Where to find ideas ?

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I really think that the most important and critical part of founding successful startups is the idea-finding and validation part. The execution needs to be perfect too, but only when you find the "good" Idea.

💡 The only good idea 

Here is how you get to the “good” idea :

Step 1: Generate multiple ideas e.g. 30 ideas —> There are several methods to do so (Brainstorming, observing trends, ready-to-use ideas… ).

Step 2: Navigate and filter your ideas. Make a shortlist of 4 to 5 ideas.

Step 3: Pick an idea and start validating it. If you fail, go back to Step 2.

If none of your shortlist’s ideas get validated, go back to Step 1.

Today, we dig deep into Step 1 and Step 2.

Step 3 will be discussed in the next release.

🧭 How to navigate ideas?

Three aspects that you need to keep in mind while navigating ideas, which will define the “good” one: Product/ founder fit, your selling price, and your type of customer.

This is my take on defining a good idea for myself

• Product/ founder fit: This can be defined by your interests, as it shows the compatibility between you as a founder and your idea.

• Price points: What is your end goal? how much earning do you want to achieve?

• Customer type: Choosing the right sort of consumer to deal with is an important step in your path. This decision has a variety of implications, including the amount you may charge, the number of clients required to meet your monthly goal, and the length of the sales process.

For a deep dive, here is a video from Rob Walling: B2C vs B2B

Before moving forward with this article, take a moment to think about these three aspects. Also, feel free to reach out to me by simply replying to this email, So we can have a discussion about your interests, your final earning goal, your pricing points, and your type of customer.

🧲 Where to find ideas

There are several ways to deal with this. You can be looking into ready-to-use ideas, try the alternative funnel or micro-SaaS marketplaces

Ready-to-use ideas:

You can find some on these platforms:

• Nugget.one: There are multiple ideas here, where most of the time the user addressing the problem is also detailing the issue and suggesting a way to fix it. Although the website has not been updated for 2 years, but the ideas are still exclusive and are definitely not outdated.

• Microconf: Rob Walling is an expert in the field, he selects some ideas and gives some insights, which helps guide on how to navigate them.

• Twitterbot: This is really cool as you can find directly some prospects asking for products, that they are willing to pay for. This means that some validation has been already done.

There are also Newsletters that dump ideas into your inbox:

• Microsaasidea

• Softwareideas

The alternative funnel

Now let's say you want to go through a completely different funnel, which is "alternatives". An alternative solution usually serves the same purpose or performs similar functions as the original SaaS, but somehow it better meets some specific needs or requirements.

These are the things that you could be looking into to come up with alternatives:

We will be calling this List A

Let's do the exercise together :

First of all choose a software that you like or best fits your product-fit e.g. Microsoft Teams

Then, download a keyword tool like "Keywords everywhere" and start looking for stuff like :

Once you document the flaws of Microsoft Teams into a list called List B,

Go check these three websites :

• Capterra

• G2 

• Trust Radius 

and extract all the competitors of Microsoft Teams in a List C

Finally, you compare List C with both of A and B Lists. You will most likely come up with a couple of things not touched in A and B that you can combine and put into a software. I summarized the whole process into the following graph

Micro-SaaS marketplaces:

Micro-SaaS is easier than SaaS. It will spare you the extra hustle of advertising, SEO, hosting etc ... It is about building plugins and add-ons, directly into the platform, so your only competition is ranking up in the software marketplace.

These are 68 Marketplaces for which you could create plugins and/or add-ons: Rocketgems

Bonus:

• Matterport is not mentioned in the marketplaces, but this is really a gem as it has a big following, a new marketplace, a niched down business and most importantly only three micro-SaaS inside, so there is a big room for innovation.

• People that did it with micro-SaaS and why is it important

📑 Conclusion

Can you do me a favor? Don’t just read this article, you need to get to work! Write down your “Filters” :

• Product/founder fit

• Type of customer

• Pricing point

Choose a way to find ideas:

• Ready-to-use

• Alternatives

• Micro-SaaS

Your best chance is to combine everything together, so look into ideas to get inspired, check marketplaces for micro-SaaS, and run lists. What if there is a piece of software that can generate ideas and do all of this work 🤔? I would definitely buy it!

You can ask me any questions or show me your lists and ideas by replying to this email.

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