How to find ideas as an indie dev or a startup founder

A lot of people think ideas come from a flash of genius. That you sit around brainstorming and suddenly a billion-dollar startup pops into your head. In reality, most ideas are way more boring than that. They come from noticing problems in your own life or in the lives of people around you.

It doesn’t matter if the problem feels small or silly. It could be “I hate carrying heavy soil bags for my plants” or “I have no idea how to get my first customers.” If you notice that you and at least one other person share the same pain, that’s already a signal. Try to solve it manually for yourself and a friend. If the solution makes life better, then it might make sense to scale it.

That’s basically how I’ve approached every project I’ve built. Here are a few examples.

Affiliate websites

I spent more than 10 years building affiliate marketing websites. In the beginning, campaigns were paid by views, so the goal was just to get as much traffic as possible. I made wild websites designed to maximize views - Toiletcam was one of them. Over time, campaigns shifted to commission-based. That changed the game.

I started checking which campaigns were trending on affiliate networks. If electricity plans were suddenly everywhere, I’d build an electricity plan comparison site. When internet connections, phone plans, and loans became hot, I did the same thing again. And when loan products changed, I adapted with new domains and keywords. It was a cycle: watch what’s trending, build something around it, optimize for search, and repeat.

It wasn’t glamorous, but it taught that spotting a shift in what people are already buying can be enough to build a business.

Learning to play instruments

Later, I worked with a company that started with an observation that adults wanted to learn instruments, but felt stuck (Yousician). The founders themselves were the exact target audience. They were asking the same questions on YouTube and Quora that other people were asking: “Can you learn an instrument as an adult?”

So we built a product that made it easy for adults to start playing. The distribution strategy was baked in. You go to where people are searching for answers and show them a better way. That’s it.

Cleaning company

This one came out of pure laziness (Freska). I didn’t want to clean my apartment. I figured there had to be other millennials who felt the same. That was the starting signal.

I started advertising in places where that audience existed - startup hubs, Slush, indie rock shows, craft breweries. The overlap was obvious. Once it worked with that crowd, it became easier to expand to other groups like career moms and families as we raised funding. The lesson here was that sometimes your own bad habits point to a business opportunity.

Pitchkit

Now I’m building Pitchkit. This one came straight from working as a VC. The problem was clear: most pitch narratives are too messy. Founders cram in too much information, so investors don’t bother reading. I was experiencing this myself as a VC as I struggled to communicate internally what the startup was doing.

Instead of just complaining about it, I built something to fix it. Pitchkit helps founders make their pitch narratives sharper and easier to understand, so investors actually read them and can communicate them internally. This one is a classic case of noticing a recurring pain in your daily work and turning it into a product.

RPG character builder

Not every idea has to be a full company. Sometimes it’s just a side project. A few days ago, I was playing a role-playing game and realized the character creation process was outdated. Sure, you can still do it on paper with books, but AI makes it faster.

So I built a quick model that helps with attributes and highlights specialties. It’s small, but it shows the same pattern: see friction, try a fix, see if it sticks. (RPGstack)

Employment initiative

One more example. When I started as a VC, I told founders about my experience scaling a cleaning company. They liked the story, but no one was actually running those kinds of experiments for them. So I started training people to do it.

That turned into an initiative that’s now employed 800+ people and has raised half a million in funding so far (Herizon). From there, I also spun it into courses on growth experiments and now into SaaS tools. Again, the signal was in plain sight. Founders wanted help, but no one was executing.

The point is: ideas don’t come from magic. They come from paying attention. If you reflect on the problems you’ve lived through, the patterns you’ve seen, or the annoyances you keep running into, you’ll notice signals. Most people don’t stop to reflect, so they miss them.

As an indie dev or founder, your best ideas are often hiding in plain sight. The trick is to notice them, test them small, and see if they deserve to grow.