22min chapter

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How To Generate Startup Ideas. The Big Talk with John Rush.

The Indie Startup Podcast

CHAPTER

Generating Startup Ideas from Social Insights

This chapter explores effective strategies for generating startup ideas by leveraging complaints and pain points identified on social media. It emphasizes the importance of engaging with potential users for validation and refining concepts based on real-time feedback. Additionally, it highlights innovative approaches to discovering market opportunities, including keyword research and localized adaptations of successful applications.

00:00
Speaker 1
So number one
Speaker 2
way to find a good idea. So today you're going to discuss on the big ideas, right? I
Speaker 1
think B2C has a lot of potential but people have to be aware that there is high risk. So the best way to come the idea is to actually see what people can complain about and all for solution right away because usually people complain about things in social media or edits or blogs or in different places where there is a reply place, there's a comment section. And you can offer solution and see where other people say, yeah, that's a good solution or you get the right for this for the solution. And I think that's underestimated. So almost every day I see ideas like that on Twitter and I don't see people really taking action on those ideas. That's why I think because people are not walking with their eyes open. I think people are always having some boss suit happening they're to have and when they consume something on the, they are consuming in a way that they don't notice things. You know that video where there are people playing Boston ball and then there's monkey, a gorilla, and you don't see gorilla because you're counting the monkeys, but not the monkeys, but the people, the players. And same here. And in my case, I'm always hunting for ideas. That's when I see ideas everywhere and in such places too. And I think people who don't have ideas, they really have to turn their brain into a hunting mount and keep the brain in that for a while, spend weeks just looking for those ideas. They should not stop on first idea they found. They should just exercise that skill for a long time, build up long list. Or
Speaker 2
like horror in real life?
Speaker 1
Both. Like in old days I would do real life. Because in old days I wouldn't be on social media. But now social media is a good place for people to do everything there. So you can do social media. So basically to wrap this up, I think the single best way to find an idea is to see that people complain about something. then offer solution right there so that you validate whether the person who complains thinks it's a good solution. And if they say it's a good solution, you say, I will build this. And you go and build it. Some people do that. I saw a few cases like that on Twitter. But usually I see myself doing that. Like, somebody about often about a directory, for example. And they say, I'm going to build it. And I build it.
Speaker 2
Oh yeah. Tell us a story, an example, what you saw, what you offered, what you built. Yeah.
Speaker 1
So there was one once like a bongert with about open source solutions and alternatives. And people were saying that it would be great. They were saying that it's a problem that there are so many alternatives to pay tools but people don't know them and I felt like I have to build a website that offers alternatives to other source tools and I built that and it was the same with MVP users where I saw a tweet where people were saying do you know anyone who builds MVPs on a fixed price and then I saw a lot of people in reply sections saying that I'm looking for that person too, I'm looking for that person too. And then I saw people say that I'm that person, I'm that person. And suddenly you see the whole marketplace in one week. And then it makes so much sense to actually build directory. And if you're a forest, like I was, I built directory and they released right away within a few hours. And that was not civil, like remarkable. And people reacted to that and it was so fast after the problem and the solution. And it went viral. You wouldn't go viral if I knew it in a random day, it went viral that day. And so after
Speaker 2
I found the tweets, then I made a reply over the solution and people say, yes, that would be perfect. I want that. Okay. So it takes you a few minutes days or in the mix to build a solution, but that tweet is gone. What do I do? How do I promote my thing?
Speaker 1
Build a waitlist. Build a waitlist right now and people will sign up for that waitlist or they will not. usually people overestimate the intent of other people. So you think if I plus something like a URL here, you think that people will actually go there and they will look for a sign up button and they look to pay and to start using. But in social media, people are not in the mood to break their scrolling. So that's what in most cases, people won't even click on your link. They will bookmark that message to come back to that later. Or if they click to your link, they will actually be happy to see the waitlist there because they want to spend time signing up for things anyway.
Speaker 2
Yeah,
Speaker 1
exactly. Or you could just pretend it's working. You don't have to lie, but you can make a quick sketch using the AI tools or simple tools. And show the illustrator exactly illustrate like low fee screenshots of the thing. And then say that if you want to receive a message when it's launched, leave your email and that will be totally fine. Like nobody's gonna hate you for that. And some people say that's not good. I don't think it's not good. I think validating whether the idea is good or not before you build it, that's good. That's good for everyone. You will not waste time. People People will not waste time trying a tool that's not good. So I do that very often right on the spot. And the second way to find ideas is to actually equate your ideas to people who are unable to find the good ideas when they come up with just one or two or three. But if you have a chance to try 50 ideas, just by luck, one of them will be good. You don't know which one. And that's why you should try to pitch your idea to the market. And even if you don't have followers, it's actually even better if you don't have them. Because if you don't have them and it goes viral, it means it's good. And if you go back in time and see when I launched Dev Hunt, I had very few followers. I had one follower or something like that. It was not many. and the account comes into play, also it's open source. All the keywords were so good that it just went viral and people gave a lot of reaction to that. And before that, if you scroll my profile, I've tried 20 other ideas like that, and there was nothing, no reaction. So that's why I think people should not be afraid to tweet their ideas. If the tweet is bad, they can just it and that's it. And some embarrassing. The best thing about social media is that if it is something not interesting, something totally shit, people won't see it. Because if they see it, it makes us good. don't see it, it means it's bad and nobody saw it. There is nothing to be ashamed of. So that's why I think often I have people on Twitter sending me DMs pitching the ideas. And I say, like, why don't you pitch it with Twitter? Just pitch it to people. Why do you send it to me personally? I can say good or bad, it doesn't matter if I'm a foreign person. So that's the second way. And the third way is, now I have the series of simple ways of coming up with ideas where you don't have to invent the idea. So one, you find the idea that works in one market, you find the market where there is no idea like that. And you clone that thing in a new market. And you localize it for that market. For
Speaker 2
example,
Speaker 1
you can see you usually try to find some hot tool that's new because if it's new in this market, there's little chance that it exists in other markets because it appears here, right? And then you go to other market and Google in that language or even if the language is the same seizure, but usually you have to change the language. And we've seen a lot of examples like that, mostly with consumer stuff, for example, not the huddle booking systems, or Airbnb like systems. Not now, but back then when Airbnb became popular in US,
Speaker 3
there
Speaker 1
were a lot of known to local markets. I remember there was one in Norway as well. And they did well. Eventually once because Airbnb became so powerful. But there are a lot of examples like that.
Speaker 2
Can you imagine huge examples like Gober, Manatee Kure? Yeah, exactly. And
Speaker 1
almost every country got their own number, right?
Speaker 2
Can you give us an example of something more doable, a smaller one? All these examples
Speaker 1
are kind of consumer products. For example, there is an app in the market where you can find, I will take an example from my lab, there is an app where you can find movies to watch on your streaming services. Every country has their own streaming services. And then you find the country where they have their own set of services and you build it.
Speaker 3
So
Speaker 1
I'm pretty sure that maybe in Turkey there's no op like that. I'm pretty sure. And they have also a lot of ways to watch movies. And you could build that up for Turkey. Or even if it exists for Turkey, the chance that there is great op that exists here is no, because they have probably made it up on their own. When you clone successful up from US, usually the problem is the ad is amazing. The UX is great, the ideas are great, and that's when it will succeed. For example, when Uber made their ad, they were an apps on the market for Texas. So even before Uber in the US, there were apps, they were not good. And that's why when people were cloning Uber in, let's say, Turkey, I'm pretty sure Turkey also had similar apps. But you don't call them the idea, you call them the app, as there is with all the best little parts. So I think that works well. And I think that's the best way to start because you have, I think when you start, people tend to try to do everything themselves to learn. And I think that's totally wrong. I think you have to do the opposite. When you build your first idea, you have to remove complexity. And that's why I suggest to start, even if you're a developer, I suggest to start with no code. Not because you don't know how to build stuff, just because it still takes time to write the code. It's also a pleasure for you. So there's high chance to procrastinate writing code and not doing the other stuff and eventually learning nothing, because you already know how to code. And when you use no code, then it's so boring and fast. And then you're left alone with marketing. And definitely have a learning. You jumped
Speaker 2
to the MP to the execution, thinking about ideas how to plan. Yeah, exactly. So one another way offer is to look at new markets, probably high tech, because new stuff. Yeah, you have to look at the US basically. Because historically,
Speaker 1
that will work all the time.
Speaker 2
In 80%
Speaker 1
best way there's no reason to look at other market. But of course you can also look like... If when it comes to apps, it's easier. You open an app store and I bet there are some services which can do that if they know you can build it out like that. But I bet there's a service that can send you every day 12 new apps. of each market. Maybe they'll think of this. So here's the idea. Imagine ever more that you get a list with top three apps of the day for all countries in the world. And
Speaker 3
you
Speaker 1
just make sure that you don't send the same app, because there's no reason, like you don't send Uber again and again. So one app can send only one, so that it's not noisy. And in that case, you will receive a lot of apps, like very few every day. But those apps will be usually very fresh and new. And if you're fast, you can actually execute that app in other market where it doesn't exist yet. And maybe the service can even do that for you too. It will only send you the apps which are only on this market and they don't need to see the other market. That's amazing idea by the way. They've been making it. No, literally it's amazing idea.
Speaker 2
Yeah, I was like I'm gonna use it because they want to know going on.
Speaker 1
People will use it even if they don't want to build apps, but just to know the trends, it's a really good idea. Because we are using our
Speaker 2
bubbles, I use a few tools for food, a few tools for... Yeah, that's
Speaker 1
very dangerous, when you live in a bubble, you just miss everything that's happening in the world and you know about that when it's too late, right? But in this case you will see some strange apps and you will discover strange trends, but those trends are real And that's what you need. You have to see trends before they're known by everyone.
Speaker 2
Maybe another way to achieve that is to travel more Yeah, yeah, when I have people's vision, I was so excited to discover apps market in pan. Very different scene. They don't use WhatsApp, they don't use Uber, they have their
Speaker 1
own things. If you go back to the story of every non-UF based founder, nearly 100% of cases, it starts. I went there, I saw that, I came back, and I did this. It's all, it's a, we don't coffee all the time. It's just, you get inspired by something and then you see certain things and then some ideas come to your head and you maybe invent something new for your work. But it's always stores we travel. Like I love stores about founders. that almost the story of every founder they were abroad. Sometimes they didn't find anything that they were there. Like it's very rare when the founder is great and he or she never left their country. Yeah, so that's an interesting way of building your idea. So when I was saying to conclude on this, basically, find willing, fresh ideas, not all like, don't go for that is too late, people saw that it's late 100%. So it has to be new ideas. And then look for markets where it's not implemented and implement. Number four is, now is more interesting. So I call it keyword-led ideas. So you go to keyword research tools, I usually use Google search, Google keyword funner. Okay,
Speaker 2
is that free? Yes,
Speaker 1
free. And you can enter keywords there and then it suggests more keywords, a lot more keywords. It just basically shows you what people search for. Exactly, exactly. And it shows you how much they search for in a lesson computation. And if you do that, but you have to spend time doing that. I share this idea often with this method with people and a lot of people are disappointed they say they couldn't find anything because they probably spent five minutes doing that.
Speaker 2
They want to do the job.
Speaker 1
Yeah, exactly. They think they will enter some random stuff there and they will suddenly get amazingly beat. seven hours. Every day, I think at least one hour of my life is spent on that. Some days, I can't easily spend a full day on that in some days. So people underestimate the importance of idea. Idea has to be really good. And the better the idea, the lower is a chance to fail. Because if idea is better, the way you do later, the apple,, or whatever in the beginning, it will just be with you all the way to the end. And there are other tools that do it better. I think there is one founder that does project called Bill with Keyword or something like that. It's Kat from Nokut Exit. She has made a tool for that. I never tried a tool, but I think it's a good tool because the pitch of the tool doesn't get up to this. So you search for keywords, you look for what people search for, and then you see the traffic. And if you see high traffic, low competition, and then you take the keyword, you enter it to the Google search, and you look at the top 10 results. And even the top 10 results, you see nothing interesting but only blog posts from SEO to my websites. Amazing. Go for that because it means that nothing really exists and even if it exists it's not popular enough. So they're
Speaker 2
sweet. What do you type? What each keywords? I
Speaker 1
give you a real example I did just yesterday. So I saw it's actually an example that Rellman for this talk, I told people asking about ideas on Twitter and then I went to search portal and started searching ideas, startup ideas, business ideas, best business ideas, top startup ideas, and things like that. If you don't have imagination you can just ask Chantipi to create hundred variations of these few words. And then I put that into Google and then it gives me lists with analytics on every keyword. And then eventually I see that the business ideas keywords is really strong. But it's obvious that it's taken because it's still obvious business ideas. It has 10 million views. So if that was not taken, if you actually get business ideas.com, you're gonna be crazy big on traffic because it's exactly the keywords and it will work. But it was taken without calling. And then they start looking for one more word. And it was like best, top, micro, net all those kind of words and then I found that the meaning is free so meaning that this ideas has really high traffic and it's free on dot com when it's gonna go there and it's not just that meaning business ideas have high traffic, it's also that business ideas have high traffic, best business ideas have high traffic. So there are like hundreds of those with high traffic and then you have mini business ideas. So in fact, people will also respect your website for those queries to sure what website is good so there's a chance to we not just the direct keyword but also the similar keywords that all along with this keyword this
Speaker 2
sounds like a process to make a perfect SEO optimized blog posts or a project but we are talking about a startup ideas I want to build a startup can I use this SEO? Yeah, I mean Directory so I came up with
Speaker 1
directory idea, but okay before that I can I would decide idea
Speaker 2
Okay, I
Speaker 1
want to build an email or like an email to for SAS for myself because I don't like any other tool But for the market there was one that I like it was looks, but then I saw it was getting more complicated and then understand they will go farther to make more complicated because they have to make more money and more features more money. And I wanted to make simple tool. And I was searching for email and other words and eventually I found SaaS emailer Domain that was available and SaaS email had high traffic SaaS emailer has lowered traffic some traffic not that much, but few SaaS email is part of SaaS emailer. There is a chance to win the traffic too. And I came up with that idea. You
Speaker 2
first came up with an idea,
Speaker 1
then you used the tool to validate it.
Speaker 2
But it's not the way to generate an idea, you're only dependent. Alright,
Speaker 1
true. Now I'm talking about validating. Yeah, so sometimes, exactly, you should have stopped me earlier because I was talking about validation. So sometimes, I have this case with the directorist. So I want to make the directorist.
Speaker 3
And
Speaker 1
I was just looking for something around the director's because I was interested in the director's. I would think maybe the director and builder or something like that. And while playing with the director rewards, so you have to start with some work because it won't give you anything if you don't give it something, right? But you have to throw something there, you know, true directory. And then I saw the key word there was directory submission services. And I'm like, what's that? Like directory submission. And then I discovered people actually look for services that submit to the directories. And that was like one for me. I thought like true, I do that too. I submit to the directories manually take a lot of time. So it's not just your problem, people's search for it. Exactly. I guess I have a lot of problems. But this one was both an other in the problem. Then I was searching more and then I found more keywords. I saw that directory submission is too long. You have to be shorter than that. It's very long. But I got the idea. From here, I was looking for better domain name and I went for listing bot. Because listing,ing was there. Directly Listings and I think go for Listingbot because it has the same word. So you just entered a keyword, some random theme above? Yes, yeah, something that you have some connection with.
Speaker 2
If you are Cauldron you can enter database or...
Speaker 1
mongol. You can say mongol. Yeah. And then maybe you see that how to optimize mongol or mongol index generator. And then you may make a tool that generates indexes for mongol. In mongol first estimator,
Speaker 2
mongol.

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