Don't over think. Just start building anything that you feel could be useful to someone.

Don't fall in love with the idea. The idea you start with will never be the idea when you are successful. It will evolve or likely you will pivot to another related idea. Facebook today isn't what it started with. Flickr and Slack started as gaming companies. Google today is very different from what they started with.

It would help if you pick a good space. Ideally something which you know about, is big enough that there would be enough users.

And make sure you enjoy the process of going for it. If you set out with a sole goal to get rich and get famous, it can be very demotivating when things are not going your way.

I've seen people take the advice of "build something that could be useful to someone" the wrong way so many times. That "someone" shouldn't be an abstract, hypothetical customer but a group of people that contains someone you intimately know, such as a close friend, partner or yourself. I think "build something that would be useful to someone that you personally know, and many others like them" is a much more concrete way to think about the problem, and will enable you to achieve success with high probability.

(Just as a disclaimer, I started earning enough income from side projects for both my wife and myself to quit our full-time jobs about a year ago and start a family, but we're nowhere near the multi-millions in yearly profit that OP or bootstrapper10x are.)

This is excellent advice. You should know and understand who your customer are. Otherwise you won't even know what to build. Or you will build the wrong product and won't get any feedback.

Congrats on your journey and best of luck for the future!

Thanks mate, really appreciate the encouragement from someone who's made it.

Personally I have at least one business idea every day, probably due to some neuro-divergence issues. The problem is determining which are worth pursuing.

By their own admission, OP's 20+ ideas didn't work.

You only need one, it just has to be the right one :)

Snark aside, I guess receptivity to novelty is critical when pivoting. At that point, though, the pivot should be based on data. Creativity is still required, constrained by the data. I believe that's more amenable to being 'engineered' rather than just waiting for the muse to arrive.

I have a friend who made a project out of brainstorming 5 project ideas every day. They had to be stuff he could realistically build (physically or with code). Sometimes he would riff off a single idea - some problem he wanted solved. Other times he just sort of free associated.

He said it was hard at first, but it got easier over time. His ideas didn’t dry up. They multiplied.

A couple of years ago I started writing down ideas whenever they popped into my head. Didn't really make a conscious effort to brainstorm them or anything, but after a while they start becoming a frequent thing. I probably get a couple a week and now have a really long list of things. Some are obviously bad, others require too much outside knowledge or equipment I don't have, but maybe 10-20% are promising and doable by me.

Honestly the hardest thing is picking one thing to focus on for an extended amount of time. It's tempting to prototype something and then get excited by the next idea and never fully finish what you were working on. I think this is just part of how humans are. I know a guy who worked on rockets and says it got boring after a couple of years.

Nothing beats just getting down and building something end to end. As you do it more and more, you get better and faster.

I just came up with an analogy of trying to be successful at startup: Imagine someone who is just born in prehistoric rugged terrain who wants to reach some magical place. You don't know even how to crawl. There is some food and clues all over the place about how to reach the magical place. You have a magic button which can take you to slave house (corporate life). You could potentially come back from Corporate life to the startup life, but you would be bruised and would have picked bad skills which you know needs to forget.

You immediate focus should be gaining skills and pace. You will start by learning to crawl, walk, jump, climb, track your path, get better instincts, find food, look for clues, follow clues.

With more tries, you will get better at these. You will be better at navigating the terrain. You will get better heuristics which will determine your success.

Many time either people looking for a magic solution. This is equivalent to someone in this situation thinking if they can roll downhill and hope to be within crawling space of the magical space. It doesn't work that way. Some people do get lucky but most don't.

Any many times people are procrastinating. Which is like someone waiting at the edge of this magical world figuring out whether to make a plunge.

Just get started. You will figure out along the way. Make sure you have a good plan on health and finances!

> You immediate focus should be gaining skills and pace. You will start by learning to crawl, walk, jump, climb, track your path, get better instincts, find food, look for clues, follow clues.

RE my earlier question I’d really appreciate it if you could provide more insight into this.

So far I’ve been building MVPs in Django ( quick and easy) CRUD mainly, trying to improve copy writing, building better communication skills ( being more succinct), learning about SEO ( evergreen for marketing) and building paid marketing campaigns through FB. What else would you suggest?

I feel that it's better to learn skills as a part of getting traction vs try to acquire skills in vacuum.

So have a razor sharp focus on building and adoption. If things are going great then cool. If not, introspect and seek advice till you figure out how to make progress. You will acquire skills along the way.

There is no magic bullet. Naval said that for success you need Product, Market, Founder fit. I would suggest go through his podcast "How to get rich".

Thanks, that's a helpful analogy. I appreciate you taking the time to comment in this thread, your posts have been really informative/useful.

I spent years and years in the "I just need a good idea" rut. In reality they are everywhere. Every spreadsheet sitting on a company computer, doing some work no other system will do, is a potential SaaS niche.

It does help to elevate your exposure to industries and companies. Go to trade shows for your hobbies, learn their pain points. Consider switching jobs more frequently, or find some work at a consulting firm which can get you on a different contract every few months. Seeing the inside of more companies will give you more exposure and will help you see where they struggle.

Working on an idea (even a bad one!), doing the deep dive, will result in logical branches out to other ideas. You need to work on your execution anyway, because the best idea in the world won't take you far if you fail to deliver.

Since I started trying to build my ideas, I find that I have far more than I could possibly build myself.

You sound like you might think ideas have to be innovative but go look at how many CRM solutions are out there. CMS. Email marketing automation. Etc.

None of them are perfect. None of them can satisfy every single potential customer. You can build yet another one to satisfy some small unhappy segment of the huge market.