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Comment by bkovacev | Hacker News Reader

In a sea of startups/products, where everything feels as if it is already created - how does one come up with a product idea?

I feel that every problem I try to tackle is not a real problem. It’s a vitamin and not an ibuprofen. The real problems already have a solution - which means that I’d need to spend a few years and a few hundred thousand dollars to just get a chance to maybe make a profitable product.

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Rarely does someone come up with a solution in a domain space they know nothing about — it happens sometimes but still rare. Don’t forget that business is ultimately just selling a solution to a problem. This is very simplified but my thoughts: Find an interesting niche domain or area of interest, dive deeply and learn about the problems and challenges, find vendors and individuals in that domain and talk to them about their problems, research some solutions, create landing pages and validate some of the ideas and solutions you come up with, get a nice customer pipeline who will pay you real money for a solution, build the solution and ship the solution, profit off that solution.

I agree with your vitamin vs painkiller analogy.

There are successful products that started catering to a finite set of audience and still making a lot of money.

For example, one from my list is ChurchCo making $45K/month just by doing websites for Churches. Can you believe?

So, just by picking unique features and niching down the audience, you can still place a safe bet without spending a few years and hundreds of dollars.

Agreed

"There’s only two ways I know of to make money: bundling and unbundling." - Barksdale

https://hbr.org/2014/06/how-to-succeed-in-business-by-bundli...

ChurchCo is just an unbundling of Squarespace it seems like with a specific niche. I guess we've reached the point where Squarespace is now big enough, with so much configuration options, that it's confusing for people who "Just want a good looking church website".

Small fish in a huge market seems like a great strategy.

Maybe create something of value first.

If you came up with a transporter you could make trillions in the shipping industry.

If you are part of a small group who knows the person who created a transporter you can be the first setting up services around that and make billions.

If you are the last person to discover you have to beat everyone before or discover something new.

If Zuckerberg said that because myspace existed, where would he be?

Perfect example. There couldn't be a better example.

> I feel that every problem I try to tackle is not a real problem. It’s a vitamin and not an ibuprofen.

Maybe you should push forward with the problems you want to tackle. Vitamins sell. A lot.

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