# How To Actually Find Profitable Software Ideas

Channel: Healthy Developer
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIZ_MXutC0o
Duration: 14 min
Language: English
Words: 2502
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/pIZ_MXutC0o

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[0:00] but you are going to have some people who are going to respond and they're going to tell you what their painful problem [Music] is are you sick of grinding away at your Tech job starting to think about building a software product so you can work for yourself well before you take the plunge be careful that you don't make the same mistakes that I did have you ever seen the show Shark Tank probably bunch of Rich VCS investors watching people pitch their latest big business idea and deciding if they're going to fund it or give them money and whether they give them money or not is based on whether they think it's really

[0:47] a profitable business idea well when watching that show you might think it's your job to come up with a brilliant business idea but if you just wait around for an idea to strike that waiting could take forever I personally tried to start up three software companies over my career and the first two failed badly I also thought my ideas were good enough but I was going about starting the company the completely wrong way it doesn't matter how good you think your idea is what matters is how painful is the problem that it solves for the the customer so in this episode I'm going to share a simple process that

[1:34] you can use to find people who have a real problem they want solved that they're willing to pay money [Music]

[1:52] for so the first thing to do before you even think about starting a software product building it doing something on your own is to select a market that you want to build a product in there's a website called Ibis world I use this with some of my career coaching clients to help them with finding markets that they want to work in but you can also use this website it's got a bunch of data in it based on I think it's the IRS in the United States but there's a giant list of all kinds of Industries different markets you know Health Care education disposal Services Tech the

[2:31] airline industry there's a much larger set of Industries than you might even be aware of but before you do anything else you want to basically identify a few different industries that you think there might be people who have problems in that you could build a small software product for to solve next you want to figure out how do I contact these people if for example you thought you know what I want to help let's say audio Engineers who are recording you know music for movies with problems they have and see if there's some little software product or solution I could build to make some money helping them with the problem they

[3:12] have well you need to find a way to find those people and talk to them to find the problems and the way that I do this today with my own business and a lot of people do is just use chat GPT basically just ask chat GPT hey where can I find online or in person people who work in audio engineering and they're in the film industry see what it comes up with it's often going to tell you you know Facebook groups Reddit LinkedIn Twitter maybe Trad mags there's going to be a variety of places but you're going to have to then go there and find these

[3:52] people so you can actually find what their biggest problems are and I should mention this set of questions I'm about to tell you in a moment here is based off of a man named D danne Maxwell um he wrote a book called start from zero you can look them up I'll put a link in the description so I I didn't come up with this I use this with other people just as part of what I do to try to help people if they're considering starting a software company but the next thing that you need to do is you need to use you know whatever features of that platform

[4:24] again let's say it's LinkedIn or Reddit or Twitter or whatever and once you find people through chat GPT through searching through whatever means that are in that market that you might want to help them with a problem you want to send them an email or send them a DM and basically just say hey I'm researching problems people have let's say again in the audio engineering industry or in the healthc care industry and I noticed you work in this industry would you be comfortable telling me what your most painful and persistent problem is and you're going to contact let's say 20 to a 100 different people and a lot

[5:05] of them are going to ignore you they're not going to respond but you are going to have some people who are going to respond and they're going to tell you what their painful problem is now one of the mistakes I made in my earlier first two startups is when I asked that question or I started this conversation or this way of finding you know if my business ideas were good or not I sort of pck the solution that I had the software product I wanted to build the thing I wanted to solve to them first and you know if you really want to start a business and be successful it's really

[5:40] important that you actually solve a real problem that your customer has that you didn't kind of trick them into saying they have you this has to be an authentic problem I talked about in one of my earlier episodes about why programmers specifically we can fail to start software projects or or software companies if we try to do it ourselves and this is one of the biggest reasons but once those people get back to you the ones that do you're going to want to then follow up and just say hey uh I'm thinking about building a product to tr try to solve that specific problem would you be okay with meeting with me you

[6:20] know and you could say would you be comfortable however you want to word it but you know would would you be willing to meet with me for a 15minute conversation or a half hour conversation or an hour conversation where I can ask you five questions to just get a little bit more info and make sure that whatever I build solves problems that people like you are having now again let's say 10 people got back to you you send that follow-up email that follow-up DM and and you ask to meet with them there's only a certain percentage of those people who are going to take the time to do it some of the

[6:52] others are going to just ignore you they're not going to be interested they don't want to participate but once you do get some people that you can talk to you know it could be over Zoom it could be over a phone call you want to ask them five questions and again this comes from Dane Maxwell I didn't come up with this on my own so when you start the call whether it's phone call Zoom however you meet them you know you say hello and then you want to remind them hey you know when I sent you that DM or I sent you that email you said your most

[7:21] painful and persistent problem was X and just make sure that they agree oh yeah yeah that's what I said you know that you're talking about the same thing then the next question you want to ask is how are you going about solving it today you don't want to start a business if possible and I again learn this the hard way by offering some solution or some product for something they're not even doing because then they have to basically uh establish a new Behavior or do something they're not even doing today and I think you know I certainly do that changing habits and behavior is pretty hard but they're going to tell

[7:57] you oh yeah today when I have this problem I work around it this way or I get frustrated and I escape from it this way you know it depends on what their current solution is it might not even be a solution at all but this helps you understand the implications a little bit you know how are they working around it and speaking of implications the next question you want to ask them is well what happens when you don't solve this problem or what happens when the way that you solve this problem has to be the way you're working around it or the way you're you know not dealing with it

[8:30] today and this helps them get to think you know is this problem costing me money is it causing me stress is it preventing future opportunities because if it's not doing any of those things or something similar to that they're probably not going to be motivated enough to actually pay money if you were to come up with a solution and then you want to ask them hey if you had a magic wand and you could just wave that wand and suddenly a solution appeared for that problem how do you think that might work what would you like to see it do and here you're looking for an

[9:05] opportunity for the potential customer that you might build a product for to give you some ideas of you know what's important to them to feel like it's really truly a solution some ideas they might have of how they would like to see it solved considering what they can't do themselves this is all super important information because if you ever do build that software product you're going to want to make sure you know if you hear this consistently from enough people that you solve that problem in in that way and then the final question is if you had that solution available to you how much would it be worth to you what

[9:43] would you pay for it now I think people can get a little freaked out asking this question but hey at the end of the day if you're going to spend the next year two years 6 months however long trying to build a small software product of some sort to help a customer base you need to know that people are really willing to pay for it now can people say they're willing to pay for it and not actually pay for it sure a lot of this has to do with the problem how urgent it is but you'll be able to tell some in the conversations you need to get them

[10:15] to say you know I'd pay a 100 bucks a month for that or $25 a month or I'd pay you know a couple grand for that problem to be solved and just get some sort of idea now you're eventually going to have to figure out is that enough money to make it worth worth your while and that's the last step once you've had these interviews with people and you know you want to shoot for this is just an arbitrary number but let's say 15 to 25 people in this market that you're considering have this actual conversation with you know get through that many of these conversations you're

[10:49] looking for a pattern a consistent pattern where they tell you over and over again yeah I'm really frustrated with this it's it's got a lot of implications that frustrate me you know here's what I got to do to work around it and here's what I'd pay for it and they might all tell you different amounts they'd pay for it different ways they'd like to see it solved but you know if you talk to let's say 25 people and 20 of them have a very similar pretty much the same problem and only five of them have some you know other problem in the space that you're talking

[11:19] to them in that might be really worth exploring now the next thing you need to do is you need to figure out how big is this Market you know how many people are in it if they're going to pay me how many you know people would I how many of these would I have to sell or how many subscriptions would I have have to you know sell per month let's say again this gets into pricing and I've talked about you know pricing your products and services in some earlier episodes but there's additional stuff you're going to need to do now that you have this information to see if it's a worthwhile

[11:50] business but the important thing is as far as this episode you know coming up with the idea you didn't come up with the idea you found found the idea by talking to people and having them tell you directly what their biggest problem is now you can decide after this that you don't want to pursue it but at least you aren't kind of you know poisoning the well so to speak by coming to a potential customer with hey I've got this product idea already what do you think because you know I did that earlier again in my career there's two different startups I did this with and I

[12:25] kind of brought up the solution I was thinking about without even naming the name of it a little bit in the conversation in a way that it just narrowed the focus and I kind of got false positives and thought that this business idea was better than it was so it's really important if you're really going to you know spend your hard-earned time and money starting up a little software company you don't have these conversations in a way that tricks you into thinking your idea is good and it truly is their idea so are you considering starting a software Product Company yourself do you already have some ideas have you validated them yet

[13:03] have you talked to your customers and asked them openly about what problems that you theorize your product's going to solve are exist and see if that's something that's on their mind that they're really thinking about you know what's the things that would hold you back from going about finding a business idea this way and what are some of the problems you see with this approach leave me some comments and let me know about it until next time thanks

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