There’s a myth I’d like to take a swing at, because I believed it for years.
The myth is that the hard part of starting something is finding the perfect idea. That somewhere out there is a gap in the market, and successful people are the ones who spotted it, and if you could just have that one flash of insight in the shower, you’d be away.
I don’t think that’s true any more. I think the ideas are lying around absolutely everywhere, in the open, in enormous quantity - and that once you learn to see them you have precisely the opposite problem.
Well, we’re about to find out. After twenty-odd years of building other people’s products, we’re going to seek out the great ideas by doing it. I’m hoping that through this process, we’ll learn to see the great idea’s along the way, not wait for them to show it self, and miss it because we don’t know what to do.
Once you start seeing them, you can’t stop
The shift for me was learning to notice friction.
Not big visionary market-gap friction. Small, stupid, everyday friction. Every time someone says “oh, we just do that manually”. Every spreadsheet with seventeen tabs that one person maintains and nobody else understands. Every workaround that’s been in place so long it’s become a process. Every time you catch yourself doing something tedious for the fourth time and think surely there’s a tool for this.
Once you tune into that frequency, it’s genuinely hard to switch off. I’ve started keeping a note on my phone, and it fills up faster than I can empty it. A conversation at a barbecue about how someone’s accountant does something. A client mentioning, entirely in passing, the thing that costs them a day a month. My own irritation at a task I’ve now done enough times to resent.
And our client work is a firehose of this stuff. We get invited inside businesses and shown how they actually run - not the tidy version on the website, the real version with the manual steps and the duct tape. You cannot spend that much time looking at the machinery of other people’s companies without noticing the same worn-out parts turning up again and again.
So: opportunities everywhere. Wonderful.
Except.
The actual problem is too many
Here’s what nobody warned me about. A list of forty opportunities is not forty times better than a list of one. In some ways it’s considerably worse, because a long list is a very comfortable place to sit.
You can spend months on a list. Researching it, ranking it, adding to it, making a lovely spreadsheet about it, discussing it enthusiastically over a beer. It feels enormously like progress and it is, in fact, none. Nothing on that list has ever met a customer. Not one line of it has been tested against anybody’s actual wallet.
And every week the list stays a list is a week you’re not learning anything real.
So the skill isn’t spotting opportunities. It’s the much less romantic business of narrowing them down to something you’ll actually try - and then being willing to be wrong about it in public.
How we’re narrowing it down
We’ve landed on four questions. I want to write them down now, partly to hold ourselves to them and partly so I can find out later which ones were any good.
1. Do we have this problem ourselves, right now?
This is the big one and it’s doing most of the work.
If we’re suffering from it today, then we are customer zero. We understand the problem in our bones instead of through a survey. We can tell instantly whether a solution is any good, because we’ll be using it on Monday. And we get an enormous amount of research for free, simply by paying attention to our own week.
It’s not a perfect filter - the risk is you build something only you want. But as a starting point for people who’ve never done this before, it beats guessing about strangers.
2. Is there demonstrable demand?
Not “would people like this”, because people are polite and will happily tell you your idea is lovely. I mean evidence that exists whether or not we show up: are people searching for it? Asking for it in forums? Hacking together their own miserable version? Paying for something worse?
Which leads to the thing I’d have found counterintuitive a few years ago - competitors are a good sign, not a bad one. An empty market usually means no market. If several businesses are making a living solving this, that’s demand you don’t have to invent, and the question shifts to whether we can do it better or narrower or for someone they’re ignoring.
3. Can we get to something real, fast and cheap?
If the smallest honest version takes a year, it’s the wrong first move for us. We want short loops. Build a small thing, put it in front of someone, find out we were wrong, adjust.
4. Would we still want to be running this in five years?
Because we will be. Software doesn’t finish - it’s alive, it needs feeding forever, and anything we launch is a commitment rather than an event. A brilliant opportunity we’d resent maintaining is not a brilliant opportunity.
Knowing is about 10% of the experience
I know a lot about how to build digital products. Genuinely - it’s my trade, I’ve done it at scale, I’ve helped other people do it, and I’ve written about the process at some length. If knowing were sufficient, I’d be in excellent shape.
But I’ve become convinced that knowing something is about 10% of the experience of it. Maybe less.
You can read every book on running a marathon and know precisely what a wall at 32km is. You still have absolutely no idea what it feels like until your legs go, and as I don’t run marathons, this will probably always remain a mystery to me because I haven’t actually lived it. Reading is not a smaller version of doing. It’s a different thing entirely, and the gap between them is where the majority of learning lives.
I’ve watched this from the outside for years. I’ve sat with founders as reality collided with their plan, and I’ve been the calm one in the room saying that this is normal, this is the process, we adjust and go again. It’s much easier to be calm about someone else’s product.
So the plan can only take us so far. At some point you have to put a real thing in front of a real person and ask them for real money, and find out. Everything before that moment - the research, the ranking, the lovely spreadsheet - is a hypothesis wearing a costume. Theoretical at best.
There’s also something clarifying about taking your own medicine. We tell clients to validate early, launch before it’s ready, and let customers tell them what’s true. Time to find out whether we can actually do it when it’s our own name and our own money on the thing.
The first few will be practice
I should probably be more confident than I’m about to be, but…
I fully expect the first few to be duds.
Not in a defeatist way - in the way that the first few of anything are duds. Nobody’s first attempt at a craft is their best one, and there’s no reason ours would be the exception. We’ll pick something for the wrong reasons. We’ll build too much before showing anyone. We’ll misjudge what people will pay for. We’ll learn what “marketing” means the hard way, having spent two decades being the people who build the thing rather than the people who have to go and find customers for it.
Good. That’s the fee. The reps are the point.
The thing I keep reminding myself is that every one of those mistakes is information you cannot buy, and it only becomes available after you launch. You cannot study your way to it. Which means the fastest route to being good at this is to hurry up and be bad at it a few times, on purpose, cheaply.
So we’re going to treat the early ones as practice. Small enough to fail without hurting. Real enough to be genuinely humbling.
The adventure ahead
I’m aware, writing this, that I’m at the trailhead with a full pack and clean boots, looking out at an enormous view and feeling tremendously good about myself. I know roughly what the terrain looks like from up here. I have no real idea what any of it is like to walk.
I’m sure I’ll read this back in a few years and wince at how little I understood about what was coming. That’s fine. I’d rather be naive and moving than sophisticated and stationary.
What I do know is this: the opportunities are out there in absurd quantity, far more than we could ever get to. The hard part was never finding them. The hard part is choosing one, committing to it properly, putting it in front of real people, and being willing to be wrong out loud - and then doing it again with what you learned.
That’s the adventure. We’ll let you know how we get on.
And if you’re sitting on a list of your own, wondering which one to pick and whether you’re ready - you’re not, nobody is, and the list won’t tell you. Pick the one you’d be happy to still be looking after in five years, make the smallest honest version of it, and go and find out for real.
I’ll see you out there.
Written in June 2023, at the trailhead. Since then we’ve actually shipped some of them: Static Contact, the contact-form job that turns up on every project; Client Invoices, which solves the “can you resend that invoice” problem; the Mangawhai Directory for our own community; and FNA Manager, the one the others turned out to be practice for. They’re all listed on our products page — and the six stages of building a digital product is the map we ended up drawing from the walk.