How to Find New Product Ideas
All software naturally invites further improvement
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Are you constantly searching for ideas online but can’t seem to find one that’s going to solve a problem?
Every software product has room for improvement.
There’s always something to be added, subtracted, or changed.
That’s how new features get made: by finding problems, and then solving them.
Not every problem is worth solving, by the software makers standards, but it can be worth it for you.
So while every software product has room for improvement — only some improvements are worth making.
This is great news for indie hackers looking to find a new idea for a project.
Instead of thinking up new things, try looking for already existing products and see what features they may be lacking according to the customers.
Here’s how to spot and exploit opportunities–-based on the software products you already use:
Way # 1 — Look For Workarounds
No product is perfect and observing how people workaround the different features to get work done will give you plenty of ideas.
Start by looking for ways in which people are working around flaws in a product or service.
For example, you might notice that:
- People are entering information in different ways rather than using the features you provided.
- They are ignoring certain features altogether but doing something else instead.
- They are doing things in an inefficient manner because a feature doesn’t exist.
When Shahed Khan, co-founder of Loom, saw one of their earliest users record a video showing how to use their software for testing, he became interested in how people were using the product in an untended way — and for what purpose. They took notice and pivoted the company toward that use case and the rest is history.
