| Source | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cufn-fjnVCE |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kvyrvwva161apxpz4yatkqw9 |
| Readwise ID | 01kvyrvwva161apxpz4yatkqw9 |
| Date | 2024-11-25 |
| Author | Chris Raroque |
| Category | video |
| Cover image | https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Cufn-fjnVCE/sddefault.jpg |
welcome to the video if you’re new here my name is Chris and I build productivity apps and a common question I get in my comments and in the DMS is how did I come up with these ideas and how do I choose what to work on so I thought I’d make a quick video for anyone who’s struggling to come up with ideas or if you have a ton of ideas and you’re not sure what to work on this is the video for you I’m going to give you guys some real life examples from my own apps and I’m going to try to make this video as actionable as possible I will say that my advice slightly changes depending on the goals that you have some people want to build a billion- dollar company and raise a bunch of money and then other people just want to get better as a developer so depending
on your goals my answer slightly changes and I’ll be covering a wide range of these goals in this video let me start by sharing some of my goals just so you guys have that context most people have some sort of monetary goal and to an extent that’s true I do have a little bit of a monetary goal like I would love to just be able to make some revenue from my apps but my ultimate goal is to get better as a developer if you’ve seen any of my videos on my channel you probably know that that’s true most of the decisions I make and the problems that I tackle are for me to get better in some sort of way so let’s start with that goal in mind anyone has a goal
similar to me where they want to get better as a developer or if you just want to get started as a developer and you don’t have much experience here’s how I would approach it and here’s my advice first I would specifically choose problems that you’re actually passionate about that sounds really simple in theory but I will say that a lot of people that I’ve given this advice to have actually struggled a lot with that mainly because of what I call shiny object syndrome when you’re online like you’re seeing people posting on Twitter or on Tik Tok a lot of them are chasing very interesting problems or building things on type of H pped up Technologies
like AI or crypto and it’s very common to want to build something in that area just because it’s a shiny object you kind of want to chase that and what ends up happening is you pick problems with very shiny Solutions like AI but they’re not actually interesting to you and then you kind of get burnt out and give up Midway through but if you build with your pain points in mind then you are the first customer and you have a way higher chance of actually following through with it so that’s advice number one pick a problem that you’re genuinely interested in solving let’s take a look at one of my apps Mogul which is an app I never talk about on this channel which
I probably should Mogul is a personal CRM app and for those that don’t know what a personal CRM app is it’s basically a way for you to manage and track relationships like interactions and details about people a lot of people don’t know this but in college I was actually going to go into finance and Consulting when you’re in that industry there’s a ton of networking that you got to do so I was networking with a lot of recruiters and a lot of people at big companies I needed a way to track those relationships and those interactions and so I was using a Google sheet at the time and it kind of worked but it was really unenjoyable to was on my phone
and I was meeting like one or two people a day so this was a pretty high friction paino for me the first version of Mogul was a Google Sheets API wrapper that I built in Swift just so I can access that Google sheet and make it look really nice there was no database there was no signups just a very simple application that only I could use to easily add things to Google Sheets and then from there I kind of just iterated and then it became the Mogul that you see today it just started as a Google Sheets wrapper to solve my paino and my other apps Ellie and Luna also started in a very similar way there was a specific
pain point in my life that I needed to solve and I created these applications to solve that one pain point just for myself and then it kind of took off from there and that goes into my second piece of advice to keep the scope as small as possible and the reason for that is very similar to the first reason it’s so that it’s manageable and you have a way higher chance of not burning out and following through with it so looking at Mogul again I didn’t set out to build the Mogul that you see today with reminders Apple contacts Integrations none of that the scope was literally can I build this so I can have an easier time inputting things on my phone really
simple scope the database and everything that came months later once other people started asking if they could use it too so that’s my second piece of advice keep it as small as you possibly can and then expand as necessary okay so let’s say that you’re having trouble finding pain points my advice is actually to start practicing finding pain points some people naturally are very good at finding pain points for a lot of people you actually have to practice and really improve on that skill because it is a skill being able to identify these things here’s what I would do if you feel like you’re not good at this and you want to practice I would look at all the apps that you use use on a daily
basis or even physical devices to be honest just look at things you use on a daily basis and consciously think I could improve anything here like if I was in contact with the developers or the designers for this thing how would I change the workflow how would I improve it I am 99% sure that everyone can come up with at least one or two things in all the applications that they use that they would improve on and it could be something like oh I really wish this button was moved over here or I wish that they had a whole other feature if you keep practicing this and you’re very intentional about it you will start
getting good at it and then ideas are no longer the bottleneck anymore you’re going to have too many ideas and then you’re going to have to figure out how do you choose what to work on so again these things are really good if your goal is to learn and get better as a developer like my goal is let’s talk a little bit about monetary goals if your goal is to build up a side hustle and we’re talking like $1 to $2,000 a month of income my advice is to still solve problems that you personally face and again the reason is so you don’t get burnt out and you actually follow through if you’re facing a problem like this there is a very high chance that there’s other people that are facing
this problem and it actually doesn’t take that many users to build a product that generates $1 to $2,000 a month I know a lot of people who have made very Niche tools that focus on a problem for a very small subset of people that make like $5 to $110,000 a month I think the important part is to follow through and actually get that product to Market and start trying to get it in front of those people whose problem you’re actually solving so$ to $2,000 a month you can take that same advice that I was giving if you want to go a little bit higher to $5 to $10,000 a month where this is a more serious side project or even now just a lifestyle business business my
advice changes slightly I would still focus on pain points that you’re interested in again so you’re not burnt out focus on talking to users and figuring out is there enough people like you that also have that same pain point for like 10K a month you’re going to need a little bit bigger of a market segment to be able to do that in my opinion most projects can attain this even with very small niches but to make your life easier I still would confirm how hard of a job is marketing and getting in front of these people before you jump into any of those ideas if you want to Target a more serious business with really high Revenue $1 million a year and you want a lot of employees
this is the territory where I actually recommend doing a lot more research and you’re probably going to have to solve problems for other people my advice is to talk to users and you’re not going to only have to confirm that there’s enough people with the problem but more importantly that there is a very high intent to pay and a lot of the times when you’re in that territory of Revenue these people that are willing to pay are probably businesses that’s why when you see a lot of apps that make over a million dollar a year most of them are in the b ofb space they focus it on businesses and not on consumers so my advice is to talk to users research a lot really confirm that there is a
market there’s a high intent to pay before you jump into the problem but again this is only if your goal is specifically to make a ton of money and build like a really serious business but if you’re K with something smaller or lifestyle business you can definitely just focus on your own pain points but I would still do some research to figure out how big is this Market how much work is it going to be is it worth it for you to get into if you have a specific monetary goal in mind a lot of that advice is more on prioritization how to figure out which project to pursue if you’re still struggling to figure out some ideas even looking at your own life and your own pain points here’s some more things that I would try first which
I think is the easiest is to study existing companies especially very big companies and tools can you build a similar tool maybe taking one or two of their features but do it 10 times better and focus on a subset of their user base they’re making $10 billion and you take a tiny sliver easily that could be like $5 to $10,000 a month so here’s an example where this kind of happened for my app Mogul which again is a personal CRM app a lot of the apps in the space that my users were using before huge crms like Salesforce and HubSpot and these are billion doll companies a lot
of companies use them to power their sales and business and manage their customer relationships there’s a small niche of users who are actually using these tools for personal use and they’re not built for personal use they’re built for businesses and sales so as I was working on Mogul I kind of noticed this and I was like I obviously can’t compete with HubSpot in Salesforce but maybe if I focused on the personal side things and Integrations that they would never do like apple contacts for example and that’s actually what ended up happening and that’s what Mogul has become even though I have one1 100th of the features I have the right set of features it is so much better as a niche personal CRM
for them so that’s advice number one is look at existing incumbents especially billion- dooll companies figure out are there one or two features that I can maybe take and build upon or is there a niche audience that are using it in a way that it wasn’t intended to and can I make a more specific version that does it way better than the current tool very interesting way to get ideas and the market is semi validated by doing this the second way is to look at communities like Reddit and other forums they are a gold mine for ideas because a lot of
people use those forums to complain about existing products and problems or look for Alternatives another more personal example is for my budgeting app Luna I actually go on the subreddits of a lot of other budgeting apps to see what are users complaining about and a couple things that I saw and noticed which really influence the decision of my app a lot of these apps have very poor international support they either just didn’t support a lot of the currencies or if they did there were usually some issues like their UI wasn’t built to support nine digits which actually is very common in a lot of countries so after reading that I got into inspired and that’s why I’m going
the extra mile to do international support but I only got these ideas by looking at these communities and reading their pain points so that’s advice number two find these communities because it’s a gold mine for pain points and friction that users are having with existing Solutions so many great ideas out there the final piece of advice that I have it’s a little bit more general advice but it’s something that I wish someone told me early on it’s completely fine to work on very simple ideas or to work on things that are just a micro Improvement on something that already exists I think too many people get deterred because they feel like that’s
the easy way out and that’s a huge waste of time they should be focused on something massive but in my experience building is building if you’re taking the time to build something that improves the lives of other people and you’re putting it out there in the world that’s a huge win in my book I mean if you take a look at all my apps none of them are new ideas Mogul personal CRM app that has been done so many times so many businesses have failed trying to pursue this Ellie daily planning app there’s so many to-do lists in Daily planning apps out there and then Luna is a budgeting app there’s like a new budgeting app coming out every single day none of these apps are actually unique world changing ideas people still
use them for one reason or the other but most of the time they use it because it works better than the existing solutions for their workflow you might be surprised that other people would also switch to your app because it fits their workflow a little bit better billions of people in the world a lot of them have different workflows there’s a very high chance that it would resonate with other people feel like I’m rambling at this point but never feel like your idea is too small to summarize my advice no matter what goals you have focus on problems you’re genuinely interested in solving because you’ll have a higher chance of following through with it and maintaining momentum and then keep the scope as small as possible for as long
as possible and then just expand as needed if you have some monetary goals in mind you’re going to have to do a little bit more research to figure out is there a market and what is their intent to pay once you do that you’ll quickly figure out am I going to reach my goals with this idea but if the goal is to learn and to self-improve there is no idea that is too small I don’t know why I chose to film at this time this light is so bright but I hope this was helpful and if you guys found this interesting check out my Instagram and Tik Tok I post almost every other day about building productivity apps and obviously if you like this kind of content don’t forget to subscribe if there’s any other questions or any other topics you want me to cover feel free to comment below or DM me thank you guys so
much for taking the time to watch and I’ll see you guys in the next video