How to find promising startup ideas?
I strongly believe that you don't need any success to build multi-million dollar company. You only need to find your passion and use right methods to kill wrong ideas fast.
I even wrote an article about this topic:
https://medium.com/@tomasmaks/how-to-find-promising-startup-ideas-ec0a94a6156a
But I would like to discuss more about lean startup methodology here.
I was wondering, what methods do you use to validate your ideas? How long does it take you to validate it? What metrics do you look at in order to decide if your validation is a success?
The best method that worked for me was talking to my customers. I am good at listening and I like talking to various people. So I easily notice if they are interested in my idea, simply from their behavior.
Yes, interviews is a great method. However, our indie hackers community consists of a lot of developers, so customers interviews are very difficult thing to them to make it right. Hacking something in 2-3 days is the way easier for most of them.
This is a copy/paste of a comment I made yesterday to someone who asked the same exact thing lol, you dudes are so basic.
"Sometimes I feel like this is more of an art than a science.
Most great ideas are great precisely because they are disguised as bad ideas - and if you were to do market research on them or ask people about them you might get negative results.
Thats why best products where built not for the market, but built based on the standards of the leaders of the companies, and people just found that they liked it too.
If you ask Elon musk how much market research he does, he will say zero. He builds products he likes with the idea that hopefully (he knows they will) the market likes it too.
In fact it might be entirely counter productive to build products that you don't like, just because you've done some studies and that suggest that someone else will like it.
People don't know what the fuck they want most of the time, they think they do but they really don't.
Ford: If I would have done market research on the transport market, they would have asked for a faster horse.
Its your job as a creator to make something you know people will love even if they don't realize it. and have the tenacity to work through it even when you know its right, but everyone thinks your wrong.
This is very typical, and why I said its like an art is because you could actually be wrong, and be tenaciously wrong. And from the outside or objectively its hard to tell which you are - you simply don't know - you have to feel strongly about it, and if you feel strongly about it there must be some grain of value there and you could pivot to it once you realize what it is.
so really, just work on projects you like and feel are important, that way if your wrong, well at least you spent your life doing something you liked to do."
Yes, great advice. But do you know how many people waste their time, because their creativity becomes something people not want?
You need to have a lot of experience to turn your creativity into something useful.
Or at least not to spend more than couple weeks on building creative project before launching it and see how people react.
So I think from my experience, passion and creativity is not enough.