How I will generate my next idea

This is something that I wrote for myself but wanted to share it to see if other people find it valuable or if you can help me refine the process.

1. 🧐 Pick an industry

The first step when I'm going to find my next idea is to pick an industry that I want to serve. The industry that I pick should be an industry that I'm interested in. Not to bash on dentists here but building a system for dentist assistants for example would not be something that I would do. The reason is because I do not find that industry interesting (very subjective).

Instead I would pick an industry where I want to learn more and find it fascinating. The reason for this is because if you do build a system for an industry you would be talking to these people for a few years (maybe longer). If you do not find it interesting you will be dreading the support calls.

I would also pick an industry that is "tech-savvy". This is hard to explain but I want to build a system for an industry that works with computers a lot. The reason for this is because I enjoy working with tech-savvy people more than those calling me to say "It doesn't work" when they have no Internet connection at their office...

2. 🤬 Problem extraction

Alright, you've found an industry that you want to serve. Now what? When reading books like "This is marketing" by Seth Godin he talks a lot about finding a lock instead of creating a key. Before, I have been thinking up the ideas myself but now I want to try and get the ideas from peoples actual problems.

I want to find the most pressing problems for the industry that I picked.

I hate cold-calling as much as the next developer but it's really efficient to get quick responses. What I will do is generate a list of maybe 20 people in the industry that I picked and call them up.

I will start with a sentence like "Hey. My name is Marcus and I'm an entrepreneur that is thinking about solving a problem in {{ industry }}. Is it OK if I just ask you a few quick questions?

I will ask them 5 questions.

1. What is the biggest, and recurring, problem that you've had the last year?
2. How do you do to solve it today?
3. What happens if you do not solve the problem?
4. If you had a magic wand. How would you have solve this problem?
5. Would you be willing to pay to get this problem solved? In that case, how much?

I will not be pitching any idea that I have myself or anything, just listen and take notes.

3. 🤓 Problem validation

All problems are not worth solving. Say that the 20 calls above got you 5 different problems that you want to investigate further to see if it's worth building a business around.

There are 4 questions that I want to validate the problem against:

1. Does the customer already do this activity today, but in some other way? I want the customer to already solve this problem somehow today because it's a lot easier to change an existing habit than to create a new habit. Are they solving it with Excel-sheets, emails and some manual task today?
2. Does this require a big change from your customer? Here you want a No. People do not like change so there needs to be a low switching cost.
3. Would the tool that you build be hard to use? Now I'm not talking about UX/UI but more if the customer would need to log in to a new system every day or is it more of an automation that you "set and forget", kind of thing? Here you want a No.
4. Will you solve the full problem? If you've found a problem you do not just want to solve it half-way, so that you only take away "half" of the pain. You want all of the pain from the problem gone. Here you want a Yes.

4. 🤠 Solution validation

As a developer it's very easy to jump straight into building a solution for this problem. But what if your solution isn't something that is working? This step is crucial to get good feedback from the industry if what you are building is something that will solve the problem and can easily be implemented.

How can you most easily explain how your solution to the problem will work? Is it an explainer video? A figma prototype? When I have something that easily can show the solution to the problem I will call back the people that I talked to before and present this.

I might also want to try and reach out to 50 (not by calling but email, ads, community,...) more just to see if I can find a good marketing channel for the solution, but this is not required.

5. 🤑 Pre-sell

For the longest time I was frightened about pre-sell. I mean who in their right mind would pay for something before the get it and before it's built?!

After some quick thoughts I realized that this is exactly what I do in my freelance business. I will solve a problem for my client and they pay me around 50% before I have written the first line of code.Why would this be any different for a SaaS? You could even look at it as a freelance gig that will be able to be productized and sold to many people.

You need to pre-sell to really validate that people are willing to pay to get this problem solved.

If the people say No to pre-paying, I should just thank them. They have saved me a lot of time of not having to build an MVP just to realize that nobody will pay to get this problem solved.

Question here becomes how many pre-sells do you need? Is it enough with 1? I'm going to aim for 3.

Do you want more? Please let me know what you think in the comments.

6. 👨‍💻 Build the MVP

The MVP should be able to be built very quickly. I do not want to program for more than 2 months before the customers can use the tool. Also make sure that you are building in public here together with your early adopters and those that you've pre-sold to. Send an email maybe once every 2 weeks or so giving them status updates.

---

Most of these things I've picked up from different sources but want to give a shoutout to the book Start from Zero where I've learned a lot of this.