> but everything I create or try to do seems like there are already dozens of other solutions doing the same thing
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.
> For solo/small teams? Think of yourself as a street cart vendor that sells hamburgers, and is located on the front of mac donalds.
What a great analogy! I always thought of how many lawyer offices there are, from single lawyer to multiple lawyers, but I like your take on it much better.
The problem with this analogy is that in the case of software, you basically have teleportation so you can go to any dry cleaner you want instantaneously.
Exactly, if you are waiting to make something that very very few ppl are doing, you will be waiting a lifetime. That or the market is extremely small to be profitable.
In reality your business is somewhere in a small side street no one ever visits together with 100 other small businesses and McDonalds has flashing ads for their business at each street entrance
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.
That does seem like the best way to go about it, but I have family who are doctors and they frequently talk about how tired they are of tech guys who read "The Mom Test" who now skulk around asking probing questions about pain points in a doctors daily work.
It just seems like any time there is a repeatable process for doing something, people will latch onto it and then do it until it is totally exhausted. Tech Entrepreneur especially has such a low barrier to entry and so many 'How To' guides that it feels super impacted.
Makes me wish software was closer to art, where someone has something they need to make just for the sake of bringing it into existence.
Tbf, medical software is a whole world unto itself. They do actually need serious solutions to their innumerable software problems, but it's really really hard to deliver those solutions for a whole host of reasons, from legislative to monopolies.
Great point! It's very difficult to build for a domain in which you're not an expert (non doctors building for doctors, non lawyers building for lawyers etc). You're going to lack a lot context, knowing what's important and how people use existing tools (versus what they say about how they use existing tools).
Considering that business is about compounding unfair advantages, if you have to hire people to tell you if you're going in the right direction it's going to be tough.
That, and when people ask me about my problems, i tell them about it. But then i realize they want to know about problems that have a scalable or easy solution they can build.
In other words, I gave them my damn problem but they arent interested in solving them.
So no, i aint talking to you about my problems anymore
Understand that being a successful solopreneurs (or entrepreneur for that matter) isn't just about "coding a thing." When I started educating myself about how to be a solopreneur, I realized that I'd be lucky if I spent 50% of my time coding; and would more likely spend 1/3rd of my time coding.
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.
Just fill needs that you have. Don't like how something existing works? Fix it. Think you can offer a better version of an existing idea? Go for it.
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.
I agree with the first half, but strongly disagree with the second half of what you wrote. Ideas matter immensely. If you work on the wrong thing, perfect execution is not going to get you anywhere. If you work on the right thing, then even with mediocre execution will bring you at least some success.
The best idea in the world without execution: worth zero.
A very simple idea (say, a hamburguer stand) but executed well is worth a lot.
Then you have everything in between.
Like you say, even a mediocre execution on a great idea can be worth something - which is often the case of business software. You do run the risk of a competitor out-executing you, and the risk is greater the worse the execution was.
> If you work on the wrong thing, perfect execution is not going to get you anywhere. If you work on the right thing, then even with mediocre execution will bring you at least some success.
You're not wrong but that should be self-evident. Most people know when they have a bad idea, they just lack the humility to admit it.
One man’s idea is another man’s execution. It’s a useless phrase, in my experience, because there is nothing that determines the difference. For instance, was git a novel idea of applied distributed merkle trees or simply the existing idea of version control executed better? I see it as primarily a matter of ideas, but to someone else, maybe not?
> Just fill needs that you have. Don't like how something existing works? Fix it. Think you can offer a better version of an existing idea? Go for it.
While I don't disagree with this point, what it often leads to is developers creating developer tools, which is a crowded and competitive area.
There are fields out there that are crying out for tech solutions because they are lumbering dinosaurs that haven't changed with the times. One example is the maritime industry. It's amazing how much is still done with pen and paper on a ship. True, there is often a reluctance to adopt new tech, but the younger cohort of mariners are far more eager and receptive to tech solutions than the previous generation.
My suggestion is to look for those industries and talk to folks in those fields about their pain points. The bar may be so low that you could step over it.
> While I don't disagree with this point, what it often leads to is developers creating developer tools, which is a crowded and competitive area.
That can certainly happen. But you should at least have some domain experience or have a partner who does. Otherwise, not only will it be hard to come to the correct solution, you'll struggle to get your foot in the door to the industry.
Agreed: you don't want to create a solution to a hypothesized problem that doesn't actually exist. My point is that there are low hanging fruit if you step outside your immediate bubble, but — as you say — you'll need a guide.
This is great advice. Ideas are at best a head start, Execution is everything. Solve a problem you know thoroughly. Solve a problem you have yourself. You can pivot later but even if it goes nowhere, you solved something you can use even if no one else does.
I bought/implemented enterprise software that my team would only use 10% of despite the enterprise software sales process, vendor lock, high cost, etc. We literally did not want or care about implementing 90% of the features. I believe they were only there to justify the cost and give their marketing some fluff.
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.
I found an area far outside of tech that had very real problems that nobody was really solving; in fact, the existing tools that should have solved this problem turned out to be a nightmare for the intended users. I've been working on it for a few months now and gotten very positive feedback, and have a steadily-growing userbase now. It's more of a side-project right now, maybe 10 hours/week, but maybe someday it'll evolve into an actual business (:
Not willing to share specifics about the specific area I'm doing this in, but the general idea stands. It helps a lot that the problem I'm working to solve is one I personally dealt with, so I understood a lot about what the problem was and was able to effectively solve it for myself. This translated into producing something that a lot of people like and use regularly.
Even more broadly: solve your own problems, then generalise out. If you're solving a real problem that you have, that isn't incredibly specific to something about you/your life/the way you do things/..., then odds are there's probably others out there with the same problem. Every even modestly successful project I've had started with solving my own problems, then polishing the solutions for others to use.
Corollary: do a lot of different things, activities, jobs, hobbies. I need to get better at this.
It's amazing how many different kinds of businesses there are. I once talked to a Dutch guy who designed and manufactured machines that clean astroturf in stadiums. He was rolling in it, small company. So many industries like this you have no idea existed.
I’ve always followed Paul Graham’s advice: “live in the future, then build what’s missing.” If you’re really good at a few different things, and smart enough to learn how to do everything else, then usually the optimal startup idea is somewhere in the middle of that space. For me I’m a good programmer and I love learning languages, so I started building tools that I always wanted but no one else was selling. Once I got a prototype and some users to get feedback from, everything began to slowly snowball from there.
What’s important to clarify is that I’m not building exactly what I had in mind when I first dreamt all this up long ago, but my first idea would never have worked anyway. The best thing I ever did was just launch, because your users (or lack thereof) will quickly prove which ideas are good and which are not. So my advice is just pick the best idea you have right now. Or if you don’t have any idea just solve a problem you or your friends have. Then launch as soon as you can and pivot, pivot, pivot. It’s always going to be an iterative process.
The biggest side project I am currently working on was an accident. I used one site (dance calendar) every day, because I do lots of couples dancing. I had some ideas on how to improve the site, but did not want to compete with the existing site. Then the site went down, the previous operator did not want to continue running it, and I worked together with him to get the new site up and running.
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.
I have another problem: ideas are cheap, coding is relatively easy, but talking to customers, marketing and sales in general are difficult as hell. Tried to find a sales co-founder on yc matching but gave up after two unsuccessful early stage startups. Did any of you have a similar problem? How did you solve it and become successful solopreneur?
I'm in the same boat and I'm definitely not successful yet. Here are some HN discussions that I found helpful. If anybody else has input, I'm all ears.
I keep a notebook where I write down every idea that crosses my mind, without judgement about how good the idea is. I just write it down. Every so often, I go through and curate that list. I have far more ideas than I have time in my life to implement. If you adopt a similar habit, I bet you'll get similar results.
Similar here. I'm not a solopreneur, but I keep writing down ideas — a lot of them. I have a folder that says “Ideas,” and I tinker-write about the problem-solution, etc., when my mind wonders or the weekends after the digital chores.
I also tend to get lots of gotchas while walking, I use the Voice Memo in the phone to just talk to and I write it down when I'm home and in front of the computer.
I also have lots of pen-paper notebooks that I write like crazy all the time. I'm beginning to take a lot care about my "CommonPlace Notebooks" now. Earlier, I use notebooks as a temporary idea-holding medium.
Be very careful when you feel desperate. It's a recipe for bad decisions.
Long-term: sooner, softer, smoother. Recognizing and addressing issues sooner means you can make smaller adjustments.
Short-term: consider treating your current situation as your role learning experience. If you as a developer don't own the product, who does? Why isn't that you? If you think you can build a business on your own, you should be able to be the product owner within your company (and then you'll have plenty of resources if the product is worth something). If you do that, you'll have the experience needed to head out on your own if that's what you really want.
If you scoff that you could never do it in your company because those roles are filled, it's corrupt, etc., then treat the situation as your emotional learning experience: i.e., even if the company is as bad as you think, assume it's the best opportunity you'll ever get. How can you be the one that spins straw into gold? Build your own agency. It's unlikely you can afford better collaborators on your own dime.
Finally, the value stream always branches and branches. You can always go smaller to avoid competition, or bigger to divide a larger pie (typically into smaller pieces). If you want to extract value. But is that what you want?
If you want to build your brand, create something critical for someone important, retaining the credit and the credibility. For success and satisfaction, it's likely more important whose team you're on than what you do. And for that, you never, ever want to seem or be desperate to leave.
Whether building products for people or working with collaborators, think about things from their perspective: that's consideration (both emotional and as exchanged in contracts). Empathy for others is the master virtue, and you might find it helps you avoid thinking of working for a company as working on something that doesn't belong to you.
I took a side project that I built for my own needs (ArchiveBox) and just built it up as an open source project until it was useful to other people too.
At first it seemed like a trivial tool that was just a thin wrapper around wget, so I didn't think anyone else would want to use it, but as I started adding features traction grew and random contributors came out of the woodwork and started helping.
Monetized through consulting, and the consulting money is paying enough to scale the buiness a bit. Next step is releasing a "Pro" version as a SaaS with some fo the features that I cant open source anyway (e.g. CAPTCHA-solving, bot-detection avoidance, etc.).
I have so many ideas. I’m finally building one, and close to ready to seek investment.
All of my ideas are things I need that weren’t available or were missing critical features.
I personally think it’s high risk to attempt to build something for others that you don’t personally need. You’re going to make a lot of assumptions and probably be wrong. It may cost you a lot of time and money.
I can imagine so many people sitting around trying to think of AI related things to build, since that is the insane trend right now. This approach, IMO, is not the right one.
Even building something that already exists - but making it cheaper or more reliable (improving the status quo) is enough.
You'd have to find some niche that companies like OpenAI won't just cover themselves, with general-purpose solutions (and what they can AI-derive just like you're thinking). They're already marketing to your customers.
And if they won't soon cover what you do, don't be so dependent upon them that they can eat up your margin or cut you off anyway.
The other option is to be an investment scam yourself: ride the hype investment, draw big salaries, puff up resume, hope you get acquired quickly.
Having existing solutions is not necessarily a bad thing, it means there's a market and paying customers. On the surface many companies sound similar but often are going in different directions once you look into the details.
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.
I had exactly the same feeling. I've spent most of my career working on software for investment banks in the UK and at the end of the day you can't show your work to anyone (even if they cared) and you only get paid for the time worked. I'd known for years and years I wanted to build my own business but waited until I was in a financially feasible position to do so. And with that I had many many ideas but it mainly came down to ideas which weren't capital intensive and had a viable gtm. And with that I chose to pull the pin on https://www.getdestash.com
I'm creating a language learning app [0] and I've come up with it using frustration.
When I was in Germany, I wanted to turn my highschool German into something usable, but no apps or techniques worked for me. And I've tried 20+ of them.
Anki was the closest, but I really dreaded the card creation process - sentence, translation, audio...
So when I've finished university, I've found myself in a situation in which: I didn't need a lot of money, didn't have a job, LLMs were a new thing.
I would suggest building something that you yourself find useful / solving a problem that you regularly face that doesn’t have a satisfactory off the shelf solution.
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.
I like the Brian Armstrong quote that execution produces information.
Releasing something...anything is the first step. First ideas are dumb anyways but it opens up the door to the next iteration of the app.
Also there is a reason that lot of competitors are in a market. There is money to be made. When lot of competitors just niche down. Reduce focus to one segment of the market.
I make an electronic gadget for musicians. The project was inside my domains -- plural. There aren't a lot of people out there who are both working musicians, and also familiar with electronics including small scale manufacturing. The latter, I picked up from internships and early-career jobs. What it meant was that I could make the jump from problem space to solution space quickly and cheaply.
I still haven't quit my day job, but my business produces a reasonable side income.
Briefly, you need to grow in ways that are separate from your existing career path.
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.
As the founder of AI2sql https://ai2sql.io/ , the idea came to me while working on data warehouses and noticing that many business users struggled with writing SQL queries. I saw an opportunity to simplify this with AI. My advice: focus on real pain points you observe in your own work. Even if others are tackling similar problems, your unique perspective can lead to a better solution. Keep iterating until something sticks!
I am always surprised that people don't actually have 10+ ideas itching them to do them at any point in time.
Like, just walk around your day without headphones on a no-stress day, and ideas just pour in from the ether. Not to mention if you have a pain point somewhere in your work or elsewhere.
Ideas often come at the intersection of problems you’ve lived through and technologies you’re comfortable using. Instead of hunting for novel ideas, ask yourself: What’s frustrating you or the people around you right now?
A lot of successful solopreneurs didn’t try to build the ‘next big thing.’ They focused on niche, underserved problems that were within their skill set. Also, don't stress if there are competitors—execution beats originality. If you’re tired of AI-wrapping ideas, try exploring automation or niche SaaS tools that solve everyday business problems efficiently.
The goal is to ship fast, validate fast, iterate even faster. You only need one niche that loves your solution. That’s enough to get you started.
I suggest reading a lot. Reading opens up a lot of ideas. Read articles in your areas of interest, dig deeper, meet up, and talk to people. Talk to potential customers (just make up some hypothetical scenarios), repeat-rinse and things should start bubbling up.
The reason people jump on AI is because YC and other VCs favor it heavily. Got a genuine B2B idea/solution with a provable track record? Nice but not for YC/VCs.
The idea is the consequence of noticing that there is a problem; a gap between a current state and a desired state, and thinking about closing that gap. In other words, starting with a problem is more conductive to finding ideas than focusing on finding ideas.
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 like beverages, snacks, clothes, cars, phones, laptops, languages, frameworks, etc? It tells you the importance of market, distribution, and a bunch of things other than code.
You probably will not find a worthwhile project outside of your area of expertise. The market for "a guy who can code built a software for your industry" is pretty saturated now.
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.
E.g. I use/used Google App Engine (GAE)[1] a lot. When Google deprecated the GUI, I found it inconveniencing using the CLI. Secondly, there was no GUI for the Datastore Emulator. So, I set out to build something for both of them [2] and then decided to put it out there for others.
Along the line, it turned out that Google didn't support using one of their tools "dev_appserver.py" for building Python 3 Apps on Windows and so I also built a patch for it [3]
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
> but everything I create or try to do seems like there are already dozens of other solutions doing the same thing
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.
> For solo/small teams? Think of yourself as a street cart vendor that sells hamburgers, and is located on the front of mac donalds.
What a great analogy! I always thought of how many lawyer offices there are, from single lawyer to multiple lawyers, but I like your take on it much better.
I like the dry cleaner example. How many dry cleaners are there? Do you go to the best one, or do you go to the one you know exists and is convenient.
The problem with this analogy is that in the case of software, you basically have teleportation so you can go to any dry cleaner you want instantaneously.
Agreed, so maybe there is some value in being a ‘local’ software provider.
Exactly, if you are waiting to make something that very very few ppl are doing, you will be waiting a lifetime. That or the market is extremely small to be profitable.
In reality your business is somewhere in a small side street no one ever visits together with 100 other small businesses and McDonalds has flashing ads for their business at each street entrance
One sample point of one person's experience:
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.
That does seem like the best way to go about it, but I have family who are doctors and they frequently talk about how tired they are of tech guys who read "The Mom Test" who now skulk around asking probing questions about pain points in a doctors daily work.
It just seems like any time there is a repeatable process for doing something, people will latch onto it and then do it until it is totally exhausted. Tech Entrepreneur especially has such a low barrier to entry and so many 'How To' guides that it feels super impacted.
Makes me wish software was closer to art, where someone has something they need to make just for the sake of bringing it into existence.
Tbf, medical software is a whole world unto itself. They do actually need serious solutions to their innumerable software problems, but it's really really hard to deliver those solutions for a whole host of reasons, from legislative to monopolies.
Great point! It's very difficult to build for a domain in which you're not an expert (non doctors building for doctors, non lawyers building for lawyers etc). You're going to lack a lot context, knowing what's important and how people use existing tools (versus what they say about how they use existing tools).
Considering that business is about compounding unfair advantages, if you have to hire people to tell you if you're going in the right direction it's going to be tough.
That, and when people ask me about my problems, i tell them about it. But then i realize they want to know about problems that have a scalable or easy solution they can build.
In other words, I gave them my damn problem but they arent interested in solving them.
So no, i aint talking to you about my problems anymore
+1 from me. I'm an investor and entrepreneur, and I can offer that this is spot-on advice.
Engineers like to build stuff. But business is about solving OTHER people's problems. It's not necessarily about building cool stuff.
Get some real world experience. Learn where the holes are. Then build a business around filling the holes.
Understand that being a successful solopreneurs (or entrepreneur for that matter) isn't just about "coding a thing." When I started educating myself about how to be a solopreneur, I realized that I'd be lucky if I spent 50% of my time coding; and would more likely spend 1/3rd of my time coding.
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.
Just fill needs that you have. Don't like how something existing works? Fix it. Think you can offer a better version of an existing idea? Go for it.
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
I agree with the first half, but strongly disagree with the second half of what you wrote. Ideas matter immensely. If you work on the wrong thing, perfect execution is not going to get you anywhere. If you work on the right thing, then even with mediocre execution will bring you at least some success.
I like to say that ideas are a multiplier.
The best idea in the world without execution: worth zero.
A very simple idea (say, a hamburguer stand) but executed well is worth a lot.
Then you have everything in between.
Like you say, even a mediocre execution on a great idea can be worth something - which is often the case of business software. You do run the risk of a competitor out-executing you, and the risk is greater the worse the execution was.
> If you work on the wrong thing, perfect execution is not going to get you anywhere. If you work on the right thing, then even with mediocre execution will bring you at least some success.
You're not wrong but that should be self-evident. Most people know when they have a bad idea, they just lack the humility to admit it.
One man’s idea is another man’s execution. It’s a useless phrase, in my experience, because there is nothing that determines the difference. For instance, was git a novel idea of applied distributed merkle trees or simply the existing idea of version control executed better? I see it as primarily a matter of ideas, but to someone else, maybe not?
There are fields out there that are crying out for tech solutions because they are lumbering dinosaurs that haven't changed with the times. One example is the maritime industry. It's amazing how much is still done with pen and paper on a ship. True, there is often a reluctance to adopt new tech, but the younger cohort of mariners are far more eager and receptive to tech solutions than the previous generation.
My suggestion is to look for those industries and talk to folks in those fields about their pain points. The bar may be so low that you could step over it.
> While I don't disagree with this point, what it often leads to is developers creating developer tools, which is a crowded and competitive area.
That can certainly happen. But you should at least have some domain experience or have a partner who does. Otherwise, not only will it be hard to come to the correct solution, you'll struggle to get your foot in the door to the industry.
Agreed: you don't want to create a solution to a hypothesized problem that doesn't actually exist. My point is that there are low hanging fruit if you step outside your immediate bubble, but — as you say — you'll need a guide.
This is great advice. Ideas are at best a head start, Execution is everything. Solve a problem you know thoroughly. Solve a problem you have yourself. You can pivot later but even if it goes nowhere, you solved something you can use even if no one else does.
I bought/implemented enterprise software that my team would only use 10% of despite the enterprise software sales process, vendor lock, high cost, etc. We literally did not want or care about implementing 90% of the features. I believe they were only there to justify the cost and give their marketing some fluff.
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.
Look outside of tech.
I found an area far outside of tech that had very real problems that nobody was really solving; in fact, the existing tools that should have solved this problem turned out to be a nightmare for the intended users. I've been working on it for a few months now and gotten very positive feedback, and have a steadily-growing userbase now. It's more of a side-project right now, maybe 10 hours/week, but maybe someday it'll evolve into an actual business (:
Not willing to share specifics about the specific area I'm doing this in, but the general idea stands. It helps a lot that the problem I'm working to solve is one I personally dealt with, so I understood a lot about what the problem was and was able to effectively solve it for myself. This translated into producing something that a lot of people like and use regularly.
Even more broadly: solve your own problems, then generalise out. If you're solving a real problem that you have, that isn't incredibly specific to something about you/your life/the way you do things/..., then odds are there's probably others out there with the same problem. Every even modestly successful project I've had started with solving my own problems, then polishing the solutions for others to use.
Corollary: do a lot of different things, activities, jobs, hobbies. I need to get better at this.
It's amazing how many different kinds of businesses there are. I once talked to a Dutch guy who designed and manufactured machines that clean astroturf in stadiums. He was rolling in it, small company. So many industries like this you have no idea existed.
I’ve always followed Paul Graham’s advice: “live in the future, then build what’s missing.” If you’re really good at a few different things, and smart enough to learn how to do everything else, then usually the optimal startup idea is somewhere in the middle of that space. For me I’m a good programmer and I love learning languages, so I started building tools that I always wanted but no one else was selling. Once I got a prototype and some users to get feedback from, everything began to slowly snowball from there.
What’s important to clarify is that I’m not building exactly what I had in mind when I first dreamt all this up long ago, but my first idea would never have worked anyway. The best thing I ever did was just launch, because your users (or lack thereof) will quickly prove which ideas are good and which are not. So my advice is just pick the best idea you have right now. Or if you don’t have any idea just solve a problem you or your friends have. Then launch as soon as you can and pivot, pivot, pivot. It’s always going to be an iterative process.
The biggest side project I am currently working on was an accident. I used one site (dance calendar) every day, because I do lots of couples dancing. I had some ideas on how to improve the site, but did not want to compete with the existing site. Then the site went down, the previous operator did not want to continue running it, and I worked together with him to get the new site up and running.
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.
I have another problem: ideas are cheap, coding is relatively easy, but talking to customers, marketing and sales in general are difficult as hell. Tried to find a sales co-founder on yc matching but gave up after two unsuccessful early stage startups. Did any of you have a similar problem? How did you solve it and become successful solopreneur?
I'm in the same boat and I'm definitely not successful yet. Here are some HN discussions that I found helpful. If anybody else has input, I'm all ears.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41180492
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18905234
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39076700
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693844
I keep a notebook where I write down every idea that crosses my mind, without judgement about how good the idea is. I just write it down. Every so often, I go through and curate that list. I have far more ideas than I have time in my life to implement. If you adopt a similar habit, I bet you'll get similar results.
Similar here. I'm not a solopreneur, but I keep writing down ideas — a lot of them. I have a folder that says “Ideas,” and I tinker-write about the problem-solution, etc., when my mind wonders or the weekends after the digital chores.
I also tend to get lots of gotchas while walking, I use the Voice Memo in the phone to just talk to and I write it down when I'm home and in front of the computer.
I also have lots of pen-paper notebooks that I write like crazy all the time. I'm beginning to take a lot care about my "CommonPlace Notebooks" now. Earlier, I use notebooks as a temporary idea-holding medium.
You guys don’t have a text file full of world changing ideas you would work on if you had some runway?
Out of the frying pan, and into the fire?
Be very careful when you feel desperate. It's a recipe for bad decisions.
Long-term: sooner, softer, smoother. Recognizing and addressing issues sooner means you can make smaller adjustments.
Short-term: consider treating your current situation as your role learning experience. If you as a developer don't own the product, who does? Why isn't that you? If you think you can build a business on your own, you should be able to be the product owner within your company (and then you'll have plenty of resources if the product is worth something). If you do that, you'll have the experience needed to head out on your own if that's what you really want.
If you scoff that you could never do it in your company because those roles are filled, it's corrupt, etc., then treat the situation as your emotional learning experience: i.e., even if the company is as bad as you think, assume it's the best opportunity you'll ever get. How can you be the one that spins straw into gold? Build your own agency. It's unlikely you can afford better collaborators on your own dime.
Finally, the value stream always branches and branches. You can always go smaller to avoid competition, or bigger to divide a larger pie (typically into smaller pieces). If you want to extract value. But is that what you want?
If you want to build your brand, create something critical for someone important, retaining the credit and the credibility. For success and satisfaction, it's likely more important whose team you're on than what you do. And for that, you never, ever want to seem or be desperate to leave.
Whether building products for people or working with collaborators, think about things from their perspective: that's consideration (both emotional and as exchanged in contracts). Empathy for others is the master virtue, and you might find it helps you avoid thinking of working for a company as working on something that doesn't belong to you.
Worked as a consultant. Formed a good "big picture" of how things worked, and got to speak with tons of people in various industries.
Do that enough, and you'll end up with a laundry list of "wish we could have this product/feature/etc."
A lot of the "boring" industries are also entrenched in old solutions that move at snail pace.
I took a side project that I built for my own needs (ArchiveBox) and just built it up as an open source project until it was useful to other people too.
At first it seemed like a trivial tool that was just a thin wrapper around wget, so I didn't think anyone else would want to use it, but as I started adding features traction grew and random contributors came out of the woodwork and started helping.
Monetized through consulting, and the consulting money is paying enough to scale the buiness a bit. Next step is releasing a "Pro" version as a SaaS with some fo the features that I cant open source anyway (e.g. CAPTCHA-solving, bot-detection avoidance, etc.).
Bootstrapping (not seeking VC), the last few weeks, I'm spending most of my time just on business&administrative stuff.
It's about 90% time, not the 50% I expected.
I have so many ideas. I’m finally building one, and close to ready to seek investment.
All of my ideas are things I need that weren’t available or were missing critical features.
I personally think it’s high risk to attempt to build something for others that you don’t personally need. You’re going to make a lot of assumptions and probably be wrong. It may cost you a lot of time and money.
I can imagine so many people sitting around trying to think of AI related things to build, since that is the insane trend right now. This approach, IMO, is not the right one.
Even building something that already exists - but making it cheaper or more reliable (improving the status quo) is enough.
> (specially in the fields of wrapping AI).
Sounds like probably short-term coattail-riding.
You'd have to find some niche that companies like OpenAI won't just cover themselves, with general-purpose solutions (and what they can AI-derive just like you're thinking). They're already marketing to your customers.
And if they won't soon cover what you do, don't be so dependent upon them that they can eat up your margin or cut you off anyway.
The other option is to be an investment scam yourself: ride the hype investment, draw big salaries, puff up resume, hope you get acquired quickly.
Having existing solutions is not necessarily a bad thing, it means there's a market and paying customers. On the surface many companies sound similar but often are going in different directions once you look into the details.
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.
I had exactly the same feeling. I've spent most of my career working on software for investment banks in the UK and at the end of the day you can't show your work to anyone (even if they cared) and you only get paid for the time worked. I'd known for years and years I wanted to build my own business but waited until I was in a financially feasible position to do so. And with that I had many many ideas but it mainly came down to ideas which weren't capital intensive and had a viable gtm. And with that I chose to pull the pin on https://www.getdestash.com
I'm creating a language learning app [0] and I've come up with it using frustration.
When I was in Germany, I wanted to turn my highschool German into something usable, but no apps or techniques worked for me. And I've tried 20+ of them.
Anki was the closest, but I really dreaded the card creation process - sentence, translation, audio...
So when I've finished university, I've found myself in a situation in which: I didn't need a lot of money, didn't have a job, LLMs were a new thing.
So I've started building.
[0] https://vocabuo.com
I would suggest building something that you yourself find useful / solving a problem that you regularly face that doesn’t have a satisfactory off the shelf solution.
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 )
I like the Brian Armstrong quote that execution produces information.
Releasing something...anything is the first step. First ideas are dumb anyways but it opens up the door to the next iteration of the app.
Also there is a reason that lot of competitors are in a market. There is money to be made. When lot of competitors just niche down. Reduce focus to one segment of the market.
I make an electronic gadget for musicians. The project was inside my domains -- plural. There aren't a lot of people out there who are both working musicians, and also familiar with electronics including small scale manufacturing. The latter, I picked up from internships and early-career jobs. What it meant was that I could make the jump from problem space to solution space quickly and cheaply.
I still haven't quit my day job, but my business produces a reasonable side income.
Briefly, you need to grow in ways that are separate from your existing career path.
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.
As the founder of AI2sql https://ai2sql.io/ , the idea came to me while working on data warehouses and noticing that many business users struggled with writing SQL queries. I saw an opportunity to simplify this with AI. My advice: focus on real pain points you observe in your own work. Even if others are tackling similar problems, your unique perspective can lead to a better solution. Keep iterating until something sticks!
I am always surprised that people don't actually have 10+ ideas itching them to do them at any point in time.
Like, just walk around your day without headphones on a no-stress day, and ideas just pour in from the ether. Not to mention if you have a pain point somewhere in your work or elsewhere.
Develop Consilience.
Read this to learn more — https://asindu.xyz/posts/the-nature-of-technology-book-revie...
Remember, all you have to build is something that is 10x better, cheaper, faster and you will attract customers.
Ideas often come at the intersection of problems you’ve lived through and technologies you’re comfortable using. Instead of hunting for novel ideas, ask yourself: What’s frustrating you or the people around you right now? A lot of successful solopreneurs didn’t try to build the ‘next big thing.’ They focused on niche, underserved problems that were within their skill set. Also, don't stress if there are competitors—execution beats originality. If you’re tired of AI-wrapping ideas, try exploring automation or niche SaaS tools that solve everyday business problems efficiently. The goal is to ship fast, validate fast, iterate even faster. You only need one niche that loves your solution. That’s enough to get you started.
I suggest reading a lot. Reading opens up a lot of ideas. Read articles in your areas of interest, dig deeper, meet up, and talk to people. Talk to potential customers (just make up some hypothetical scenarios), repeat-rinse and things should start bubbling up.
The reason people jump on AI is because YC and other VCs favor it heavily. Got a genuine B2B idea/solution with a provable track record? Nice but not for YC/VCs.
An invoice passed my desk one day and i asked why we're paying this 30% fee to this company to get us money.
Don't try to come up with an "idea."
Look at companies already operating and think to yourself, "Meh, I could do that." and then do it.
Especially relevant if you’re in a market they aren’t.
Try talking to prospective customers. Understand what challenges they have and how you can address them.
The idea is the consequence of noticing that there is a problem; a gap between a current state and a desired state, and thinking about closing that gap. In other words, starting with a problem is more conductive to finding ideas than focusing on finding ideas.
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 like beverages, snacks, clothes, cars, phones, laptops, languages, frameworks, etc? It tells you the importance of market, distribution, and a bunch of things other than code.
You probably will not find a worthwhile project outside of your area of expertise. The market for "a guy who can code built a software for your industry" is pretty saturated now.
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.
You just have to shovel a lot of shit and eventually something will stick.
I usually try to solve my own problem.
E.g. I use/used Google App Engine (GAE)[1] a lot. When Google deprecated the GUI, I found it inconveniencing using the CLI. Secondly, there was no GUI for the Datastore Emulator. So, I set out to build something for both of them [2] and then decided to put it out there for others.
Along the line, it turned out that Google didn't support using one of their tools "dev_appserver.py" for building Python 3 Apps on Windows and so I also built a patch for it [3]
1) https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard
2) https://nocommandline.com
3) https://github.com/NoCommandLine/dev_appserver-python3-windo...
Reduce frictions, it is usually unsexy problems
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
Honestly, the idea is less important...execution and marketing is what determines success.
Checkout
indiehackers.com
for lots of stories/ideas on this topic.