How to get an idea for your next SaaS + Template

You want to start your own startup business, but you don’t have an idea what to work on. You might have time, resources, and knowledge to start your own thing but unsure where to start.

I have good news for you: finding your next startup idea is easier than you think. All you need is aspiration to start your own thing, and discipline to continue.

The good thing is you don’t need motivation, investors, or too much knowledge to start. All you really need is energy to work on your startup and the discipline. You’ll need a lots of discipline.

Reasons why you want to start your own thing may be various, varying from wish to get rich, glory, fame, getting more freedom, or quitting your full-time job, all these reasons are valid - and if you’re reading this you already took your first step.

In this post, I’ll also include and share my own experience finding problems to solve and launching solutions. I have founded 3 different startups and managed a few more.

Before you decide what to work on, you should think about your previous work. What are your previous job positions, and in what industries do you already have experience?

Can you use your previous experience as an advantage? Can you use your knowledge for your next startup?

If you have already experience as a software engineer - that’s already a huge advantage. You could build your SaaS by yourself.

If you’re already experienced as a Product or Project Manager, you will use this experience to find and manage someone to build a product for you.

Have experience in sales, lead gen, or marketing? Great! This will help you scale your product once it’s built, and help you with the idea validation.

Finding the right problem to solve is often the first step where aspiring founders get stuck. This is the easy part. There are so many problems waiting to be solved, it’s up to you to decide which one to focus on first.

In product management products or solutions are referred to as vitamins or painkillers. Imagine someone on a strict budget or a low salary: most likely they won’t invest in vitamins if they have to decide to buy a lunch or multivitamins.

Someone enduring pain will most likely do or pay anything to stop the pain. The same is true for companies that have blockers or pains, such as unnecessary costs, time-consuming tasks, or potential penalties.

Key differences:

I would advise to focus on the painkillers. They’re easier to sell, and the last to get cut in times of recession or budget cuts.

In your work, what is the number #1 thing that makes you go “fuck this shit, I hate doing this”? E.g.:
- filling timesheet at your work
- monitoring web app availability
- monitoring app logs for errors
- attend pointless meetings (solve this one and you’ll be a multi-millionaire)

Are there things that you must do manually each month/year? E.g.:
- sending invoices to your clients
- doing taxes
- analyzing competitor’s SEO content

Many of these problems are already solved multiple times, by different companies, and in a different way. Take for example monitoring web app availability, and tools that do that for you: Pingdom, DataDog, UptimeRobot…

Ahrefs, Semrush, and Keyword(dot)com have solved multiple problems for SEO specialists. Automating reports, monitoring keyword rankings, gathering data for research, and assisting content ideas.

Do you see where I am going with this? Each profession, especially in IT, is using 10 different tools on a daily basis. And - many of them are frustrating their users.

Have you ever met someone who loves Jira or Salesforce? Those are reasons why alternatives such as Notion and Pipedrive exist.

During my 15-year career in IT, I’ve encountered hundreds of problems and pains while doing my work. Some are not directly related to the line of work I was doing, but my experience helped me solve those problems.

At some point in 2018-2019, I was heavily invested in bodybuilding and fitness. Prices for fitness supplements varied 3x for some products. Back in the time, 1 2.2kg bucket of whey protein in one shop was 250HRK, and in the other up to 500HRK. Each time I was buying something, like whey, creatine, or energy drinks I searched across 10 different shops for the best price.

For me, this was too time-consuming. Each week I spent 5-10 hours searching for supplements. I decided to scrape multiple shops, put them in one database, and build a simple UI to search all products across multiple shops in one place.

My pain was solved, friends wanted a taste of that solution, and FitAlert was born.

Recently I had a similar problem with home accessories as with supplements - searching for the best product or price for my living room across 20 different shops. After I spent the whole weekend looking for a simple living room lamp, living room table, and small accessories, I saw this problem was also affecting others.

I built ZaDom.hr - price comparison for Home&Garden products and launched it publicly. I got over 1,100 visitors on day 1!

Calendone is an excellent example of how working on your own business can help you spot problems and generate new winning business ideas.

At one point I was managing 10 different fitness influencers and content creators, promoting FitAlert, and content writers for the web. Managing all that became expensive and too time consuming for me.
Searching for solutions and trying out different tools, such as Later, Buffer and others turned out to be too expensive, I wasn’t happy with the customer support and it wasn’t working as I expected.

I decided to build a better tool for content management and social media content scheduling.

Oh boy, where do I start with this one? After over 10 years professionally in IT, I’ve worked on so many different products, and tech stacks, managing different teams, internal and external.
In many cases, I inherited teams or tech products that were poorly built, had tech debt, and were hard to scale. I wish someone who worked before me was thinking about the consequences of their actions.

Fixing tech problems in your startup becomes very expensive at one point, and is blocking your growth. The best medicine, the cheapest, and the most effective for such problems is doing things right.

I decided to help startups by advising them on building tech, product, and infrastructure, managing and hiring tech teams through my tech & product consulting business.

Solving your own itch and fixing problems you’re encountering is the number one best idea to monetize. The second best one is fixing problems for others.

Follow people who build products and share their learnings on Linkedin, Twitter, Reddit, and other social networks. Many people are sharing their problems and successes in public #buildInPublic and can be an inspiration to build products.

What tools are you using on a daily basis? Do you think they could be better?
What tools do your friends and colleagues complain about?
Do you see someone on the internet talking about a product they use?

For each tool check reviews. Focus on the negative reviews (especially those 2⭐️ and 3⭐️ reviews). They often reveal why customers are not happy and you can use that information to build a better solution. Find reviews on Software review sites such as G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, Google Reviews, etc.

I’ve presented multiple ways to find problems that need solutions and ideas to find what you can build. Now it’s time to decide what to focus on.

Spend each day 30 minutes searching and documenting potential problems/solutions/problems.

Document and compare ideas before you decide what to work on. Keep in mind that building a successful business might take years. Ensure you like the industry, love the problem and that will keep you interested in that for the next 5 years.

Keep in mind that also building B2C, B2B, or marketplace solutions varies a lot.

Find the Google sheet template here and copy it to your Google Drive.

My best advice to someone who is not sure yet what to start is to start with a simple idea. Don’t build the AI for recognizing cancer if you don’t have experience in cancer research or already building startups.

Start with something simple and small, something like a job board or uptime monitoring robot. Time from idea to market will be fast, easy to test, start, and you can earning fast.

While working on your first startup, you will get idea for your next #2, #3, and #4 startups.

Start simple.

Start today.

If you need help with market research, building MVP, managing a team, or you just want to brainstorm your ideas, reach out to me and schedule a free 30min call.