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One thing I will try doing soon is to look for job postings of companies, and then look what those companies are looking for, and what domain they're in. The theory is: maybe I can get product ideas 1) as spin-offs from their general mission, or 2) maybe I'd be able to replace their job posting with a product.

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When I first started consulting, I had an idea of specializing in automating business processes. It was something I had done before, and I really enjoyed it. However I ran into the problem of those that understood the potential had already employed a few full time devs, and those that didn't, also did not understand the potential. I reasoned that people who needed automation were hiring tons of people. So I searched job ads that looked close to what I thought an ideal customer might be as a way to generate leads.

It turned out to be a fairly low quality way to find leads. Random cold calling would have probably netted me the same conversion rate.

I have similar story: corporate experience in process design and implementation and moved to consulting with idea of using knowledge and connections. What I realized I have no way to sell to big business. And s.m.b. don't use erp, let alone bpmn. s.m.b are quite happy keeping notes in spreadsheets and smartphones. Most of the market for bpmn comes from regulation and certification e.g. ISO certification requires processes to be reproducible and documented (with appr. software) and the list goes on say if company goes public and all of that. No s.m.b has this requirement, so there's no marketing to them.

I used to do a variation of this by looking at project requests posted on RentACoder or other outsourcing sites and considering if there was a product idea there.

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