The 143 tactic version of this is exhausting to hold in your head. This is the compressed one: five lanes, nine sources each. What matters is not the list, it is that the five lanes have wildly different signal quality…
Promised follow up to the review pull. Eight of the ten categories gave me a product brief. Two gave me the opposite, and they failed in completely different ways. The one with no gap. A party game category. 98 reviews…
Wanted product briefs written by people who had paid rather than by me guessing, so I pulled the App Store review RSS for 22 apps across ten categories, four countries, both sort orders. 1,532 reviews, 737 of them one…
Made a mistake early in this research worth writing down, because it is the obvious way to read a market and it is backwards. I ranked categories by total estimated revenue and got a list of places to avoid, presented…
I wanted to know whether a new question on Stack Overflow still finds readers, because if it does it is the cheapest demand test there is: ask, and see whether anyone arrives. Took the 100 highest voted questions asked…
Instead of looking for ideas I looked for a specific sentence shape: somebody wanting a thing and not finding it. Eight phrases, seventeen communities. I wish , Looking for , Is there an app , Why doesn't , Alternative…
Eleven conversations about the idea. Nine of them were people I already knew or one introduction away, and the other two came from the same person. They were all encouraging, which I now distrust, and they were all…
In the hexagonal description, the application core has incoming ports called by incoming adapters, implemented by services, which in turn use outgoing ports implemented by outgoing adapters. When I write that out, it…
I come from a mathematics background, where a counterexample often teaches more than an example. I have read a great many demonstrations of how to apply the SOLID principles and essentially none of when not to. That…
I sell nothing yet. The idea is a month end reporting tool for small bookkeeping practices, the kind with two or three staff closing thirty or forty client sets a month. Six calls so far, 25 to 40 minutes each, found…
Landing page for a scheduling tool for a specific trade. Shared it in four places over six days, got 340 email addresses. Felt amazing. Sent one plain text email a week later no pitch, no design, one question: "what are…
Reading through a repository I do not contribute to, I noticed a few small spelling mistakes in the README. Nothing that causes confusion, just typos. I can see three options: open a pull request, open an issue…
Nine days of exact match search ads on three keywords. 41,300 impressions, 1,142 clicks at $0.21, and 3 email addresses. Scroll tracking says 402 people made it past the hero, 31 clicked "get early access", 3 finished.…
Reading an aviation incident report, the list of investigated trigger types included software bugs and software corruption as two distinct categories, alongside hardware faults and interference. I would have assumed…
There is a permanent tension between names that are descriptive and names that are short enough to read in an expression. A name carrying the unit, the source, the constraint and the meaning becomes unreadable inside…
First time doing this. The page says "join the waitlist", there is a pricing table with three tiers, and there is a screenshot I made in Figma. None of it is real. There is not a single line of code. Everyone says this…
The tool I want to build sits on top of a scheduling API. Section 4 of their developer terms says I can't build anything that competes with or is substantially similar to their own features. They shipped a thin version…
Ran 12 interviews over three weeks. Every single one said the problem was real, ten of them said $29/month was reasonable, four said they would "definitely" buy it. Put up a preorder page real Stripe checkout,…
Six weeks ago I put up a form that dumps into a spreadsheet, and every morning I spend about 40 minutes doing by hand what the app is supposed to do (take a client's inventory export, dedupe it, mail back a clean csv).…
Two evenings of searching turned up three competitors. All between $15 and $25 a month, all with changelogs going back years, all with customers who post screenshots of the thing working. Half my brain reads that as…
I checked about forty phrases around the problem I want to solve. Almost all of them come back in the 10 100 band, a handful say zero, and the only high volume terms are generic ones that big software companies already…
I have four weekends before I have to decide whether to take three months unpaid leave to build this. So the constraint is real and short: I want the strongest signal per hour of effort, and I will not get a fifth…
Same underlying tool, two possible markets. The narrow one is around 900 companies in a specific regulated niche who would plausibly pay $200/month. The wide one is maybe 40,000 individuals who would pay $9. I have 10…