
Ask HN: How do you come up with ideas for a website/product? - cathhhhji
Many people have said: build something you need. It seems like all my ideas have already been done.
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ggm
Websites which irritate you: clue to UX design "do it better"

Websites which are incomplete: market demand proven, "do it better"

Websites off to one side: find your niche

Do one thing, but do it well.

Do one thing, but be comprehensive with pointers onward.

Be responsive to feedback.

Provide a service to people in your niche: finding websites with bad copy?
write a simple tool to fix simple copy mistakes and give it away on github but
sell the service of doing "moar" but applied to your niche.

Go to conferences, and talk to people in your niche and pick up on _gee I wish
that x was done better_ signals

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pontifier
Often my ideas have something to do with an inefficiency I've seen, or a
nagging problem that doesn't seem to get the attention that it deserves.

Watch lightning in slow motion sometime. Many times before I come up with an
idea, my mind is racing and seems to send out branching tendrils through
resources, problems, techniques, news, people, previous ideas, etc. Like step-
leaders in lightning, many alternate paths and branches are evaluated and
activated. As this network expands, a solid connection forms between a problem
and a solution, and BANG! An idea forms. Sometimes with many important details
baked in.

I focus in on this active path, and debate the merits and ramifications and
potential pitfalls. Sometimes this idea is valuable and new. Many of my ideas
have nothing that would connect them to anything I've worked on before.

Often these Ideas will get lost if I do not write them down, so I always
endeavor to do that. Reading through these old ideas is a good way to re-
activate these pathways of invention again and generate new ideas.

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hluska
It's worth noting that if you look at the big tech companies (MSFT, Google,
Apple, Facebook, et al) none of them started with a particularly original
idea. They just executed far better than the incumbents.

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danieltillett
I wrote about this a few years ago and you might find it useful [0].

It is really hard to come up with good ideas.

0\. [https://www.tillett.info/2015/08/30/ideas-are-not-
cheap/](https://www.tillett.info/2015/08/30/ideas-are-not-cheap/)

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jayec
Along the lines of build something you need, think about your life and the way
in which it could be better. Do some research on your ideas, if a product
exists then you’ve found a way to improve your life. If it doesn’t exist, you
have an idea. Either way, you win.

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simonpure
Another way of looking at it is to focus on the process and see the idea as
starting point.

Don't be discouraged if there's an existing solution as you are likely to end
up in a very different place from where you started.

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mabynogy
Ideas don't matter much. As you've noted, most have been made many times. Do
something you'd enjoy to work on and do it differently. Don't use the same
tools for example.

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ajeet_dhaliwal
_Many people have said: build something you need. It seems like all my ideas
have already been done._

For me at least this has been accurate (building something I needed). Tesults,
[https://www.tesults.com](https://www.tesults.com), is an automated test
results data storage/reporting web application. As a developer I had to
implement a custom solution to do this for three different teams across two
companies (employers) over a three year period. After the third time I noticed
the pattern. I also noticed how we used it everyday, throughout the day in our
dev team so it seemed like a fairly good problem to tackle in a general way,
not least of all I thought that whatever was created could be used at my next
job.

When you say your ideas have already been done are you sure they have been
done exactly in the way you're thinking of, or done as well/polished as you
would like? With the problem Tesults solves there are open-source and paid
software alternatives out there that provides the building blocks to do
something similar. Alternatively you could build something yourself like I
previously did. Some people would definitely choose one of those two options.
However at my job none of these options were great due to missing features we
needed and maintenance concerns. As an employee this is was not the main part
of my job so it was quite annoying not having something available to just
handle this, I didn't want to manage the web app or database and my employer
didn't want me to either really. So yes others did have the same general idea
but they had not executed as well as I would have liked. It wasn't a slam dunk
though, after the initial release it took over a year to get the first couple
of paying customers (had several dozens of free ones) but that was because
earlier iterations lacked polish and were missing key features (such as logs,
screen capture, file uploads). Also I didn't have someone helping with service
or marketing before.

I really think execution matters above all else and continuing to iterate is
important. Tesults needs continuous work, it's updated every day, usually
multiple times and there are years of work in the pipeline to make sure it
remains the best way to report results data. If it wasn't for my seeing the
problem in the wild as an employee I would never have done it, the idea would
never have occurred to me sitting at home, I needed to have worked in the
domain and I needed to be a domain expert. I think if you are a younger person
you can perhaps think of cool stuff for you and your friends (b2c) but I'm an
older person now with thoughts dominated by business issues and around being
more productive. That and diapers (not my own).

