Building is cheap. Knowing what to build is where the goldmine is

Nowadays, the cost of building has reduced significantly. It takes considerably less time, money and expertise to bring an idea to life.

But having the ability to build is one thing. Knowing exactly what to build is another.

Thankfully, there are now many tools at our disposal we can use to identify ideas that are worthwhile pursuing.

Method 1: The copycat method

You have probably heard of the term "steal like an artist". Well, that applies in this context too. The copycat method entails either:

1. Taking a pre-existing product in a good market that has potential, improving it, and serving it to the same market.
2. Copying an existing and already successful business model and bringing it to a new market.

For option A, this heavily relies on your eye for identifying ideas with potential and your ability to actually improve them. However, you will be opting to compete in a potentially crowded market. My advice is to go read $100M by Alex Hormozi — the chapter called "Finding the Right Market: A Starving Crowd" — to understand what is considered a "good market".

Now, why I like option B is that there are clear signals that help you identify a business idea that is already successful and replicable. The perfect example is looking for problem spaces, business models and/or product types on fundraising or VC databases that are more recently and consistently receiving funding. Focus on areas that are raising lots of Series A funding rounds, as these are the companies that have passed the seed stage and been identified by investors as having proven product-market fit.

A good way to do this is to build a scraper that regularly searches for companies receiving funding, stores them, and groups them by problem space.

Method 2: Social listening

What better way to find good business ideas than to listen to people who are actually going through the pain? Reddit is my favourite tool for listening to the authentic, unfiltered pains of everyday people and turning them into business ideas (usually while doomscrolling AITA threads). The trick is doing it at scale instead of relying on whatever happens to cross your feed. A good way to do this is to build a scraper that mines Reddit for recurring complaints and unmet needs, then clusters those pains into problem spaces ranked by how often they come up and how willing people are to pay.

Method 3: Look at problems around you

This method does not require you to use any software, but it does require you to be more observant of the world around you. There are many problems that you, or people in your life, face that could be solved by software. This is more of an art than a skill, as not all problems should be solved by software. But honestly, when in doubt, try it out. Interview people who face the problem before committing to a big build. Use the social listening method to validate or invalidate your hypothesis. And if you feel conviction, then go for it. Put it in front of people ASAP. Worst case, it just becomes a passion project you can add to your portfolio.