How to find ideas for boring products / sweaty startups
jasonleow • 11 Jan 2022 •
Here’s some ways to find ideas for boring products/sweaty startups:
1) Go to a review site like Yelp or Google Maps.
Find businesses with many reviews but poor ratings.
Create something with better customer support, or better self-help tech/website.
2) Mystery shop: Call services like plumbing, washing, cleaning, landscaping. - @CSMikeCardona
See how fast they return a call, if ever.
Can you get the info you need? Where are the gaps?
Plug them with a faster website, immediate quotes, responsive hotlines.
3) Mature to less mature markets. - @ClimbRideRunner
Find an idea/product that works well in one market (e.g. US) and bring it to your region/country (Asia for me).
I really love the idea behind @tillermoney, a money mgt app using google sheets, but want one for local banks!
4) Usual SaaS suspects
Website builders, form builders, job boards, web scraping - the ideas that everyone say are overdone and in competitive markets?
Do them.
As a solo indie hacker you just need a micro slice of it to make a living.
5) Biz with recurring income (like a regular done-for-you service) or sells consumables (leading to repeat purchases) - @Kon_Theo
Easier to snowball your revenue, no need to find new clients every day.
E.g. Wordpress😱 website maintenance/updates
6) Go hyperlocal. - @fannin_seth
Look up the local services/biz in your city.
Outdated websites, bad ad copy, old logo.
Still using paper forms, clipboards, log books.
Offer something—web dev, copywriting, design—to them to help fix that.
7) Look up Microacquire / Flippa for SaaS biz ideas - @VicVijayakumar
See which ones are “boring” but gets good MRR, and/or sold.
Find patterns. Make a replacement to those that sold.
Best of both worlds: You either get good MRR or get microacquired.
https://twitter.com/VicVijayakumar/status/1461701213435711497
8) Excel is every SaaS’s competitor but also muse
Ask friends to show you any massive, bloated Excel sheet with hundreds of columns and thousands of rows that they use for their jobs.
I even got some of those in my laptop!
That’s a boring SaaS product idea there.
9) PDF forms
Don’t you hate it when you got to print a PDF form to fill out, sign, scan and send back?
What’s the point of digital if it just replaces paper with PDFs?
That’s a boring product idea there.
10) Replace in-person physical trips
Anytime you got to physically head down to the store/branch to buy or collect something.
That’s a sweaty startup idea there.
What other hacks and tricks do you know to discover ideas for boring products and sweaty startups?
Comments
Oh that’s cool. Would love to hear your progress with your city’s biz owners as it goes! With the global reach of internet, it’s surprising how people forget the opportunities of going hyperlocal isn’t it?
Yes, these are great springboards to bigger ambitions!
Nice list of small, actionable starting points for people short on ideas who wanna try their hands at something!
I’ve been taking a very slow approach to this, but increasingly trying to get to know local business owners of places I like in my city. In most cases, this isn’t gonna lead to work opportunities, but… already finding some opportunities to do some work in trade, or maybe collaborate in the future on something more substantial, etc.
For people just getting started out, it’d be fantastic practice just to try these ideas out as thought experiments / side projects without even expecting it to be a financial success. Never too early to start learning the various skills needed to eventually have your overnight success years or decades later. :-)