Finding an app idea to work on

If you're in this course, it's likely you already have an idea you want to work on. But lots of things can happen. You might have an idea, and then as you begin working on it you start to realize this may not be the one and so you want to pivot.

Finding an app idea to work on is one of the hardest things you will do, mostly because the premise itself is flawed. There isn't really such a thing as ideas "arriving."

If you don't have an app idea, it doesn't usually come to you through inspiration or serendipity. It can come through serendipity, but that's way too long of a time scale. If you want to wait for something to hit you in the head, it might take five years while you're sitting in a dentist's office. That's not a reproducible way to find app ideas.

Market research probably won't do it either

I could sit here and tell you to do market research, look up keywords, and find out what people are searching for. That might work, but it depends on the kind of entrepreneur you are.

If you're a passion-based entrepreneur, which means you can only work on things that personally excite you, then none of that is going to matter. If on the other hand you're the kind of entrepreneur who doesn't mind selling refrigerator coolant when that's suddenly what people want, then sure, you could use things like Google Trends or SEO keyword tools to find out what people are searching for.

But it's just so unlikely you'll gather enough conviction that way. It's much more likely that you need something in your own life that spurs you to make something.

Start with your worst idea

If you don't have a solid idea, start with your worst one. Pick the dumbest idea you have and just go with it.

And even if that idea is just to copy another app, that's fine. Find an app you actually use today, whether that's a to-do tracker, a notes app, Google Docs, etc., and set out to make a clone of it. Just for the experience.

A couple of things can happen from this.

One is that you gain the experience you need, so that when your actual idea comes along you're ready to build it and you don't have to struggle through the awkward, embarrassing first-time mistakes. The more you do this, the faster you'll move next time.

The other thing, which happens much more often than you'd expect, is that in the act of motion, while you're moving and building, the ideas start to come.

Ideas come from motion

Ideas that survive scrutiny don't happen when you're taking a walk, or trying to force it by thinking really hard, or doing psychedelics. It just doesn't work like that. Good ideas come when you're working on something else.

This is why you'll find that if you stay busy, you'll come up with more ideas than if you open up your entire afternoon to brainstorm.

So just start with anything. Pick your favorite app and set out to build a competitor. You'll find that as you work on it you'll start coming up with ideas non-stop, because you'll be trying different tools, working with AI, and reading and streaming through thousands of words and thoughts. Your brain will be stimulated and you'll start coming up with derivatives and remixes.

Say you're building a Google Docs competitor. As you're working on the comments feature you'll realize that actually, if comments worked like this instead of like that, then that would make for a very strong competitor. You essentially take a product and you add one.

But this only happens while your hands are busy. You couldn't have sat down and decided to have that thought about comments, because you only had it after spending two hours inside the comments feature getting annoyed by it.

There will always be room for one more

This is why I personally believe technology doesn't have a limit. It's sort of like numbers, in that you can always add one.

It's the same with music, and the same with novels. There will always be new novels to write, because at the very worst you could take an existing novel and modify it slightly. Likewise, there will never be a shortage of software products to make, because software isn't just utility. It's fashion, it's taste, it's marketing, and it's distribution.

Sometimes you can just take something that already exists and is even successful, and if you have a unique distribution channel then people might prefer to do business with you rather than with some huge mega corp. A lot of people don't love giving their money to Google or Microsoft, so you can build a clone of one of their products and say hey look, I'm a small time indie founder and I'm passionate about this. If your product is good, those people would rather do business with you than with a faceless corporation.

The other advantage of cloning something that already exists is that you skip the hardest question in product design. You don't have to guess whether anyone wants this, because you already know they do.

So if you don't have an idea, start with literally anything. Don't be picky. Your job right now is to gain experience and practice. And it's by being in motion, by pedaling with your brain, that your brain starts producing ideas. That's the most reliable way to come up with ideas I've ever found. You will not come up with ideas by trying to brute force it.