Finding and Generating Ideas

Ideas are not scarce and they are not valuable. What's scarce is the discipline to kill the bad ones quickly. This chapter is about generating candidates systematically and then trying very hard to destroy them.

The concept

Two beliefs make this stage go wrong.

"I need a brilliant, original idea." You don't. Most successful software businesses are a known category executed for a specific underserved group, or a known workflow made dramatically less painful. Superhuman was email. Notion was documents. Linear was issue tracking. Originality lives in the execution and the customer, not the category.

"I have my idea, now I build." This is the expensive one. The correct posture at this stage is negative: you are hunting for reasons to stop. A teardown costs a day; building the wrong thing costs six months. That's a 180:1 return on scepticism, and people skip it because killing your own idea feels like failure while writing code feels like progress.

Reframe it: killing a bad idea is the progress.

Where real ideas come from

Ranked by how well they tend to work:

The bottom row is where most first ideas come from and where most of them should die.

Feature vs shape: the distinction that matters most

The single most useful question you can ask about an idea:

Could a well-resourced competitor ship this against me in two weeks?

A feature is something your product does. A shape is what your product is.

• "Alarm app with maths problems", a feature. Every alarm app already has it or can add it in a sprint.
• "A structured 90-day authored course, not a tracker", a shape. Technically easy, but it's hundreds of hours of work nobody else wants to do.

Features are copied in a sprint. Shapes require someone to restructure their product, retrain their users, or do labour they've decided not to do.

📐 The most accessible moat for a small team is labour nobody else will spend. Not proprietary technology, you probably don't have any. Depth of content, breadth of integrations, quality of curation, obsessive support. Boring, unglamorous, and genuinely defensible.

The platform-feasibility trap

Every idea depends on something you don't control: a platform API, a data source, a store policy, a third-party service. Find that dependency and read its actual limitations before you commit, not the marketing page, the section titled "Limitations."

This kills more products than competition does, and it's usually discoverable in an afternoon.

📐 Best practice

Generate in volume, judge separately. Keep a running idea list, one line each, no filtering. Judging while generating suppresses both.

Evaluate at least three candidates in parallel. A single idea has nothing to lose to. Comparison exposes quality that introspection doesn't.

Time-box it. Three candidates, one day each, decide on day four. Research past that point is procrastination wearing a lab coat.

Write a kill note for every idea you reject, one paragraph, three reasons. At 2am on day 40 you will try to resurrect a dead idea, and that paragraph is what stops you.

Check for recent entrants with an audience. Everyone checks the top 10 in the store. Almost nobody asks "did a creator with 100k followers ship this in the last 12 months?" That's the one that kills you, because they launch to a warm audience on day one.

Score the grind, not just the market. Every product has one unglamorous, high-volume task: writing 500 lessons, shipping 3 videos a day, doing 20 sales calls a week, labelling training data. Name yours and ask honestly whether you can do it 500 times. This, not passion, is what "founder-market fit" actually means.

💀 Common mistakes

Falling in love before researching. The tell: you find yourself arguing with the evidence. Give the kill verdict to someone else. If they say "that's clearly dead" and you're still negotiating, you're in love, wait 48 hours.

Analysis paralysis. Week three of "research," nothing built, no decision. The time-box exists for this.

Treating market size as encouragement. A big market means the leader is well-funded and the ad auction is expensive. Big-and-growing is a reason for caution, not excitement. What you want is a proven market with an unserved shape.

Only checking incumbents. See above, recent entrants with distribution are the real threat.

Skipping the platform-limitations read. An afternoon now, or month three.

Picking the highest-scoring idea you have no appetite for. You will stall at week three with no content, no posts, and no calls. The score doesn't survive contact with the grind.

Assuming "someone is already doing it" means stop. It's a kill signal when they're doing your specific wedge with distribution. It's a good signal when they're proving the market and leaving a shape uncovered.

Confusing a tool for a business. "I'll build a better X" where X is free and open source is a hobby unless you can name who pays and why.

The professional workflow

 1. COLLECT (ongoing, no filtering)
    A running list. One line per idea. Never judge here.

 2. SHORTLIST (3 candidates)
    Pick on gut. Gut is fine for shortlisting, useless for deciding.

 3. TEARDOWN each — one day, fixed structure:
      · market size + demand evidence
      · every real competitor: downloads, revenue, pricing
      · ⭐ any recent entrant WITH an audience?
      · ⭐ the platform dependency and its real limits
      · distribution: how would anyone find this?
      · monetization benchmarks in the category
      · the grind: what's the 500× task?
      · one-line verdict

 4. RUN THE KILL TREE (below)

 5. WRITE KILL NOTES for the losers

 6. DECIDE — and record why, dated

The kill tree

        Does anyone already pay for this, or its offline twin?
                          │
              NO ─────────┴───────── YES
              │                        │
        ☠️ KILL                Is there a dominant, beloved leader?
   (you'd be paying to               │
    create a market)          YES ───┴─── NO
                               │           │
                  Can you name a SEGMENT    │
                  they serve badly?         │
                       │                    │
                 NO ───┴─── YES             │
                 │           │              │
            ☠️ KILL          └──────┬───────┘
                                    │
                    Has anyone WITH AN AUDIENCE shipped
                    your exact wedge in the last 18 months?
                                    │
                        YES ────────┴──────── NO
                         │                      │
                    ☠️ KILL              Is your wedge a FEATURE or a SHAPE?
                                                │
                                   FEATURE ─────┴───── SHAPE
                                      │                  │
                                 ☠️ KILL          Does the platform actually
                            (copyable in           permit the core promise?
                             a sprint)                    │
                                              NO ─────────┴───── YES
                                               │                   │
                                          ☠️ KILL          Can you do the
                                     (read the docs)       500× grind?
                                                                   │
                                                        NO ────────┴─── YES
                                                         │                │
                                                    ⚠️ RISKY          ✅ BUILD

Tools, websites & costs

Total for this stage: ~$20. It is the best-value money in the entire book.

A teardown prompt that produces something useful

Generic prompts produce encouragement. This one is built to find the kill:

Write a brutal, investment-grade teardown of this idea: [IDEA],
for [SPECIFIC CUSTOMER].

Sections: market size · demand evidence · every real competitor with
downloads/revenue/pricing · technical feasibility · distribution ·
monetization benchmarks · unit economics · retention · moat · risks ·
realistic outcome range · one-line verdict.

Rules:
- Your job is to find the reason this FAILS, not to encourage me.
- Mark every figure [VERIFIED — source] or [ESTIMATE]. Never blend them.
- Specifically check: has anyone with an existing audience shipped this
  in the last 18 months?
- Specifically check: what platform API does the core promise depend on,
  and what are that API's documented limitations?
- Name the single highest-volume, least glamorous task this product
  will demand of its founder.

The two "specifically check" lines earn their keep. They're the questions that kill ideas early.

Alternatives & trade-offs

Idea-first vs customer-first. Customer-first ("I will serve dental practices; what do they need?") is more reliable but requires access to that customer. Idea-first is faster and riskier. If you have genuine access to a niche, prefer customer-first.

Solve your own problem vs research a market. Your own problem gives you speed and taste, but you may not be typical. Validate that others have it (Chapter 05) before assuming.

Novel vs proven category. Proven categories have proven demand and real competitors. Novel categories have no competitors and often no demand. Proven category, novel shape or segment is the highest-percentage play for a first product.

Fast-to-money vs long-term interest. Thin AI wrappers and single-purpose utilities can reach revenue in weeks; they also compete purely on marketing and get cloned. Deep products take longer and defend better. Be honest about which you have the appetite to sustain.

Checklist

• I evaluated at least three ideas, not one
• Each has a written teardown, not a vibe
• For each I know the top 3 competitors with rough downloads and revenue
• I checked for a recent entrant with an audience
• I identified the platform dependency and read its limitations page
• I can state my wedge as a shape, not a feature
• I know the 500× grind and have honestly assessed my appetite for it
• I wrote a kill note for every rejected idea
• I know who already pays for this or its offline equivalent
• Total spend so far: under $50

📓 Case Study: running ideas against each other

Project: SOLIS. The founder evaluated four ideas in parallel rather than committing to one.

The alarm app, a textbook kill. A "Duolingo of waking up": an alarm that won't switch off until you complete tasks. The teardown's verdict wasn't "bad idea," which is what makes it instructive:

"A real, proven market, but a brutally crowded one where an indie just shipped your exact idea on top of Apple's new APIs."

Demand was overwhelming, Alarmy alone: 82M+ downloads, ~1.9M DAU, 4.8★ across 2M+ reviews, an estimated ~$500k/month. Three findings killed it anyway:

1. An entrenched, beloved leader. You don't beat 4.8★ across two million reviews with a feature.
2. A recent entrant with distribution. In September 2025 the developer behind a popular planner app, someone with an existing audience, shipped a polished task-based alarm on Apple's new AlarmKit at $19.99/yr. Not a competitor: the same product, already built, launching warm.
3. The wedge was a feature. Maths problems, QR scan, step counting, facial recognition, all already shipping in four different apps.

And then the one that would have surfaced in month three: AlarmKit, the only sanctioned iOS path, fires the alert but does not wake your app, can't detect a swipe-away, and only plays bundled sounds. So "verify with your face before it stops" can only run after the user chooses to open your app, which is precisely the thing the product promises they can't avoid. The core promise was not shippable on the platform. One afternoon of reading found it.

The one that scored well and still lost. A separate scan of seven niches identified AI camera utilities as the fastest path to revenue, Cal AI reportedly went from two teenagers to $1M MRR in six months; the category grew ~2,990% YoY. Every objective score said build this.

It wasn't built, for two reasons that map directly onto this chapter:

• The memo itself concluded "the moat is brand + distribution + ASO, not tech", meaning the entire game is marketing, against people who've been training at it for a year, with a product cloneable in a fortnight.
• The grind test failed. The founder could not have written 450 lessons about calorie counting, but could about Stoicism. On day 19, authoring item #847, appetite is the only thing keeping you at the desk.

⚠️ Where it deviated from best practice: the research ran after building started.

Best practice is scan first, then build. The first SOLIS commit is dated June 24; the alarm teardown is June 28 and the opportunity scan June 29. Investment memos about alternatives were being written five days into building something else.

It worked out, SOLIS survived the comparison, which is genuinely strong evidence, but it worked out by luck. Had the scan concluded "build the skin app instead," five days were gone. Do the scan first; it costs two days and it's the cheapest insurance available.

Lessons

1. Research is negative work. You're hunting for reasons to stop. Reframing it that way stops it feeling like procrastination.
2. A day of teardown beats a month of building. The platform limitation that killed the alarm app was findable in an afternoon and would otherwise have surfaced in month three.
3. Check for recent entrants with audiences, not just incumbents.
4. Features are copied in a sprint; shapes are not. Ask what a competitor could ship against you in two weeks.
5. The most available moat for a small team is labour nobody else will spend.
6. Read the platform's limitations page before you commit. It decides feasibility more than your code does.
7. Score the grind. The highest-scoring idea you have no appetite for will stall at week three.
8. Write kill notes. Future-you tries to resurrect dead ideas at 2am.
9. Do the scan before you start building, not five days in.

Next: Chapter 03: Market Research and Competitive Analysis →