How to generate product ideas from niches and communities.
There is a veritable bounty of product ideas waiting for you hidden in niche forums and social groups all across the internet.
The trick to finding a good niche/market is to simply ask yourself:
- What kind of people would I like to serve?
- What kind of niches do I like?
These questions are the perfect starting point because they help you get started with groups you actually care about.
Then, after you've chosen a niche or two, your next step is to search for forums and social groups in that niche and do some research.
- You can choose a group of people that you like and respect.
- You will have a clearer idea of how to find customers compared to building a generalist product (ie something like a "time tracker").
- You will start out with direct access to a seed group of users who you can start talking to in order to validate your product.
Step-by-step Example of Niche Mining
Talk is cheap, so let's take this up a notch!
For the rest of this lesson, I will show you how I do this step-by-step. This is a real-world example I worked up that almost had me heading out to build a product.
The first thing to do is identify one or more groups of people you would like to serve.
In my case, I would be interested in serving folks who have physical jobs. Some background - I've been a coder for 20+ years, and one thing I regret is the sedentary nature of what I do. I would love to work with people who are in professions that I deem to be awesome and that require physical work.
Here are some examples of professions I feel hit the sweet spot:
- Organic farmers
- Carpenters
- Boutique glass blowers
- Wildlife filmmakers
- Orienteering Instructors
- Rock Climbing Instructors
- Etc.
These are just a few of the groups I would be pretty stoked to serve.
Next up, you'll need to pick just one of the groups that you like and focus on them.
For the sake of this exercise, I'm going to pick Carpenters. Why? Well, Harrison Ford is a carpenter and he's in Star Wars & Blade Runner. Need I say more?
The next thing you'll need to do is to find one or more forums that your group frequents. This could be niche forums, sub Reddits, niche Facebook groups, niche Slack groups, etc.
In my case, I'm simply going to search Google for "carpenter forums."
[searching...]
Awesome, the #1 result that comes up looks great: Contractor Talk. This looks like the perfect kind of site to run my anthropological research.
One way I know this is because there are over 100k posts. This will give me a lot of discussions to search through.
This forum is for any type of contractor, not only carpenters, but carpenters are a large portion of the membership, so I think we can work with this for what we're doing here.
Once you've found a forum/group that looks promising, you can start to look through the discussion to get a feel for what folks are talking about and what kind of pain points they have.
Keep in mind, your main goal is to see if multiple members have similar pain points and if that can somehow translate into a product idea.
The best way to get started is to search for discussion threads where people are talking about their problems and their pain.
In my case, I am going to search the Contractor Talk forum with the following keywords:
- software
- painful
- I wish
- fix
You'll note that the keyword "software" isn't about pain. Or is it?!
I actually find "software" to be the best keyword to begin searching with because people often submit posts like "I wish XYZ software existed."
In other words, you might get directly to the pain and a possible product idea!
Here's my process:
- I submit the search "software" on Contractor Talk.
- Bingo!
- The second result is a post title "Things I hate".
Now that's something we can work with!
After you've found a few threads where people are discussing their pain, copy/paste the best statements into a text document or excel spreadsheet.
You'll want to do this so you can see them all in one place and then move them around and group them into common themes.
In my case, here are some statements of pain copied and pasted from the "Things I hate" thread:
- jhark123 says: "Being audited by the State Department of Labor and Industries. I envy you guys with access to private workers comp."
- rex says: "i hate people who think plumbing is easy....only will take 5 minutes"
- jb4211 says: "I hate when someone hires you to do a job and then proceed to tell you how to do it."
- Mud Master says: "I hate when a profitable job becomes a charitable write off."
- TheItalian204 says: "Think I might write a book about CT, whole section will go to your quotes...you hit it dead on when you re inspired ...not to mention that is my new signature"
- tedanderson says: "When people ask me a question and then argue with me over the answer."
- Gary H says: "Builders that want to hold your money until they get paid."
- Gary H says: "Gc,s that bid the plans off of prints yet want to save money by doing it another way."
Wow. This post has 1000+ replies! I could work with just this one thread for days!
With that in mind, let's try to keep things simple and just focus on the above responses.
After you've created your work file and you've copy/pasted 10-20 statements of pain in there, the next thing to do is to group them into common themes.
The reason to do this is to help uncover common problems that members of your group have, and use them to work up a product hypothesis.
In my case, I have identified four common themes.
Here they are:
Theme #1: Customers Misunderstanding what The Contractor Does
- "i hate people who think plumbing is easy....only will take 5 minutes"
- "hate when someone hires you to do a job and then proceed to tell you how to do it."
- "When people ask me a question and then argue with me over the answer."
Theme #2: Contractors Not Getting Paid Enough / Quote Too Low
- "I hate when a profitable job becomes a charitable write off."
- "Think I might write a book about CT, whole section will go to your quotes...you hit it dead on when you re inspired ...not to mention that is my new signature"
Theme #3: Contractors Not Getting Paid
- "Builders that want to hold your money until they get paid."
Theme #4: General Contractor Bait & Switch
- "Gc,s that bid the plans off of prints yet want to save money by doing it another way."
Ok, this is where the magic happens!
You now need to use your creative and critical thinking skills to come up with a product hypothesis that can solve one (or more) of the pain points your group is discussing.
In my case, my hypothesis is that working contractors would pay to solve any one of these pain points:
- Not Getting Paid Enough
- Quote Too Low
- Customers Misunderstanding what The Contractor Does
I spent about 10 minutes thinking what kind of product might be able to solve those pain points and I came up with this:
A tool like http://howmuchtomakeanapp.com but for carpenters rather than software developers.
The software would allow carpenters to host a quote-building homepage for their business (i.e. they add services and prices in an admin panel).
They could also use it as they are walking around the customer’s house, checking off the items and labor that would be required, and then print it out for a full quote.
The quote would get emailed to the customer and allow the customer to click through to the website, where the customer could get a deep dive explanation of each process that the contractor was performing, why it was difficult, etc.
Over time, the product could start to expand into other contractor niches such as builders, etc.