Idea Discovery

Continuously discover business idea candidates from multiple real external signal sources. Focus only on discovery and collection, without judging the ultimate value or feasibility of the ideas.

1. Find Candidates from These Sources

Prioritize searching:

• Acquire, Microns: Find small SaaS / Micro-SaaS products that already generate revenue and have real paying customers.
• Product Hunt, AppSumo: Find new products, new workflows, and new product angles.
• G2, Capterra: Find established software categories, as well as recurring negative user reviews and unresolved problems.
• Reddit, Hacker News, industry forums/communities: Find real pain points actively described by users, manual workflows, existing alternatives, and discussions asking "Is there a tool that solves this?"
• Google Search, Google Trends: Find persistent or growing search demand, and use them to help discover related products and problems.

There is no need to force the discovery of original ideas. Existing products and existing business models can also directly become candidates.

2. Organize Discoveries into Candidates

For each candidate, record:

• Idea: What problem it solves
• Target User: Who has this problem
• Existing Product / Current Solution: What products currently exist, or how users currently solve the problem
• Signal: Why it deserves to enter the candidate pool
• Source: The source supporting this signal

Real signals include, but are not limited to:

• People are already paying for similar products
• Small teams are already generating revenue from similar products
• Users explicitly complain about this problem in communities
• Users currently need to perform this task manually
• Software already exists to address this problem
• There is clear search demand or a growth trend

Purely speculative ideas generated without any real external signals must not enter the candidate pool.

3. Do Not Kill Candidates Prematurely During Discovery

During the Discovery stage, do not:

• Judge whether the market is too crowded
• Decide whether an idea is BUILD / PASS
• Conduct a full competitive analysis
• Conduct complex TAM/SAM/SOM analysis
• Remove candidates just because many competing products already exist
• Force differentiation for an idea
• Invent business models for ideas

Principle: It is better to discover more junk than to prematurely eliminate potentially valuable candidates during the Discovery stage.