Speaking to potential customers
I've been trying to "come up with an idea" for an app for some time now. It's recently occurred to me that I've got it twisted. I shouldn't be trying to "come up with an idea", I should be trying to find a problem. I should be finding a pain point encountered by a specific group of people, and then solve that pain for them. Then the money will follow.
I want to chose a niche (say, marketing agencies) and then speak to people in that space to try to identify a problem worth solving. I figure the easiest way to do this would be by phone, or over lunch.
When generating and validating ideas, who here reaches out to people and has 1 on 1s and how do you go about arranging this? Are there any other ways of discovering pain points?
Why don't you start with trying to solve pain that you are having?
It's much harder to build solutions for something you don't understand because you aren't actually feeling the pain. It doesn't seem like you have connections already where problems are occurring but rather you would be cold asking people. You won't be able to materialize great solutions from a conversation (or even 10 conversations). You should try and be in the problem, feel the pain, then solve it.
I agree with you 100%. The trouble is, like most people in this situation, I'm a developer. There are so many tools for developers it's massively saturated. Why? Because that's what happens when a developer solves their own itch. Developers also don't like paying for things. We're used to open source. It's seems to me that the real opportunities lie totally outside my own experience. That's what I want to tap into.
In an ideal world, I would change jobs and work for (insert different field here) for a while to find a problem, but I'm not prepared to do that, so starting these cold conversations seems like the only other option.