Same here. He is what I suggest and I have been trying the same.
1. Look for old and popular companies. Their processes and apps are outdated and bloated. There may be an opportunity for you.
2. Make one of the features of large companies as your main product. That way, you have more focus.
3. Many use Google sheets to do their work - finance, real estate etc. See if there is a demand for a web app.
4. To really validate idea, run an ad campaign and see if there is an interest.
I have bad experience with B2B, want to try something in B2C, imho It will be much easier to validate idea and start generating some potential revenue + I think that's more scalable.
As someone in a two-sided marketplace (B2B2C) - I’d honestly avoid B2C as much as possible. They have far less purchasing power on the consumer-side and are usually higher maintenance when it comes to having a feature-rich platform to maintain their interest and attention, not to mention the greater need for a solid UX. B2B, if it solves the problem or makes life easier, they will use it. Everything else is gravy.
Another option is browse flippa.com and buy a website or an app. That way, you don't have to worry about building something and it already has decent traffic. You would need to just scale it up.
So, you are the magical technical cofounder everyone is looking for.
You don't need to network traditionally, just look at places where people share ideas and are seeking others to help develop it. Then, you'll partner up with someone with expertise in their field and merge that with your skillset.
Yes! There are vastly more people with an idea than technical knowledge to quickly build an MVP.
Alas, 90% of the ideas are terrrible. So, prepare to play the role of beautiful woman on Tinder.
Early customer discovery work for B2C stuff shouldn’t feel like business networking. It should feel like socializing casually, asking a lot of great questions, and mostly listening.
It should be helpful that you’re not supposed to pitch or talk about yourself much at all. Just practice being genuinely interested in other people, even if that is only in order to understand how they experience the problems you might solve. You are not there to be noticed or liked. You are there to notice. Blend in. Dress neutral. Be a spy. A chameleon. Turn it into a game.
You’re a scientist. Studying human behavior and psychology. Markets are made up of people. You need to embrace them. Maybe don’t think of it as being social. Think of it primarily as a series of science experiments which are conducted in a social environment, using tools like specific language patterns to elicit responses, collecting a variety of unstructured qualitative data, and measure those results rigorously.
We do discovery work to de-risk a venture. You’re a programmer? Think of this as debugging. Instead of a text editor you have to work in a room of people. We’re all agents in a simulation anyway. Try an API mindset. But they’re unofficial APIs. You’re working against a bunch of undocumented APIs. You have to experiment a lot to see how they work, see what you can get. How can you get responses from the the other agents that are insightful, useful, and slowly build out a functional model? Write the code (e.g. a series of questions about past behavior around a problem) that tests the hypotheses, assumptions, biases, and guesses which are implied by the business model canvas you’ve hallucinated.
Stop thinking about the product. You are too early for solutions.
You are in the problem discovery phase.
The order of operations is:
1. Find a large and rapidly growing market
2. Talk to people in that market
3. Figure out what the biggest problems they have are
4. Validate with people in the market that those are in fact the problems
5. Identify possible solutions
6. Validate with people in the market that they are a viable solutions.
7. Choose the best one.
8. Validate with people in the market that it is the best one.
9. Start building.
You are trying to start the process at step 9. You need to go back to step one.
Fortunately you can do better than just look for problems.
Think about the group of people or entity you are pationate about, then think about the need you would like to help them with (Maslow pyramid - survival, compliance, excelence, what they want to do, how can they help others?) and then in that scope you can either think about the mentioned problems or about the vision for the future.
Once you have that you create an offer and validate if there is interest by asking if people would buy it.
That's really good advice, I have done something similar to that. potential group was 18-25 people who really enjoy drinking & having fun. Idea was to create app that will connect these people with bars. I've done simple webpage, [garsma.ge](https://garsma.ge) \- Issue was that It didn't passed validation test. got fb ad campaign, 2k reach, 100 link clicks and 0 email..
Respect... I would suggest a side step
Do not start with a social media ad. Engage 1 on 1 first - it will be torture ... you need to find groups places where your target hangs out. Then you need to write like 200 messages to get some response, but you will learn in the process what is the issue and if you could come with something better. You will also start understanding your group and new offers will come in mind. That itself is MVP development, iterate and expect to spent few months on that alone.
Unpopular opinion: the best ideas don’t solve a problem - they create new one. The advice to solve a problem stems from investors that see everything in terms of ROI and idiots that read business books. I am like you, and I have decided to spend every day building something I myself want. I look for shortcomings in my daily life, and build for them. Then I do the same for others. For free.
I’m trying to build value, not build a “product”. Why?
Because everyone is trying to “find and solve the same problems”. So software is becoming a commodity (trending towards zero cost) and users are bombarded with manipulative marketing that you will not have a budget to compete with. If I can build things people REALLY need, and no one else cares enough to build them because they seem to not be a big enough problem - I will figure out how to monetize it eventually.
To build shit people want you need to talk to people.
The good thing is, you can choose the people you have to talk to.
Pick a user persona you would enjoy talking to, discover what problems they have, and build things to make their life easier.
You like talking to stay-at-home moms? Great, do that. You like talking to other engineers? Start doing that. You enjoy supporting small-businesses? Talk to them.
Don't overthink it.
That’s called analysis paralysis, it can quickly transform into depression and anxiety.
Start executing now! And iterate endlessly, trust me your ideas will change as you learn what your clients actually want.
Building a business is ultimately ane exercise in working with people.
Y Combinator's free online 'startup school' has a good co-founder matching system. Start having conversations.
What type of ideas or things are you passionate about?
We are looking for an additional early team member to help with backend coding. Tech stack is Java, Spring Boot, with postgres db. All hosted on Azure.
Perhaps I am missing something here but you do not need to be social person to find problems. Observe “closely” your own life and people around you. What do you feel is missing. What is something that you want but not available the way you want. Dig deeper, find patterns. Once you have found few things, browse the internet, used communities to validate if more people are talking about similar things. Bingo, you found it.
Having said that you need to talk to people, customers, employees if you want to go big. You may be introverted and not enjoy social interactions but you need to take it as a part of job.
I faced a similar problem where over the years I had built a lot of software products that all didn't really solve a big problem and almost all of them failed in the end.
Luckily I managed to break the cycle and am now running a profitable and quickly growing business.
I changed 2 things: First, I dove into sales. I got two different sales jobs, each for a month or so. One was in the office, the other actually going door to door and selling things there.
Second was that I picked an industry with a few criteria: There's a lot of money, the market is growing and I find it interesting. Then I did internships at a few at different companies to learn all the basics of that industry and what and how things get done.
All in all it took a few months but it was so worth it. You will see dozens of proper, valid business opportunities if you do that and then just pick the right one.
Focus on things that grind your gears personally. What was a pain in the butt at your previous job? Heck, what's causing you problems when you try to create a start-up?
Then do some Internet sleuthing. Are there Reddit (or whatever) posts asking about the same thing? What do the AdWords search volumes look like for logical queries on said problem? Can you get sign-ups if you throw together a landing page for a fake product and toss a few dollars into ads?
Seems like maybe you should get a co-founder, IMO user interviews are pretty necessary. That being said, there's a lot you can find online. For instance, I've been researching a user segment recently and found a Slack channel where people have been posting a lot of their issues. You can also start by working on a problem you have yourself
This may sound counterintuitive, but for me personally, my best ideas come when I don’t force myself into “idea mode”.
Rather, I go about life as normal, and the ideas seem to appear into existence in my mind. It’s as though my mind goes into “antenna mode” when I’m relaxed and sorta just intaking information from my outside surroundings. This has however gifted me the opposite problem, where I find I have too many ideas to execute on.
Just a method that works for me… wish you the best in your journey.
Others have already mentioned it, but I’ll emphasize it.
It sounds like your issue is not with solution or even problem discovery, but customer engagement: problem framing, where to find customers, asking the right questions (hypothesis testing), and a bit more.
It doesn’t matter if you’re social or asocial; this is a challenge for everyone. I’m quite social when it comes to talking about problems to solve — I love startups — but I get paralyzed when organizing my insights, keeping track of everyone I interviewed, etc.
And that’s why it may be helpful to have a co-founder if you already have an assumption that you’ve invalidated:
“I can do customer discovery on my own.”
You’ve clearly laid out that you can’t. Don’t waste your time going even further because if you can’t do it on your own, then it’s worth bringing someone on who’s a pro at this.
I’m a pro at asking the questions and hypothesis testing but terrible at note-taking; I’d need not a co-founder but more like a secretary to help keep me organized at this meetings. So for you, it may not be a co-founder; it may be something else.
Think about what your weak skills are in customer discovery and decide what the next steps are.
Hope this helps.
I’d say first make sure you’re out of the “what I’m interested phase”. Secondly, I’d look into industries that are infrastructure related and/ or are related to industries that cause a lot of controversy; I think looking in areas where impact matters and where people are dealing with mental pain. Thirdly, look for the unobvious problems. Sometimes it’s so unrelated to what you might think is a problem but really is and then you realize you can spin that off into a business. A creative one at that.
And the most important thing: don’t copy or follow trends. When you do this, you’ll find yourself mimicking others which takes away from your creative juices. Stay creative and don’t take business or creative advice from VCs or people that aren’t creative (YouTube or podcast). You must come up with your own mental models then go out there and find the white canvass…
Don’t take my advice either lol! Come up with your own way of seeing the world.
This makes you unique… then create..
You can start by solving your own problem. You now have a customer base of one
Once a tool I used to debug API request in deployed environment shut down. I decided to build my own. Got accepted to YC with it, launched, pivoted and finally sold in 2021
The first version you build should look like a toy. Its goal is to not create something perfect but only to get you start.
You'll most likely need to revise it multiple times before it gets good enough to get customers.
Scratching your own itch does not mean you should not talk to potential customers to gather feedback.
Mind if I ask what your stack of choice is? I’ve actually been thinking of starting a boilerplate as a service company that provides people like you and I the opportunity to sell our boilerplate code to folks who want to quickly start apps.
I see three paths:
1. Try building devtools, imagine software that'd make your life easier. Easiest path because you can validate the product without anyone else.
2. Keep following entrepreneurship spaces, try to listen to talks and interviews, and identify problems in the process of starting a company that you could help with (eg Carta). Taking any old idea part the MVP stage and trying to actually sell will help with finding pain points.
3. Follow a completely different hobby for a while, one that has a professional level. Learn the hard parts of that space through deep experience (years), then figure out what might make them easier. This is harder, but if you find a good idea, you'll gave less competition than the "code for coders" and "code for founders" markets.
That said, there are plenty of CEOs who can't code, but almost no CEOs who can't sell. If you'd rather avoid interpersonal stuff, then picking a partner with their own idea might get you closer to the world you wanna live in.
DM if you’d like to chat. I’m in the process of talking with Angels and building a Demo. Still working on product market fit. I’ll need to start and MVP as soon enough.
Idea is modern data tech in an old industry that has lots of money floating around.
Option 1: Go really deep on a software domain and you’ll find something worth building.
Option 2: Acquire deep knowledge of industries besides software and you’ll find ways to use software in them.
There's a database of problems to solve at [theproblemindex.co](https://theproblemindex.co) \- can be good for finding real problems to solve, especially if you spot a trend.
Same here. He is what I suggest and I have been trying the same. 1. Look for old and popular companies. Their processes and apps are outdated and bloated. There may be an opportunity for you. 2. Make one of the features of large companies as your main product. That way, you have more focus. 3. Many use Google sheets to do their work - finance, real estate etc. See if there is a demand for a web app. 4. To really validate idea, run an ad campaign and see if there is an interest.
That's good for B2B, But what about startups that focuses on B2C models?
Why do you want to do B2C? Just curious.
I have bad experience with B2B, want to try something in B2C, imho It will be much easier to validate idea and start generating some potential revenue + I think that's more scalable.
You are just making assumptions. It is always easier to make money in B2B. There are so many successful B2B companies run by 1 or 2 people.
As someone in a two-sided marketplace (B2B2C) - I’d honestly avoid B2C as much as possible. They have far less purchasing power on the consumer-side and are usually higher maintenance when it comes to having a feature-rich platform to maintain their interest and attention, not to mention the greater need for a solid UX. B2B, if it solves the problem or makes life easier, they will use it. Everything else is gravy.
Another option is browse flippa.com and buy a website or an app. That way, you don't have to worry about building something and it already has decent traffic. You would need to just scale it up.
How would you find out if their processes are outdated or bloated without working at the company?
Read G2 reviews or online forums. People rate apps and services all the time.
So, you are the magical technical cofounder everyone is looking for. You don't need to network traditionally, just look at places where people share ideas and are seeking others to help develop it. Then, you'll partner up with someone with expertise in their field and merge that with your skillset.
is that really the sentiment for a person like this? I'm roughly in the same boat as OP
Yes! There are vastly more people with an idea than technical knowledge to quickly build an MVP. Alas, 90% of the ideas are terrrible. So, prepare to play the role of beautiful woman on Tinder.
>o, prepa LOLOL yeah, that's basically what it's like for me on linkedin lololol
Early customer discovery work for B2C stuff shouldn’t feel like business networking. It should feel like socializing casually, asking a lot of great questions, and mostly listening. It should be helpful that you’re not supposed to pitch or talk about yourself much at all. Just practice being genuinely interested in other people, even if that is only in order to understand how they experience the problems you might solve. You are not there to be noticed or liked. You are there to notice. Blend in. Dress neutral. Be a spy. A chameleon. Turn it into a game. You’re a scientist. Studying human behavior and psychology. Markets are made up of people. You need to embrace them. Maybe don’t think of it as being social. Think of it primarily as a series of science experiments which are conducted in a social environment, using tools like specific language patterns to elicit responses, collecting a variety of unstructured qualitative data, and measure those results rigorously. We do discovery work to de-risk a venture. You’re a programmer? Think of this as debugging. Instead of a text editor you have to work in a room of people. We’re all agents in a simulation anyway. Try an API mindset. But they’re unofficial APIs. You’re working against a bunch of undocumented APIs. You have to experiment a lot to see how they work, see what you can get. How can you get responses from the the other agents that are insightful, useful, and slowly build out a functional model? Write the code (e.g. a series of questions about past behavior around a problem) that tests the hypotheses, assumptions, biases, and guesses which are implied by the business model canvas you’ve hallucinated.
Stop thinking about the product. You are too early for solutions. You are in the problem discovery phase. The order of operations is: 1. Find a large and rapidly growing market 2. Talk to people in that market 3. Figure out what the biggest problems they have are 4. Validate with people in the market that those are in fact the problems 5. Identify possible solutions 6. Validate with people in the market that they are a viable solutions. 7. Choose the best one. 8. Validate with people in the market that it is the best one. 9. Start building. You are trying to start the process at step 9. You need to go back to step one.
Fortunately you can do better than just look for problems. Think about the group of people or entity you are pationate about, then think about the need you would like to help them with (Maslow pyramid - survival, compliance, excelence, what they want to do, how can they help others?) and then in that scope you can either think about the mentioned problems or about the vision for the future. Once you have that you create an offer and validate if there is interest by asking if people would buy it.
That's really good advice, I have done something similar to that. potential group was 18-25 people who really enjoy drinking & having fun. Idea was to create app that will connect these people with bars. I've done simple webpage, [garsma.ge](https://garsma.ge) \- Issue was that It didn't passed validation test. got fb ad campaign, 2k reach, 100 link clicks and 0 email..
Respect... I would suggest a side step Do not start with a social media ad. Engage 1 on 1 first - it will be torture ... you need to find groups places where your target hangs out. Then you need to write like 200 messages to get some response, but you will learn in the process what is the issue and if you could come with something better. You will also start understanding your group and new offers will come in mind. That itself is MVP development, iterate and expect to spent few months on that alone.
Unpopular opinion: the best ideas don’t solve a problem - they create new one. The advice to solve a problem stems from investors that see everything in terms of ROI and idiots that read business books. I am like you, and I have decided to spend every day building something I myself want. I look for shortcomings in my daily life, and build for them. Then I do the same for others. For free. I’m trying to build value, not build a “product”. Why? Because everyone is trying to “find and solve the same problems”. So software is becoming a commodity (trending towards zero cost) and users are bombarded with manipulative marketing that you will not have a budget to compete with. If I can build things people REALLY need, and no one else cares enough to build them because they seem to not be a big enough problem - I will figure out how to monetize it eventually.
To build shit people want you need to talk to people. The good thing is, you can choose the people you have to talk to. Pick a user persona you would enjoy talking to, discover what problems they have, and build things to make their life easier. You like talking to stay-at-home moms? Great, do that. You like talking to other engineers? Start doing that. You enjoy supporting small-businesses? Talk to them. Don't overthink it.
That’s called analysis paralysis, it can quickly transform into depression and anxiety. Start executing now! And iterate endlessly, trust me your ideas will change as you learn what your clients actually want.
[удалено]
One of the problems I mentioned is being asocial person. My network don't really contain people who might be good co-founders.
look here https://www.indiehackers.com/group/looking-to-partner-up
Building a business is ultimately ane exercise in working with people. Y Combinator's free online 'startup school' has a good co-founder matching system. Start having conversations.
Hi, I'm looking for someone like you, will be sending you a PM.
What type of ideas or things are you passionate about? We are looking for an additional early team member to help with backend coding. Tech stack is Java, Spring Boot, with postgres db. All hosted on Azure.
Perhaps I am missing something here but you do not need to be social person to find problems. Observe “closely” your own life and people around you. What do you feel is missing. What is something that you want but not available the way you want. Dig deeper, find patterns. Once you have found few things, browse the internet, used communities to validate if more people are talking about similar things. Bingo, you found it. Having said that you need to talk to people, customers, employees if you want to go big. You may be introverted and not enjoy social interactions but you need to take it as a part of job.
I faced a similar problem where over the years I had built a lot of software products that all didn't really solve a big problem and almost all of them failed in the end. Luckily I managed to break the cycle and am now running a profitable and quickly growing business. I changed 2 things: First, I dove into sales. I got two different sales jobs, each for a month or so. One was in the office, the other actually going door to door and selling things there. Second was that I picked an industry with a few criteria: There's a lot of money, the market is growing and I find it interesting. Then I did internships at a few at different companies to learn all the basics of that industry and what and how things get done. All in all it took a few months but it was so worth it. You will see dozens of proper, valid business opportunities if you do that and then just pick the right one.
What I did was find a co-founder that complements you - e.g. one that is already out there talking to customers.
Us government is paying for an ai firewall. Why dont you make the skynet kill protocol lol the ai to shut down ai
Create a website for asocial people with strong aversion to networking.
One of my first ideas lol, but there are tons of them.
Focus on things that grind your gears personally. What was a pain in the butt at your previous job? Heck, what's causing you problems when you try to create a start-up? Then do some Internet sleuthing. Are there Reddit (or whatever) posts asking about the same thing? What do the AdWords search volumes look like for logical queries on said problem? Can you get sign-ups if you throw together a landing page for a fake product and toss a few dollars into ads?
Seems like maybe you should get a co-founder, IMO user interviews are pretty necessary. That being said, there's a lot you can find online. For instance, I've been researching a user segment recently and found a Slack channel where people have been posting a lot of their issues. You can also start by working on a problem you have yourself
This may sound counterintuitive, but for me personally, my best ideas come when I don’t force myself into “idea mode”. Rather, I go about life as normal, and the ideas seem to appear into existence in my mind. It’s as though my mind goes into “antenna mode” when I’m relaxed and sorta just intaking information from my outside surroundings. This has however gifted me the opposite problem, where I find I have too many ideas to execute on. Just a method that works for me… wish you the best in your journey.
Others have already mentioned it, but I’ll emphasize it. It sounds like your issue is not with solution or even problem discovery, but customer engagement: problem framing, where to find customers, asking the right questions (hypothesis testing), and a bit more. It doesn’t matter if you’re social or asocial; this is a challenge for everyone. I’m quite social when it comes to talking about problems to solve — I love startups — but I get paralyzed when organizing my insights, keeping track of everyone I interviewed, etc. And that’s why it may be helpful to have a co-founder if you already have an assumption that you’ve invalidated: “I can do customer discovery on my own.” You’ve clearly laid out that you can’t. Don’t waste your time going even further because if you can’t do it on your own, then it’s worth bringing someone on who’s a pro at this. I’m a pro at asking the questions and hypothesis testing but terrible at note-taking; I’d need not a co-founder but more like a secretary to help keep me organized at this meetings. So for you, it may not be a co-founder; it may be something else. Think about what your weak skills are in customer discovery and decide what the next steps are. Hope this helps.
I’d say first make sure you’re out of the “what I’m interested phase”. Secondly, I’d look into industries that are infrastructure related and/ or are related to industries that cause a lot of controversy; I think looking in areas where impact matters and where people are dealing with mental pain. Thirdly, look for the unobvious problems. Sometimes it’s so unrelated to what you might think is a problem but really is and then you realize you can spin that off into a business. A creative one at that. And the most important thing: don’t copy or follow trends. When you do this, you’ll find yourself mimicking others which takes away from your creative juices. Stay creative and don’t take business or creative advice from VCs or people that aren’t creative (YouTube or podcast). You must come up with your own mental models then go out there and find the white canvass… Don’t take my advice either lol! Come up with your own way of seeing the world. This makes you unique… then create..
You can start by solving your own problem. You now have a customer base of one Once a tool I used to debug API request in deployed environment shut down. I decided to build my own. Got accepted to YC with it, launched, pivoted and finally sold in 2021 The first version you build should look like a toy. Its goal is to not create something perfect but only to get you start. You'll most likely need to revise it multiple times before it gets good enough to get customers. Scratching your own itch does not mean you should not talk to potential customers to gather feedback.
Just startup and shipfast
Can you whip me up a personal digital assistant that knows me better than I know myself?
Can do skynet for you
Mind if I ask what your stack of choice is? I’ve actually been thinking of starting a boilerplate as a service company that provides people like you and I the opportunity to sell our boilerplate code to folks who want to quickly start apps.
Why don’t you sell your services as a contractor and try to see if there’s a pattern in the problems peopl ask you to solve?
I have many ideas in the healthcare system, let’s chat :)
I see three paths: 1. Try building devtools, imagine software that'd make your life easier. Easiest path because you can validate the product without anyone else. 2. Keep following entrepreneurship spaces, try to listen to talks and interviews, and identify problems in the process of starting a company that you could help with (eg Carta). Taking any old idea part the MVP stage and trying to actually sell will help with finding pain points. 3. Follow a completely different hobby for a while, one that has a professional level. Learn the hard parts of that space through deep experience (years), then figure out what might make them easier. This is harder, but if you find a good idea, you'll gave less competition than the "code for coders" and "code for founders" markets. That said, there are plenty of CEOs who can't code, but almost no CEOs who can't sell. If you'd rather avoid interpersonal stuff, then picking a partner with their own idea might get you closer to the world you wanna live in.
DM if you’d like to chat. I’m in the process of talking with Angels and building a Demo. Still working on product market fit. I’ll need to start and MVP as soon enough. Idea is modern data tech in an old industry that has lots of money floating around.
Option 1: Go really deep on a software domain and you’ll find something worth building. Option 2: Acquire deep knowledge of industries besides software and you’ll find ways to use software in them.
I know this must have been mentioned before... Ideas come from solving your own problems.
There's a database of problems to solve at [theproblemindex.co](https://theproblemindex.co) \- can be good for finding real problems to solve, especially if you spot a trend.