What to Do When You Have No Ideas – William Gant – MicroConf Starter 2019

0:00[Music] [Music] about four years ago I was in the same boat that a lot of urine I heard Rob talk about how he's got a whole notebook of ideas and I thought that was crazy and I want to say that that goes away and I want to show you how you probably have seen this a lot right you start writing you start trying to produce a piece of content and you completely freeze you watch the Microsoft Word cursor blink and you slowly panic as you realize you have no ideas does anybody ever felt like that yeah me too however I was able to fix this over time

0:56with a little bit of work and I realized a few things one of which was that I was looking at creativity backwards so I'll give it a little bit of background where I come from that'll explain it this is the logo for my podcast as an aside you'll note that nobody notices you screwed up your aspect ratio where you look like a conehead if you've got a big enough beard I just noticed that the other day and it's been that way for three and a half years and nobody cares so that's it's totally fine you'll also notice a couple other things one is is we don't really look like designers as a

1:32matter of fact we look like we're selling duck calls I do not own a black turtleneck a Macintosh computer or those square hipster glasses that are so cool those are considered to be necessary for creativity by a lot of people that's not really true they are real handy though if you want to start a blood-testing company that turns out to be fraudulent yeah that was a cheap shot sorry it's just who's just sitting there so when we started this podcast we basically went to a Mexican restaurant and drank two pitchers of margarita over a period of a couple of hours not going to say what kind of state our ideas were at the end

2:17but we didn't really come up with a lot of good ones I think there were 10 or 15 that's a lot of work for not a whole lot of reward our current state now is that we have approximately 250 ideas in our Kanban board and we have a weekly podcast so that is five years worth of content if we come up with no more ideas so how do we get from there to here well one thing we learned from the get-go is that creativity is not a stimulus it's a response and once you changed that part of the equation everything else gets easier so here's how you do that

3:00so you start google searching obviously you're gonna have to have a niche of some sort and you search for you know X sucks where X is some part of a thing that you're doing and I'll give an example I have a book on surviving whiteboard interviews so I started out going whiteboard interviews suck and I found lots of people that agree with me a surprising number of them on Hacker News as a matter of fact or I hate whiteboard interviews or why our whiteboard interviews and you just start you know typing that into Google and it'll give you all these options underneath the next thing you do is you

3:39get a free keyword tool I use keywords anywhere but what you want is something that just dumps stuff to the right these are alternative keywords for that topic write those down if any of those sound compelling and you kind of rinse and repeat after that start asking your audience about problems you know you have some people there that you can ask you could ask on Quora if you don't have an audience use somebody else's the idea here is to get a rough idea of the pain points around a certain thing and get going now you need to do this a few times on a few different subjects until

4:14you get five ideas that are not terrible they don't have to be great they just have to be like okay I'm not completely embarrassed to mention this that's all you need the next step is to start researching and research by creating and what I mean by this is you write long-form content you know long blog posts write an e-book do a podcast do a YouTube video those kinds of things skyscraper posts are also really good for this the idea here is that okay yes I can use this on my website but what this is really doing is it's giving you the price of entry for getting in front of an audience that can

4:53refine your ideas you'll be able to reuse this stuff later of course but that's what this is for initially once you're able to get in front of an audience you leverage that content for feedback relentlessly so you find user groups to speak in front of you find charities I speak regularly in front of a software school in Nashville that is nonprofit they love having me there they don't realize that their question and answer session at the end is my market research it's great now once you've done that a little bit the next step is to actually start using the feedback and you'll get a ton of stuff especially if

5:33you have questions and answer sessions your feedback that you get is how you refine your product idea or refine your content idea or refine whatever the thing is feedback is also really good for coming up with brand new ideas again you're in front of an audience this is how you get it into your pipeline essentially and sometimes people will hand you product ideas my book on whiteboard interviews some dude brought that up at coding school I don't even know the guys name and now I have a book I have a book deal with a press now because of that dude and I don't know who he is that's pretty amazing now when

6:11you get these ideas hang on to every last one of them sort them out you know later but don't ever throw an idea away even if it's complete crap you'll be surprised how frequently those ideas come back up and suddenly become very very useful now the last thing is obviously if you have an idea that has traction you need to be relentlessly X escalating on it and what I mean by that is is hey if you're solving a pain point for people get that in front of more people start getting more specificity start getting more details out of people you know pull ideas from other we'll see where their pain is get that

6:49out there and I talked a little bit faster than I thought that my southern drawl would let me do so we're already on the final thoughts but I got a few things here you will be creative eventually if you follow this process relentlessly creativity comes it won't be tomorrow but it might be in a year and it's it's really more of a thought process of how do I change my pipeline for getting creative you know creative ideas coming towards me instead of how do I go hunting for creative ideas your your hunt you know instead of hunting you're farming that works a lot better you'll need a lot of ideas so just

7:37because an idea doesn't necessarily fit what you're doing right now you still want to hang on to it you need short form content you need you know a little you know gimmicky crap that you put in emails you need stuff that hey this might make a good video or hey this might make a good conference talk you're gonna need a large variety of stuff and some of it you really can't foresee right now but it'll come up dumb ideas are some of the best ideas I had this stupid idea for a podcast episode that was called the seven deadly sins of programming right I threw that on the

8:08Kanban board it's sat there for a year one day I was kind of bored out of my mind decided to write an outline saw that one I was like okay this would be fun it won't be that hard wrote it it was one of our top downloaded episodes it was a completely stupid idea and I would thoroughly disavow it had it not worked you just never know so like the point there is that you don't really know how to evaluate an idea even though you think you do your audience evaluates the idea that's not your job now another thing is an audience of sufficient size will give you ideas you

8:47know micro comp is good proof for that by the way because the pitch for this talk came out of conversations I had with other micro comput Indies over the past three years so that's a real thing you should also keep the ability to write down ideas or record them you know I always keep a pad of paper by my bed I always have my phone I have some way of recording an idea now except for the restroom I haven't figured that one out and that may not be entirely sanitary but everywhere else you should be able to do that the idea here is don't lose something once you've got it because

9:21again you can feed it back into this loop and it can become