Day #16: Ideating once again

In yesterdays issue I said I would map the journey / stages of building a business / being a founder and make a list of problems I’ve faced in different stages.

That is what we’re exactly doing today.

First off, stages of building a business in my experience and from my observations:

The very first step is Ideating. You make an observation (notice an opportunity or problem) and create a hypothesis on how to solve the problem or take advantage of the opportunity.

After that comes Validating. Testing your hypothesis. Usually involves creating a simple version of your product called a Minimum Viable Product and doing outbound sales to get first customers.

Right after Validating comes Growing. After getting some of your first sales through outbound, you know you have something people are willing to pay. At this point, you start improving your product and look for ways to attract customers through inbound channels.

I’ve only gotten up to the growth stage so far, my insights on the remaining two are limited.

So for the sake of our goal, I’m going to first focus on the ideating stage since that is the stage with the most prospects that need help.

Then if I can’t build a successful tool / solution for problems of that stage, I will move on to the next stages.

Ideating

There are 2 facets to this stage:

When it comes to making an observation, usually founders have two choices:

• Observing a problem they personally have

  • Noticing things that frustrate you in your personal and professional life.

• Observing something other people need

  • Noticing things that frustrate people around you in their personal or professional.

In my experience, the biggest problem people face in this stage are the following:

• Finding patterns of pain points (I struggled with this, person X did too, person Y seems to as well)

• Picking the right problems (growing group of people experiencing it, pain being felt critically, experienced frequently, being a good-fit to build it, etc)

• Coming up with the right solution

• Not knowing how to build the product or not being able to build a simple version that takes a week to build

I don’t how I’d solve these problems with a product, most of them seem like a information problem rather than a product / tool problem.

Here are some potential solutions for finding problems:

• A tool that analyzes the product reviews and forums of your competitors and finds gaps in their products you could use to your advantage.

  • Could be sold to businesses in further stages as well.

• A tool that analyzes communities and forums to find people searching for products and gaps in the market.

Here are some potential solutions for picking the right problem:

• A tool where you can put in a problem you’re trying to solve and it gives you information / data about the market by scraping the internet.

  • How much and fast it’s growing

  • How critically the pain is felt

  • How much money is spent on the problem

  • How frequently it’s faced

  • Competitors building similar solutions

Here are some potential solutions for coming up with the right solution:

• A tool where you put in your solution and it shows you how the problem is being solved in the market right now

  • Scrapes data from the internet

• A tool where you enter your problem and it gives you a list of potential ways to solve it (powered by AI probably)

  • Plus you could enter criteria for a good idea and evaluate potential solutions based on criteria

• A tool where you enter solution ideas you have and the tool would rate each one based on a pre-determined set of criteria (complexity, cost, ROI, etc) and data it collected based from the internet.

Here are some potential solutions for building a simple solution:

• Templates of landing pages, pricing, sign-up forms, etc to help speed up the process of delivering an MVP.

I’m going with the idea of building a tool that analyzes the product reviews and forums of competitors and finds gaps in their products.

It’s a product I know I would use and pay for.

Tomorrow I’m going to come up with a simple way to build it in a few days then start executing and get our first $.

This is finally an idea I personally relate to.