturday morning” or something to that effect. Maybe not an idea for you, but pay attention to these things. You have to be intaking lots of information about the world and observe carefully

To me that is part of an idea. You can build something to show what channel the Yankees are playing but how do you get enough people to reach a mass to start selling other products or advertising? That's the real problem you start tackling

Bro, just work on 3. You might not end up being some hot shot executive, but you'll have done something with your life that truly matters.

I would strongly advise against trying to find an idea to solve.

For one, it’s not your idea. You don’t care if it succeeds. Therefore, you are going to quit the moment things gets hard. Second, the best ideas come from observation, not asking around online.

Don’t listen to those people listing ideas online for founders to tackle. They don’t care if you fail. If you succeed, they can claim they helped you. And if you fail, oh well.

As much as I want to agree with your general point, I’ve known plenty of successful entrepreneurs who just searched for a good market, problem, idea and executed.

With no prior “passion” or even expertise in the area.

So by this post I hope to find more people like that and hear what they have to say.

Fair enough. Let me know if it works out and what approach you took. I am curious as well since there is always more than one way to succeed.

A search engine is not easy to do solo, unless you're targeting a specific niche. A better Google is far more difficult than most people realize. Finally, even if you could pull it off, a lot of people are very attached to their search engines and won't switch easily.

Looks like you didn't get the nuance of the way I answered, I specifically stated creating a google.com equivalent is a big challenge. Either way, OPs statements were poorly phrased, too. A search engine consists of a lot of moving parts. Indexing is not a challenge too great for a solo dev, I've done it myself several times. Crawling is not too challenging for a solo dev, done that, too. A web frontend for the actual searching of the index? Trivial.

Doing any of this at google.com scale? Not happening.

I suggest, like you, OP look into niches. That's how you can break down every one of his 3 statements.

A search engine that specifically rules out every mainstream site? I'd be into that. A search engine built specifically for devs? Again, great. A search engine for blogs not built on Wordpress? Great. An academic search engine? I'd like that, too.

I agree, people are attached, but there are ways to mitigate, at least Duck is trying with their bangs.

A better way to mitigate is creating a niche, like you're suggesting, which is what I only hinted at. Even though I am attached to a particular engine, or website, I would use, IN ADDITION, niche engines.

OK yes I somehow misunderstood your point.

I like the idea of searching with big exceptions. Specifically not searching mainstream sites sounds very interesting. In theory it would penalize those that are successful, but then they would be picked up and prioritized by the bigger search engines, so it could be a hit.

If you're still around, post an email?

It always seemed to me that the best path was #1, but with some sort of competitive advantage or headstart.

Maybe our problem-space will be of interest to you!

Look at an existing business. find problems that are too different for them to take on, but valuable. solve if for them. sell it to them.

Just try. You'll learn interesting things by trying. Don't worry about how hard it is. Start with what seems most interesting.

Have you tried studying the startupschool.org curriculum? Their lectures help in ideation phase.

>Something is wrong with my current worldview

Had to grin at that. My views of the existing startups are essentially the same. I suspect all the low hanging fruit are dealt with hence those 3 categories. Most people, even the rich ones are what I'd call as white collar 'street' smart, otherwise IMHO they are not particularly even insightful about life in general. By white collar 'street' smart I mean, they certainly are fast with many things including raising/making money, but they are otherwise quite banal. Being white collar 'street' smart and profound is a rare combination. Among the well known figures I would rate Peter Theil and Elon Musk in that category.

wow