🔄 How to Generate More Viable Ideas...

3-step idea generation method for startups: Identify market pains, brainstorm with 'How Might We' questions, and map the customer journey to uncover deeper insights and develop targeted, viable solutions.

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Steve Blank once said that he thinks most startups fail because they don’t “find the right product-market fit”. But if ideas start from a bad place, the chances of them never hitting PMF are great. So we thought: Isn’t there a way to generate ideas out of a place where it makes it easier or more likely to get the right fit?  

You know, so you don’t even start working on things there's no market for…

Turns out growth hacker Max Bonpain wrote an article about it on Medium, and we quite liked his idea-gen method (which they take even further into POC and MVP, but we’re only looking at the idea bit now).

Solving the right problems

1. Start with finding problems in segments

Maybe you read something in The Open Letter, or you have specific domain knowledge – likely the best place to focus. Focus your efforts on the various pains that a market faces. I.e. let’s say you are a doctor (or targetting this segment) you might know that doctors have issues collecting payments promptly.

While this might be a great place to start, engage more roleplayers in the space to start unpacking the nuance of it and the “real problems” (the real reason they are experiencing pain). I.e. timely collections might have nothing to do with the tech they use, but rather a business process to bill later making collections harder. In changing the business process, the role tech plays is different than the former where it simply acts as a collection mechanism.

Either way, chances are those experiencing the pain might not be able to get to the root themselves and you need to discover it through iteration and experiments.

2. Use the “How Might We” method

Use a visual tool for sorting ideas – use Figma or just colourful sticky notes on an old-school whiteboard. Write each problem as a “How might we…” statement. For example: if they battle with tracking their payments, write “How could we make payment tracking effortless?”

Don’t generate solutions yet. First, spread all the problems out and see if you can spot any general themes. It’s important to map all the problems you can find, even if they are not part of your original idea or direction.

Are a lot of them focused on a particular theme (payments, finance, admin or repetitive daily tasks perhaps)? Group these similar ones together.

Now, consider the individual groups and start generating solutions for each group – this helps you generate concepts that impact multiple problems.

You could even just focus on the groups with the most problems in it first.

3. What you are up against

Just like you’d journey map a product, mapping for ideation is creating a hypothetical journey of how customers might currently try and solve each problem they face – they might search for tools, try different methods, use MS Excel, get frustrated with complex software or simply give up.

Again, put each step in the journey on a sticky note or a visual tool and identify where they have pain points. Brainstorm how a product/service could solve each pain point to flesh out your ideas.

Next, you’d do a proof of concept (hopefully you can use no-code/low-code) and get it in a customer’s hands. This is where you can start uncovering the “real problems” and offer something meaningful to solve them.

Got a killer idea-gen hack? Hit reply and let us know…