Choosing a Software Idea

As a disclaimer, the choice of which software to build matters, but it’s not going to make or break your ability to succeed.

You don’t marry the idea, you marry the people who’s problem it solves. The ideas come and go because products pivot, they solve the same problem in different ways, or they solve different problems altogether.

Notice how I didn’t title this section “Coming up with an idea.”

The phrase “coming up with an idea” puts you into a mindset that forces you to use your own creativity to make up a hypothetical problem for a hypothetical person. This will make you hypothetical money.

We want to solve for things that exist in the real world for real people who have real problems. This will make you real money.

I also want to point out that we’re not finding ideas, we’re finding problems. Ideas are worth a dime a dozen. People don’t pay for those, they pay to have their problems go away.

“Solve problems for people and you’ll never run out of a job.”

Your software idea should have an origin story that has names of real people experiencing tangible pain.

Here’s the story of how I came up with the idea for my first successful software.

It began with a simple DM to my friend Connor. I was loosely connected with him through college, and I reached out to grab coffee and learn about his social media marketing business, Aebly Studio.

We met up at Moxie, a coffee shop off of 16th St just south of Camelback Rd in Phoenix, AZ.

I was just a few months in to doing freelance software development full time after quitting my job doing marketing for a solar power company.

I wasn’t searching for a pain point that could be solved with software, I was just looking to learn about the business and how they operated, especially since I had a background in social media marketing.

We discussed all sorts of different aspects of their business. At some point though, Connor shared that they were texting clients pictures they were going to use for their client’s posts. They also texted over the captions.

This became a bottleneck for them as it was slow and difficult to get multiple posts approved at a time.

There were solutions in the market, but none were tailored to their specific needs.

I decided to build a prototype for a software that could do Instagram post approval with their clients and had it finished in a day or two.

At the time, I had no idea what I was doing. But as we’ll see, I had actually stumbled across an idea that I would grow into a software that would later be acquired.

With that story in mind, let’s evaluate why it was a good idea and discover a way to discern which software ideas are worth prioritizing over others.

The following is a list of questions to evaluate if your start-up idea is good.

Knowing that the software from my story ultimately resulted in a successful acquisition, we’ll use my start-up as an example evaluation.

Since I had experience and domain expertise in social media from a job in the past, and personally knew the importance and difficulty of getting posts approved, I understood the problem very well and was equipped with development skills to bring the solution to life with my unique understanding of the problem.

Social media management is one of the largest fields in marketing today with hundreds of thousands of potential customers.

Without an efficient way to get posts approved, Connor’s business would be constrained by this issue. They needed a way to get this done, or they wouldn’t be able to scale. It was a need.

Other post-approval tools existed, just none that they liked. Most software in the space were focused on providing a full suite of tools that didn’t apply to Aebly Studio’s approach to social media. They didn’t need post scheduling or AI post generation, they just needed a way to get posts approved. Providing a simple product made this solution stand out. This made the target audience smaller, but that wasn’t an issue to me.

I had a personal relationship with the first customer, Connor. They had a problem and were both willing and able to pay for it.

Some questions will apply more to some ideas that others. In my case, the following questions were less applicable.

I wasn’t going to be using this software myself, but since I had a good relationship with the target customer used, I could rely on their feedback and insights to make changes, in addition to having insights to it myself.

I sold this software in it’s infancy because I wasn’t interested in continuing to grow it as a company. So I’d definitely recommend thinking through this depending on your goals.

Nothing had recently changed, but that wasn’t necessary for my idea.

I would venture to say that the social media software for businesses is a good space, but I haven’t done the research on it.

Search for ideas in the pains you experience in your field of expertise or through talking with people who have expertise in a field.