How to find these boring problems? Every time I look at a boring problem in tech there is a pretty okayish solution, so I'm discouraged to even try to make something, as I know that okayish solution will be even better when I get mine to work.
Congratulations. It means your ideas are good and there is a proven market for them (assuming the solutions you find are generating revenue).
The fallacy that “there already is a product” out there doing something and as such you shouldnt would imply that we’d all wear identically looking jeans and there would be one car design and one type of phone.
Differentiate a bit. The only questions to answer are: can you execute on your idea, is there a market large enough to achieve your target revenue and is it overcrowded?
Really, just market and sell adequately enough to grab the share of the market that you need is all it comes down to. Your product might even be a worse copy of an established competitor and this still holds true.
It's so rarely about more or different features, better UX, or innovative twists on ideas, and so often about just getting in front of the customer in the right place at the right time.
Take one of those ideas. Make a site that reviews all the current competitors in the market.
Put the one with the best existing seo strategy in first place.
Contact them and let them know and ask that they link to it, offer to write a guest blog post about how you reviewed every tool in the space and this one came out on top, and why.
Share the site all over where you can find people talking about the niche.
if the niche is not too big, this will often get you ranking for that term. Google loves “best ___ in 2023” content.
You are building a traffic source.
Then you can build a product and put your product in 1st place or even above the list entirely. Write a blog post about how you took the best of the other tool you reviewed and created the perfect tool for <certain persona>.
Ok, end riff, i have no idea if that will work but it seems repeatable and not too difficult. It really is all about getting traffic.
- Gitbook.io doesn't support i18n well. Not SEO friendly and not language detector. - Readme.io is too expensive for just product docs. - Hosting with NextJS etc.. is a pain if you need to support i18n and edit content using markdown.
I had to build out a Next app last year with a seamless looking blog and docs site. I struggled to find real solutions, so I ended up getting in touch with Marco from Plausible to get some advice. He helped me to figure out their stack, and I replicated it to my project. I released a dope next app with a markdown powered blog and docs site that looked amazing.
I’m working on releasing a free cli tool for frontend devs based off this work. I’d love some feedback and watches on GitHub if anyone is interested. Link is in my bio.
SHOW HN and IH coming soon :)
Yeah, I have a few hypothesis that I am going to prove using the Elegant tool that I’m working on.
The first hypothesis is that I’m going to use Elegant itself to scaffold out the documentation. So when the domain is live, Elegant will be ready for beta testing. I hope to get some content up on the domain this week!
Thanks for pointing this out.
We are working on multiple aspects of the products that should cover a lot of this (improved i18n, SEO, faster rendering)!
Would love to get your feedback on what you would like to see improved exactly on our SEO friendliness and i18n support. We have an open GitHub community for feedback; https://github.com/GitbookIO/community/discussions
And for anyone, if you are interested in building a "A SaaS to host product guides ", we are hiring engineers/designers/builders: https://jobs.gitbook.com/ :)
Keep making things, iterating, grinding away.
Some things stick, some things don't.
You network and grow your business along the way.
That's the boring journey, but the reality for most of us.