Most developers live in a product world where the emphasis is on solutions. If your working within a big business, that’s totally fine.
But if you’re creating a business, solution-first is a “build it an they will come” mentality.
There’s no promise that if you solve a problem someone will pay for it.
Problem-first
It might be better to find a problem first.
Then we know the friction exists in the real world, and that we have access to people with the problem.
Whereas with the solution-first approach, it’s very easy to build solutions without having access to an audience that wants to buy it. We don’t know if they’re trully needed or if we have access to buyers.
Experiment
So how do you find a problem?
By doing research, by talking to people.
My plan is to book about 10 devs and talk to them about some of the issues they are running into. I do have an area in mind, but I won’t publish it here just in case they read this, I don’t pollute the research.
https://twitter.com/joshnuss/status/1405483902102294528
As I narrow the problem, I’ll do more rounds of research.
P.S. These ideas come from the excellent book The Mom Test