Ask HN: Solopreneurs, how did you come up with your idea?

Look at companies already operating and think to yourself, "Meh, I could do that." and then do it.

Checkout

indiehackers.com

for lots of stories/ideas on this topic.

A couple of things to consider:

- Business is more about execution than being the first to market with an idea. Marketing, customer satisfaction, pricing, reliability, ect, all come into play. Before you create, spend time looking at the "dozens of other solutions doing the same thing." You may find a weakness, unfulfilled need, niche, ect. Often times, in early markets with lots of players, the first movers have a lot of baggage that holds them back from growing.

(IE, the first movers made a lot of false starts and end up with Frankenstien products. You can "bypass" them by better understanding the market and building something with less functionality, but just enough functionality to meet most of the market's needs. This is a huge advantage because you aren't wasting time fixing a feature that only 2-3 people use, or making sure you don't break that one feature that 2 people use.)

- Look at books like "The Incredible Secret Money Machine" by Don Lancaster or "Start Small, Stay Small" by Rob Walling.

- Read through (and watch) a lot of YC material about starting a business. Although it isn't focused on solopreneurs, a lot of the concepts are very similar.

Me: I realized that I enjoy joining a company early and turning the MVP into an industrial-strength product.

I did this a dozen times for different companies. So, I started a startup that focused on the 10% of features I had become an expert at and made it available as a self-service SaaS with a much smaller price. But then you still need to sell the damn thing, which is a drag and I don't put much effort into. I let the product grow pretty organically as users (who are SME's within departments of most companies) change their jobs and are looking for better solutions within their new employer's.

Sorry intentionally vague, not really willing to give specifics.

Product's built based on brainstorming: NEVER worked.

Product built around solution to actual problems I've experienced: Always worked, BUT may not have a large enough TAM.

The best way to actually find problems to solve is to replicate something else (as a learning process to actually find the real product you need to build), or talk to people who have problems: e.g. Try an replicate a product with relatively simple core functionality all the way-end-to-end.

During that process you'll probably discover paint point that aren't addressed by any product.

Example from building: Build some GenAI based app that allows users to upload a video and have it "horrified." There may only be a small market in that, but the framework you build to do it could be productized (or subsets of the problem). A simple to use full stack solution where folks can focus on the image / video generation model prompting fine tuning, and then one-click deploy that model wrapped in a whitelabeled ios app with monetization built-in, etc. <-- sell the shovels.

Example from talking: Lot's of buddies have challenges with bringing AI based coding tools into the organization because most don't support on-prem. Is there an on-prem solution that acts like a DMZ? That is, Cursor team could securely deploy their models to containers running on on-prem hardware (with layers of physical and software security to prevent exfiltration of the model weights), while companies can load their propriety data into another container. Win-win.

Note that this implies spending time in a different problem domain than just programming all day (alternately read as: have a hobby or two).

I finally have a side project with traction & paying users and it’s because sheer frustration drove me to improve an inefficient workflow in my language learning process (hobby), which turned out to not be such a unique problem at the end of the day.

(Not to shill - I was a frustrated Anki user and built this to improve my own life: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1531888719 )

Unless you went to Stanford and are going to secretly use your family office as the seed round and lead investor to scam VCs into thinking there is demand for your funding round, then making up problems and solutions isn’t for your socioeconomic class

For example, working on an idea that doesn’t belong to you — that is the wrong frame.

Avoid leaping to solution thinking and look at actual problems. Talk to other people outside your company to see if they have the same problem. Then, try different approaches to solving it.

If you get really lucky you will end up with customers that tell you exactly what they need you to build for them.

You still will not be working on an idea that belongs to you.

But the business will.

I still haven't quit my day job, but my business produces a reasonable side income.

I think the world is full of ideas to work on. You can look into almost anything, and see that existing ways of working and systems are mostly crap. Just start working on something. Probably you will encounter other problems -- i.e. ideas -- when working on the first one.

The biggest thing is not the coding, but all the other stuff. Sales, invoicing etc. I find that tiresome.

Here's what worked for me: look for an important and frequent problem that you and people you know have, where the solutions are inadequate and people are not happy.

To know if you're going in the right direction talk to people about their problem and see how unhappy they are with the current solutions. You don't need to build anything at first just to validate the problem.

Most of your time building a business will be spent talking to customers, doing sales, understanding the problem space, not so much coding.

Also: ideas are far less important than execution [1]. That's why it's best to work on problems you actually care about. If you don't, you'll end up cutting corners or burning out well in advance of success.

[1] https://sive.rs/multiply

Unless you can split hairs on why specific products don't appeal to people in a given niche/industry, at the technical level that the users care about, you probably won't find much success.

In my personal experience I come from the medical side of things. The amount of garbage software written by people who know nothing about how we work is obnoxious. They all advertise themselves as the "next generation, streamlined, efficiency boosting" magic pill for us, but it's about as convincing as your 5 year old telling you they can do your taxes.

So my advice is find something to do in an area of expertise you already have.

Read this to learn more — https://asindu.xyz/posts/the-nature-of-technology-book-revie...

Finding problems requires that they be considered as such, that there be a desired state that is different from the current state. That there be a gap (error). At some point, a hunter-gathered said "You know what, I'm kind of tired of hunting game. I'd rather chill and have these animals and plants right here". His current state differed from his desired state, and there was a problem that was born. That was a different problem than the state of being hungry (Current state: hungry. Desired state: not hungry) which lead him to hunt and gather in the first place.

Finding problems has a lot to do with exposition. The more situations, the higher the chance a problem hits you. Problems may not be yours but other people's, and they may not be aware they are problems (current state ≈ desired state. Close enough that they're not picking up the error, or that they perceive they can't do anything about it, often due to asymmetry of information).

That is to say, focusing on problems is more conductive to ideas.

Then who does the problem belong to? Your problem or other people's. Sometimes when it's other people's problem and you like these people, the problem becomes yours. "Fixing someone's computer", for example. Sometimes you go to use their computer and it's horribly slow even if the specs are good, and they might even have not noticed it or they got used to it or it's not that big of a problem until you fix it and they notice just how fast it's become (back to when they purchased it, but they forgot how it felt - perceptual contrast).

That is to say: what's your target audience. What's the market? The segment. Do you like that crowd? For some people, it's not important, but it is for me. There are categories of people I could talk with and topics I could talk about for hours and days and not feel like it's work (previously MLOps platform), and there are others I wouldn't really hang out with by choice or default (helped a friend making a product in the dental space).

Then there's qualifying the problems: Is it a real problem? For whom is it a problem (buyer, user, etc)? Do they know it is a problem or will I have to make them see it (raising awareness and "educating" is expensive)? Has it always been a problem or just now? Why now and what changed? When was the last time they had that problem and what happened and how frequently they're having it (frequency, impact)? What have they done to solve it (time/money/people/etc)? What were the outcomes (are they still dissatisfied)? Is it urgent/mandatory? Is it expensive?

How can I search for and reach the people who have that problem in order to learn?

>I'm desperately trying to find an idea I can work on, taking advantage of the current ease of developing MVPs.

Either hang out with people and listen. There are a lot of times where people describe something frustrating for them that is obvious for you. Now, whether the solution already exists and it's simply a lack of awareness, or they're aware of solutions and none did it for them, or that there are organizational hurdles, it's up to you to figure that out, but you're often in a position you can see it.

What's great is that you got the technical part down; one fewer layer of risk is good; but in my opinion, most of the time it's not that that kills an endeavor. The code cemetery is full of MVPs and full-blown products that found too few or no buyers to make viable at the time and place.

>but everything I create or try to do seems like there are already dozens of other solutions doing the same thing (specially in the fields of wrapping AI).

Kind of l...

The major lesson I have after +20 years doing this: WHO CARES.

This concern is valid for a huge company or anybody that wanna get like 70% of the whole market.

For solo/small teams? Think of yourself as a street cart vendor that sells hamburgers, and is located on the front of mac donalds.

They still sell.

What you has but not others is that you are small, and is the actual person other person can , FOR REAL, talk about your product.

That is the whole thing of working as a freelancer, solo, small business. You can, FOR REAL, provide personal training/consulting/support, etc.

And that works even if you just take the product made by the big corporation and just know how to use it. There is business in being the guy who knows Excel well.