How not to discover ideas worth solving

Why searching for a problem to solve is almost never the right answer

Billion-dollar ideas aren’t thought of, they are discovered.

A while back, I wanted to flex my skills as a software engineer and solve unsolved problems. Make my mark on my world.

Naive ideas, I’m told by my ever-pragmatic brother.

And in some ways, he was right.

My life was kind of trouble-free. Beyond the normal stresses of someone fresh out of college - finding a job, stresses from the job found, relationship woes, etc., it was going well.

So inevitably, my ideas fall into the same camp of things done a dozen times in a dozen different ways. To name a few.:

• A way to take notes that don’t require the internet but still have good sync. (Looking at your notion)

• An email client that is more keyboard-friendly like Vim and helps you sort through the weeds (oh, hey superhuman exists!)

• A meal prep service that gave you delicious and healthy food affordably. (Oh wait, hello fresh, factor, fuel exists…)

• Capitalize on the recent AI advancements and build an assistant to help run your life. (Apple’s Siri and Google’s Gemini assistant are pushing this although the results are still a little disappointing)

Among all the thinking of ideas is seeing friends get into big tech companies, and enjoy the free food, good work balance, high pay, company perks, and job security.

Comparison and doubt snuck in occasionally as I sat there and wondered if I was doing the right thing.

Therein lies the problem. I just sat there and thought, and brainstormed. This is ironic considering I’ve worked in start-ups for the last 3+ years.

The day-to-day activity is almost anything but thinking. Most of the time is spent doing. Talking to customers, fixing bugs, building new features, etc.

While I don’t think (pun intended) never thinking is the solution, thinking all the time is not it.

Instead, start with something you’re interested in. Go deep. And when you’re there, you’ll find problems associated with that field.

A couple of examples from friends building (and not sitting there “thinking”) :

• No tool or software to streamline the ad creation process for Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) and they have to piece together a bunch of different smaller tools to achieve their workflow.

• No easy way to create quality content to help sites rank higher. A lot of manual work researching sites to get backlinks, writing quality articles, and converting content from one platform to another.

• No easy way to take science notes without some clunky tool like LaTeX. Makes it hard to take notes during technical class

• It is troublesome to prevent credit card fraud without a bunch of checks and then fighting chargebacks later takes even more time and money.

• There are no affordable places for retail traders to go for information on what the markets have priced in.

These ideas did not come from sitting at a nice air-conditioned desk.

It was from them working on something they thought was cool and trying to get it out there. (albeit for some, still at a nice air-conditioned desk)

Along the way, inefficiencies in their workflow or area of interest cropped up.

And while I have no idea if any of these ideas would work (nor are they well fleshed out), it feels a whole lot more concrete and specific than “a better notetaking app”.

I’m sure there are exceptions to this.

But one thing is for certain for me, I’m not discovering ideas worth solving from sitting there thinking about ideas worth solving.

So I’m taking that first step, by doing more and thinking less.