What are actual ways of product idea generation?
I know about the usual working in an industry for half your life and then go and make a product around it when you are in your 40s trying to juggle your back pain, family time and startup pain side by side.
But is that the only legit way?
I have heard about opening a service agency and then see what problems are being repeated, the problem with that is you have to start from Upwork or Fiverr and over there you just get way too broad products to build that you don’t really build any expertise in any area of sorts.
Another I have read about is copying a feature or two from a big competitor and then do that really well, never really tried that though.
Any one got any other strategies? that they have actually seen work not just theories.
Personally, all of my ideas have come from trying to do something and not finding a tool that does it in a way I want. That can spark the idea but how you structure it still depends on a deep product sense that is hard to build.
I’m working on Mirroi these days and the idea came to me a year ago when I was at Ertiqah and my co-founder was pushing me to plug our product in as many Reddit threads as I could. He set an arbitrary target of 20 comments per day. I ended up automating that whole thing using AppScript + f5bot + Google sheets. There were tools for this but none allowed customizing the prompts or selecting exactly which subs you wanna listen to with what keywords, and certainly did not improve overtime. I’m turning this into Mirroi now with a much more extended feature set.
These days, most of my product ideas start as tools for internal use. For example, I’m building a help center for all our products because the existing help centers have too many features I don’t need. I want a help center that is a single AI agent with an ability to escalate to human input. Plain and simple. I don’t want elaborate ticketing systems with delegation and so on. To add some spice, I’m building it on RLM rather than RAG. If it works, I’ll launch it.
With vibe coding, you could be working on at least 2-3 such ideas in parallel. Anything which shows promise, ship it. Ask questions later.
So I should just start with ideas in my head, approach the target customers and then iterate from there?
I say this because I have read online that only people who have faced that problem themselves or have been in the industry for so long should start a business.
My source of ideas are really random tbh its either me seeing a few people complain about it or they just pop in my head.
Yea iteration is the best way to learn. All theories about finding good product ideas are for people who are in the process of iteration, not before it. Just keep a short release deadline, i.e., give yourself maximum 2 weeks to ship. And then iterate.