M&Ms: How to Find Ideas to Build

A three step formula for finding ideas that might help you.

Jun 10, 2024

I had a call this week with a community member who was struggling to find good ideas to build out.

Finding good ideas is a common problem. And I think I've got a formula that's worked for many of us in the community. I shared it on the call with him, and I'd like to share it with you, too.

The first step in this formula for finding ideas you can build into projects is to study yourself a little bit. The second step is to find inspiration. The third step is to study the market.

But let's go through each step in depth.

On the first step, "study yourself," you'll want to put together a list of all the valuable things you've done throughout your life. It should definitely include work you did, expertise you have, industries you worked in, and things you know well that you can tap into if a good idea presents itself.

But when studying yourself, I wouldn't limit it to professional work. I'd also include hobbies and other non-commercial activities.

It might feel silly to do this exercise of listing things that you know well and have done, but it's not.

Listing out my assets in this way was exactly what I did early on in my journey when I started placing small bets.

The list of assets that I took the time to scribble into my Apple Notes inspired me to create a product to help Software Engineers in their careers. And that product ended up making me over $50k in my first year into this journey.

But that same list of assets brought other things I could do to the top of my mind many more times. That same year, I pulled from that asset list and built out several other projects. I repeat this exercise of adding to my asset list every few months. I always have some new things I can add to it. And it turns out the new things we learned the hard way tend to be especially valuable. That's where my Newsletter Launchpad came from. But it's always helpful to review and refresh this list.

Now that you've studied yourself, it's time for step two: getting inspired.

But getting inspired can be tricky because the common wisdom says the best ideas come to us in the shower. But if you wait for that, you might wait for a long time. In our community, we think the best inspiration for ideas usually comes from something external.

For example, my business partner Daniel Vassallo said that this random tweet that he stumbled upon from another creator, with a course on flipping pallets, inspired him to build out an idea.

Daniel realized he could do something similar: a brain dump of what's been working for him to grow on Twitter. Since the inspiration hit him, that project, "Everyone Can Build A Twitter Audience," has earned Daniel over a hundred thousand dollars.

Daniel couldn't have gotten that idea in the shower.* He needed to see someone else making money with a simple idea first. Then he realized he might be able to pull off something like that on a different topic, too.

But Peter Askew gets inspired to build out ideas in a whole different way.

Peter told us his inspiration is expiring domains. When a great domain is expiring, like BirthdayParties.com or DudeRanch.com, if he thinks he has what's needed to build it out into a business, he will buy it & build it. That's largely how he started selling onions on the internet. He got ahold of a good domain: Onions.com. Then he realized he could partner with a great local farm and now outranks Amazon on the search results for buying onions on the internet.

Peter’s onions are delicious; they are the best onions I've had shipped to me here in NY.

But you might get inspired to chase an idea in a whole other way, and that's good, too.

Inspiration is hard to come by. You have to take it where you find it.
—Bob Dylan

I often get inspired by talking to friends. I hear about a pain they are having, and I think, "Wait, I can create something to solve that." This article is precisely that. I spoke to a community member & was inspired to write it for you, too.

Another way to get inspired that I've found useful recently is chatting with ChatGPT. I ask it what sort of ideas might work in a given domain with my particular set of experiences, and it brainstorms with me. We can go back and forth until something inspires me.

Inspiration is an important aspect of getting good ideas to build out. Different people get inspired in different ways.

But you can try all the things I mentioned above to find inspiration for ideas you might be able to build out. Try curating your feed on your favorite social network with people who are making things. Try enmeshing yourself and talking with other builders. Try talking to friends about their problems. Try brainstorming with ChatGPT. Try looking at expiring domains.

Try as many things as you can here, and give yourself time and space to get inspired. And chances are high that if you try all of that, some things you might be able to do will come to mind.

Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.
—Pablo Picasso

But once you're inspired, it's onto step three: study the market.

Many people are the way I used to be. They get inspired, and they just start building.

But one of my biggest regrets about all the side projects I built out when I was a full-time employee is that I wasn't rigorous about them. I did not study the market for any of my ideas, and this hurt my odds of success.

Here is an example of what I mean: I was inspired to do a side project by a friend who bought a few unlisted homes by simply knocking on people's doors and making offers. So I built something called Olive Offers, and the idea was anyone could put offers on homes even if they weren't for sale. A person can pay us a few dollars, and we send a nice, official-looking envelope with their offer to the homeowner of the home they like. Then, we get the homeowner on the site and get the negotiation going.

I thought, "I can't wait for this thing to go big so I can quit my job."

But I was wrong. I spent a few months building Olive Offers, and then no one wanted it. I even ran ads and burnt some money running traffic to it.

Some early screen shots I found from my side project.

Now if I had done just a little bit of studying the market, I would've seen that there was at least one other guy doing this exact same thing and struggling with this same crap idea. I could've studied his traffic. I could've studied the search terms. But I went straight to building and burnt a few months of my nights and weekends, a few good dollars, and quite a bit of my motivation.

Studying the market won't guarantee success—nothing can. But it can help you decide which small bet *not* to place a little more scientifically.

Here are a few ways you can study the market.

If it's a book that you want to write, our community member Greg Lim told us to always check the Best Seller Rank (BSR) on Amazon. This is a good proxy for how well books are selling.

For example, just the other day, I was doing a little research for a potential idea and came across this great self-published book on prompting children to write.

The book had a Best Seller Rank of about 4,000 at the time of my research last week. That rank can be put into a free BSR calculator (you can Google BSR Calculator), and that will tell you that this book sells 50+ physical copies per day.

That tells me there is some demand for a book like that.

But it's not just Books. Hassan Osman told us that we can do something similar for courses on Udemy too. And, of course, just because someone else is selling well doesn't automatically mean we will, too, but it gives us some baseline of where the market is. If nothing is selling, the odds that we'll be the exception are low.

But it's not just for books and courses either. You can use search tools and Google as a proxy for how much demand there is for a software idea or any other idea you might have to build out. With a baseline, you can begin to formulate a hypothesis.

For example, if I had researched my "Unlisted Homes" idea a little more via one of the search engine tools like Ahrefs or AnswerThePublic, I would've seen another signal that it's getting searched about 30 times per month across the entire world, which is pretty terrible as a small bet.

Results for my search term “Unlisted Homes” from AnswerThePublic

There are other things that go into creating more rigor around placing a small bet, all of which can be guided by this step of studying the market.

For example, you can set some expectation of payoff for the time and resources you'll invest into an idea. Once you do that, you begin to form your hypothesis for the bet. You'll also want to make sure you timebox your commitment so you don't turn it into an indefinite project, and so on.

But let's go back to my failed side project example, Olive Offers, one more time. As we saw, Google tells me that only 30 people per month search for "Unlisted Homes.” I had priced my product at $19.95; for the time I was investing in building it (a few months of nights and weekends), I'd need 100 or more sales per month for a year straight to feel good about the resource investment. But given the signals, it would be pretty unreasonable for me to expect 100 or more sales per month for this product.

But this is why the three steps I shared with our community members on the call can get you 80% of the way there to find good ideas to build out.

So, let's recap our steps.

First, we study ourselves and create an asset list—or an asset stack, as we call it in the community. This list isn't the only set of things you can do. I know you can learn new things, too. But this is the list of things you can do easily without much research and with less risk. It's a good list to have handy.

Second, we find some inspiration. There are many ways to generate inspiration for ideas. As we saw, getting inspired to chase an idea you can easily pull off has its advantages. It lowers your risk of over-investing, increases your odds of a small win, and can potentially create more assets you can reuse later.

Third, we study the market a little bit and do some research. We do this to try to formulate a more realistic hypothesis about our project. We know that no amount of research can tell us with certainty if something will succeed. There is far too much randomness at play in the world of business. But still, we do the research because it helps us cap our downsides and risks.

When we do these things, we’re well on our way and working toward finding good ideas to build out.

*Daniel Vassallo wrote an in-depth piece, “Imagination is Overrated.” on why external inspiration is the best kind. And a thank you to Daniel for giving feedback that improved this piece.