Share the pain
One of the common strategies some successful indies have to find ideas is to scratch their own itch.
Think Tony Dinh and Pieter Levels.
All right. Simple enough. One problem though - for some reason I have a hard time even noticing, let alone keep track of my itches!
There might be entire gold mines worth of potentially profitable ideas floating all around me and I'm just ignorantly waddling past them every day!
I'm sure some part of you relates.
So I reflected on this little dilemma and realised that it itself is an itch that needs scratching.
Obviously, this resulted in me building a free little web app where you can log and keep track of your itches(things that annoy you).
"Rik, that just sounds like something Notes can do"
Yes, sure, but here's were it's a bit different(and potentially much, much move powerful, IMO).
Not all my itches would be things I have the skills to scratch. Or WANT to scratch myself. But I do want them scratched!
And what if I could have access to REAL pains others are facing that might be the perfect fit for MY skill set?
Why not share the pain?
Why not create a communal database of real problems seeking solutions. I mean, this will surely increase the amount of gold mines for everyone taking part in it. And maybe make their lives a little bit easier too.
I also added a little bit of AI magic to give you a couple of starter ideas after you log a pain. They're not great(yet!) and a bit generic, but good enough to get the juices flowing. Or to get a chuckle.
So Pains To Profit is essentially a communal database of problems seeking solutions, where you share pains you want solved and hunt for problems that needs solving.
"But they'll steal my idea!", I hear a couple of lone voices moan.
No they won't - you're not sharing entire bow-wrapped, validated and workshopped business models, you're sharing problems.
Most of the problems you'll likely not want to do something about yourself anyway. But someone else might!
And their problems might be something you could profit off!
I don't know, it might be silly, but I thought I'd share it anyway.
I already have a couple of ideas I discovered with it that I want to test out.
Pains To Profit app is live and me and a handful of other people are actively using it.
It's super MVP at this stage, but it's doing what it needs to.
Anyway, check it out. And feedback welcome.
