Get an Idea

Today I'm going to ask you two important questions and then help you answer them. Why? Because far too many people skip this step and dive head first into the deep-end, only afterwards remembering they don't know how to swim.

My goal – don’t let you drown. And to keep from drowning you need an idea.

So here are my questions:

Do you have an idea for a product?
If so, are you right for that idea?

Throughout the course of today we're going to talk about how to identify what you truly care about, how to match your expertise to that passion, do your research, and then make sure all of that equals a product people will actually pay for.

But before we get that far, let's start with the second question because, honestly, this is one of the biggest mistakes you can make – chasing what sounds like a brilliant idea down a rabbit hole for days, weeks, or even months when you're not the right fit for it.

How many times have you thought "why didn't I think of that" when you see a new product hit the market? You're not alone. We've all hit ourselves over the head at some point for now being faster, smarter, or more motivated than the next big startup founder.

But even if you had thought of it first, you probably weren't the right person for that idea.

There's nothing special about Twitter. Especially when it started, it was a scaled down, feature-barren version of bigger, better social networks. Anyone could have made Twitter, but it only became popular because it had the right team and support at the time it was built.

Here's another example – I could dream up the world's greatest phone, solving every problem you can imagine that Android or iPhone devices have. But I've never built a phone, nor have I worked in the industry – me making a phone would be a catastrophic mistake.

Would building a phone be impossible? Maybe not, but I'm definitely not the right person to do it.

The same will be true for you and a lot of the ideas you have. There will be more than one that you look at and think, "dang, this is a good idea", but simply don't have the resources or experience needed to make it a reality.

Don't worry about it. There are plenty of good ideas out there – plenty of problems you can solve or ideas you can manifest as new products. Don't get hung up on one you're not the right person to pursue. Save it or sell it but don't build it.

What Do You Care About?

With that out of the way, let's dive into the first question. Do you have an idea?

If the answer is no, or if I just shattered your hopes and dreams and you need something new (sorry about that), there are three quick steps you can go through to find and validate a good idea for your product.

Remember, we're doing this quick – spend today working on this and no more. Don't stress out for days or weeks, worrying that it's the wrong idea. If it's a bad idea, no one will buy it and you can move on – you'll know soon enough.

To get started, we need to look at what you care about, then how the research supports your interests and finally what people actually want and need in that space.

Your Interests

Should you ONLY work on things you enjoy? Not necessarily, but if you have at least a passing interest in the industry for which your product will be used, you'll be much more successful than if you pick something you could not care less about.

So step one is to create a list of all the stuff you care about. What are you interested in? What do you do in your spare time? What kind of books do you enjoy reading?

Make a massive list of stuff. Don't worry about what's practical or marketable right now – just write down what you like. Aim to build a list of at least 50 different things you like. Go to a site like mindmup.com and create a Mind Map that links these ideas together if you want to organize it, but don't spend too much time trying to categorize. Just get them on the paper.

What Do You Want to See Changed?

Now, what really drives you crazy? What experiences in your life, whether they relate to the above list or not, do you want to see changed.

We all have them. Google's engineers created Gmail as a side project because existing email was so clunky and dull. Zuckerberg created Facebook because the existing social networks were an immature mess and he wanted something cleaner for communicating with his classmates (and later the world).

Don't worry about the actual solution right now – just focus on the problem itself. What drives you crazy and why is it such a pet peeve? Here are some examples to get you started:

Cluttered ads on websites
Sluggish or feature-barren apps
The cost of microtransactions in games
Digging through countless cruddy articles to source for school work

Try to think of at least 10 of these – more is okay, but make sure it's a decent sized list to get you started.

Where's Your Passion?

Through all of this, what we're driving towards is passion. Too many people focus first and foremost on what they are good at – hoping to leverage their skills and expertise to create something profitable.

But being good at something doesn't mean you care about it.

I'm good at a lot of things I don't particularly enjoy. Doesn’t mean I want to create a product around them. Don't make that mistake – it's boring.

Why bother if you're bored?

Stay true to yourself, focus on what you care about and forget the rest. The odds are you'll walk away from all this with more than one good idea. Awesome - you have a backup list.

Do Your Research

Notice how you don't have an actual idea yet?

Not a big deal – we are going to gather a few more important pieces of information before we get to that step, giving you more resources to make your decision.

When it comes to research, you want to answer two questions:

What does the market support?
What problems are people seeking answers to?

After all, if there isn't a big enough market for your product, why build it? If only a couple hundred people could ever need your software, it might be a fun project, but it won't be profitable. We need to make sure both are covered.

Market Support

The market supports some crazy stuff. Who would have thought that people would buy artisanal water en masse or that we could need (and support) dozens of Twitter clients – each of them doing almost exactly the same thing with a small unique twist.

But the market supports it and these guys make money (most of them anyways). So before going any further, let's look at which of your interests and pet peeves have markets big enough to support product ideas.

There are dozens of places you can look for this kind of data but we don't need a comprehensive market research study to tell us people care about our interests. We can just look online. Here's where:

TED Talks – TED talks are famous for connecting brilliant people in interesting roles with a large online (and live) audience to discuss topics important to our time. Some of these talks are stories, others are ideas, and others still are arguments for social change, but they are generally held by people at the forefront of their field and are a good place to see what is considered "important" in the here and now.
Mixergy Interviews – Mixergy interviews the best and brightest minds from the startup world (and others) to discuss everything from creating a business to past success (and failure) stories, and much more. The site offers more than 1200 interviews and 180 courses and while some are junk, a number of them will give you a good idea of what's trending here and now in the startup world.
Amazon Reviews – This is as simple as it gets. What are people buying right now on Amazon? Set a threshold and look for products that get at least that many reviews. Keep in mind that the average product receives reviews from only 1 in 1,000 buyers – so if you see a product with 1,000 reviews, assume upwards of a million sales. It doesn't mean you'll do the same, but it does mean there's an audience for it.
iTunes Reviews – The same holds true on iTunes. Are people downloading the crap out of a certain genre of podcast or information about certain topics from multiple podcasts? Look at the rankings and reviews on the iTunes store for podcasts, apps, movies, books – whatever best reflects the verticals in which you are doing research.
Alexa Rankings of Top Blogs – Alexa ranks the world's websites based on a bunch of third party factors. The bottom line though is that the lower the number, the more eyeballs a site gets. Look for blogs in your niche of choice that have an Alexa rating of 10,000 or lower – that's a good sign that people care enough to read about it and in turn possibly buy products related to it.
Forum Size – If your audience cares about the subject you're working on, they will gather together and complain about it. Look for forums where this is happening and tap into the conversations being held there. TheBiggestBoards.com is a useful tool for finding which sites have the most users and posts – look for ones that match your niche. This is where your audience is gathering.

What we need to know right now is whether there are enough people in these markets to buy what you might someday sell and whether they are already spending money in those markets. So we're gauging interest and capitalization.

If you find a ton of people talking about the same things as you and they are spending a LOT of money on products related to those topics, you're set.

Where Are People Asking the Most Questions?

Using the above research, you should be able to pare down your list of interests and pet peeves to a handful of potentially profitable markets.

Now, we want to find where people are actively looking for solutions to problems. What are the biggest and most frequent questions in these spaces? Are there multiple issues you can address? One big one?

Don't worry about whether other people are already solving the problems you find – right now we're just looking for problems and making a list.

This will help us gauge how urgent the market need is.

When it comes to a startup with a small (or non-existent) advertising budget, urgency is your best friend. If you solve a problem people have been struggling with for a long time (or do it better than the other guys), your product will practically sell itself.

Right now we're looking for those kinds of problems. Here's where to start your search:

Craigslist Gigs – Are people asking people to solve problems on Craigslist and pay for it? If someone is willing to pay someone any kind of fee to fix the problem you're also looking to fix, it's a good sign that your product will have buyers. Look for recurring gigs in multiple locations that show people aren't finding the automated tools that can do the job for them.
UpWork Projects – UpWork is a more formalized freelance network. There are others – Freelancer.com and Guru also offer the same type of services. You can search projects for free without logging in – see what kinds of jobs people are posting and how you can fix those problems more easily with software.
LinkedIn and Facebook Groups – For more business-focused discussions, turn to LinkedIn and for more personal conversations, Facebook. Both sites will guide you to see the most common questions and problems people have and the advice they give each other.
YouTube How-To Videos – Look for the most popular and frequently viewed videos in the how-to section of YouTube for your particular niche. Are people viewing problem solving videos tens of thousands of times? If so, this is an area of real opportunity.
New Technologies or Platforms – Anytime a new technology or platform hits the market and grows rapidly, there's room for someone to provide useful third party tools for it. Look at how many Twitter bots and clients there are now, or how many photo filtering and editing apps for Instagram and Pinterest. People want that extra bit of functionality that these apps or tools don’t offer out of the box – your product can provide it to them.
Common Searches in Google/Amazon – Finally, look at what people are searching for. Google doesn't provide data on their search traffic anymore, but you can circumvent that by using their AdWords Keyword Planner – a tool they provide to advertisers to estimate what it will cost to advertise with them. You'll need a free AdWords account to use it, but it's worth it. You can also view Google Trends to see what is trending and how it has risen or fallen over the last few months or years.

The Internet is a treasure trove of data – people are constantly complaining. If you can find the bulk of those complaints, your future customers will pretty much tell you exactly what they want you to build.

How easy is that?

The Inefficient Solution

At this point, you've narrowed down your list of interests and pet peeves to a handful of ideas that have a large enough market, the possibility of profit, and people out there actively looking for solutions to problems.

Anything on your list right now is a good idea, but there's one more step to help you build a product that will stand out as something truly special.

This is all about honesty. You're not reinventing the wheel here. Whatever you're making probably isn't unique or new or revolutionary.

Heck, new stuff tends to fail faster than tried and true ideas. If no one has ever done it before, why do you think that is?

So rather than looking for an angle that is 100% unique and stands out from all of your competitors in a way that will make you look like the smartest person in the room, let's go the slightly easier route.

Take what other people are already doing and do it better.

Apple has crafted a multi-billion-dollar business model on this – taking niche ideas and forward thinking technology that was ahead of its time and making it accessible to a larger audience.

There are solutions out there to almost any problem you can think of, but the vast majority of them are inefficient.

When you look at the problems you have or the pet peeves you have with existing solutions, ask yourself what you would do different. How would you do it better? Faster? Cheaper?

Make a list of what you would do that the current product doesn't and start thinking about ways that a new version of that software would look and operate if it was rebuilt from the ground up.

This is what your product is going to look like – it's going to be something that:

Interests you
Addresses a problem you hate
Has an active online market
Can be sold to an already spending audience
Solves a common problem or question
Does it all better than whatever's already out there

If your idea does those six things, you're ready to go. The next step is to make sure you have a good idea before investing in it.

The Hacked Solution

One of the more interesting things you'll find at this point in your research is that there are a lot of custom hacking solutions out there. This is where someone looked at the landscape and all the bullets you just listed above and thought "damn, I should hack all this stuff together".

There are real opportunities for your idea to do something just like this – here are some examples of extremely successful companies that have built their entire model on hacking existing tools together:

HubSpot – Hubspot doesn’t do any one thing better than the various tools it gathers together. There are better blogging platforms, better social media management tools, better analytics systems, and better CRMs, but none of them are integrated into ONE system that does it all in a single interface. Rather than trying to outdo the features of the tools it was cobbling together, HubSpot improved on the experience of using those tools. It's now a 9-figure public business and growing fast.
Zapier – Zapier's business model is quite literally to cobble together other tools. By tapping into the API of dozens of popular web apps, Zapier allows you to create custom "zaps" and send data or trigger actions between those apps. It solves a huge problem by using the tools already available in other systems and tying them together.
HootSuite – Logging into every social channel and posting manually? Not a chance. Any business or marketer with more than two channels to post to uses HootSuite (or one of its many imitators). Scheduling, multi-user access, and a dozen other features make it a must for social media posting.

There are a lot of jobs out there that use a spectrum of tools to accomplish a single goal. If you can create a product that combines those tools, creates something new that addresses all of them, or just makes an existing process more efficient, you could have a hit on your hands.

Validating Your Awesome Idea

This is the moment when you're full to the brim with energy – texting friends, writing furiously and daydreaming of yourself on the beach with attractive companions showering you in hundred dollar bills.

Snap out of it for a second – that surge of emotion when you think of the perfect idea is awesome, but it can blind you. A really good idea can be drowned out in enthusiasm to the point that you miss some glaring problems before the investment starts.

This is where we do our reality check and make sure all the data we just pulled (alone!) is actually accurate.

This is where you ask people, run it by friends and family, do some additional hands on research, and make sure your idea is as good in the minds of others as it is in yours.

Ask OTHER People

What's the one thing every step today has had in common? You did it all by yourself.

While this makes things super efficient, it can also lead to problems. You start to get biased and make decisions without getting them validated (or at least proofed) by someone who knows more than you.

And yes there are plenty of people out there who know A LOT more than you, so let's ask them what they think. Start with:

Survey the Market – Unless you have a big ass list of people you've gathered together that you can email, this will cost some money, but it's worth it if you're still not sure exactly how to tackle the idea you're forming. SurveyMonkey offers relatively affordable survey services to people you don't know and you can ask them as many questions as you want. You can also run polls on Facebook or join a bunch of groups and just start asking people for their thoughts.
Ask Friends and Family – Your immediate circle of friends and family are a good place to start as well, but don't let their opinion be the end all of your decision. They love you, but they don't always support you, and that's okay, but you should also learn when to ignore them and just keep hustling. Get a good consensus, some honest feedback, and a few ideas for what to do next.
Call Experts in the Field – Finally, you can reach out to experts in the field and ask them for their honest opinions. Interview someone who's built a product in the field you're looking to get into. This won't cost you anything except some confidence and a bit of time.

This stuff takes a bit of time, it might even cost a bit of money, and it can delay your decision on this somewhat, but trust me when I say it's 100% worth the extra effort. If you skip this step, you will undoubtedly regret when the first complaint comes in with an obvious statement that you didn't think of.

Don't proofread your own work and don't build a product out of an idea you haven't run by other people first.

What if Someone Steals It?

Some of you are wondering right now if sharing your brilliant idea with a bunch of people you don't really know is a good idea.

Don’t worry about it.

People are always concerned about their idea being stolen. Don't be. No one is going to steal your idea. Even if they were, if it was that easy to steal, it's not that good of an idea in the first place.

Your idea is unique to you, your experience, your passion, and your resources. If someone has exactly the same of all of those, good luck to them – think of something better. But seriously, it won't happen. Get their advice and use it wisely – you'll need it.

When to Ignore Advice

There's a reason I put this section towards the end. Good ideas die fast when someone you respect says horrible things about them. And sometimes they to it for no reason other than that they don’t understand what you are doing or why.

Ideally you're looking for feedback only from the people in your life who are most supportive of you.

The friends who think this is awesome. The family who love you and want to see you succeed. The experts who went through the same crucible and enable others to succeed with their advice.

But there are some people who will throw shade on any idea they didn't come up with on their own. They'll nitpick everything to death, point out where it could fail, or try to discourage you from even trying.

These people are poison – whether it's a best friend, a girlfriend or boyfriend, or one of your parents, avoid poisoning one of your best ideas.

If nine people tell you it's a winning idea and the tenth strikes out with a bucket of negative energy, step back and think on it. Don't let one person's negativity kill what you're building. Stay positive – you're going to need it.

Sleep On It

At this point, you should have a pretty clear idea of what you're going to build. You've stripped away all the "this would be cool" style ideas and narrowed down to the ones that have a real chance of making you some money while being interesting and fun to work on.

But don't move forward just yet.

Take a step back and wait another day. Tomorrow morning, look back at all of what you just put together and think about whether this is what you really want to invest in for the rest of the week.

Is this the right idea for you? A little bit of distance and some time to sleep on it never hurt.

This is where you ask the very first question we addressed one more time – is this the right idea for you? And if you've gotten some of the negative feedback we just talked about, give it some time to fade. Set aside everything you've just absorbed and come back at it fresh to determine if this is worth your investment.

This is the ONLY thing in this book I don't want you to rush through. Don't sit back and wait forever to make a decision, but don't rush into it either. Bad things happen with rushed ideas.

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