Serial entrepreneur, product designer and startup advisor. Currently running several profitable products, while working on my next startup in email/productivity

Mar 2, 2016

How To Find Great Product Ideas

I was talking with a friend yesterday, and he mentioned that he was having hard time coming up with new ideas for web and mobile apps.

“Maybe we’re just getting old,” he said half jokingly.

I thought about this for a few seconds…

“We’re not getting old,” I replied “but web and mobile definitely are!”

The web has been around for almost 3 decades. Mobile has been around for almost a decade. Lots of ideas have already been tried on both platforms. It’s more difficult to create new ideas for mature platforms, like web and mobile, than for younger ones, like Virtual Reality and IoT.

Secondly, the concept of having a great idea to start with is overrated. I recommend focusing on the execution instead: a small idea well executed is far more valuable than a great idea poorly executed. Keynotopia wasn’t a ground-breaking idea, and many people had already been prototyping with Keynote and PowerPoint when I launched it. Instead of ignoring it because it was too small, or too obvious, I focused on executing it as well as I can, and it paid off with over 60,000 customers so far. To this day, I receive emails from folks who say they had similar ideas but never acted on them because it didn’t seem “big enough” to act on.

In the age when most entrepreneurs want to tackle big problems and make a dent in the universe, taking action on small and useful ideas is highly overlooked.

Instead of trying to come up with good ideas, maybe we should find people who have problems worth solving, and come up with ideas to solve them. Once you find a problem worth solving, you will come up with dozens of great ideas to solve it.

With StatusPanda, I started out with no idea whatsoever. Instead, I reached out to a small list of creative agency managers who have been using Keynotopia. I asked them about their daily challenges, what is taking most of their time, and which pain points they would pay to solve. It turns out that getting status updates from their team members was one of those pain points, and I suddenly had lots of ideas on how to solve that problem. Those ideas came up during conversation with customers, not while gazing at a blank laptop screen in my office. Two months later, StatusPanda had its first paying customer.