Primarily out in the real world, talking to people (my friends and family) seeing problems come up and thinking can I solve this. I don't act on many, my goal isn't to be a CEO but I like making things that solve things or are just fun
@aaronoleary second that. I was about to write the same things when I saw your post. I also look outside in the real world. I am fortunate to be part of an NGO so problems pop-up every day. I love to find creative solutions to them. Mainly looking outside, trying to immerse myself in other people's worlds to understand the problem better and coming up with real solutions.
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@aaronoleary Many good ideas started from people simply wanting to resolve their daily inconveniences and problems. I think it's up to our critical thinking and proactive mindset when faced with issues.
Talking to people "indirectly". When I ask them what they want, people often give bad answers. But When you let them talk about some issues, sometimes they share a valid insight.
I presume it's a common practice to follow reviews on the existing products and find opportunities there. If something is a hit despite of the fact that thousands of users are extremely unhappy, it makes sense to enter competition field by creating a new player devoid of the most annoying features. This strategy hits two birds with one shot: you know that there is a market for your product, and you know exactly what to avoid
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Apart from personal experience, pain points that I personally come across or hear from friends, I usually look up ideas encouraged by startup accelerators like y-combinator etc. As you read about these amazing ideas in action, you end up getting into this "ideating zone". You start thinking if a particular idea would work in your city, maybe in another market segment, could it be applied in another form!
At odd places;
Ideas come (to me) when I am alone at odd places, such as standing in front of the Microwave at 2am, waiting for the clock to run down. Or when I am in the toilet (yes, happens often). I have a jotter & biro that I go to the bathroom with
In addition to looking around for inspiring ideas, we actually created a page in our company wiki/knowledge base called "Product Best Practices" where people upload screenshots and add descriptions of great product experiences they encountered "in the wild".
We even added a set of tags so you can at a glance get an idea of what the particular product idea is about.
Over time it has collected a lot of great ideas.
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I always search one web to find new ideas.
Always their minds inspire me a lot .
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