How do you know a problem is worth building for?
I am planning out my next project for a hackathon. As I previously completed two vastly different types of products, DukaanMate and LeetSeek, I want to focus on being more thoughtful with validating the next idea as opposed to just beginning coding.
Instead of asking individuals for new features, I think I will ask them to tell me the most recent time they had to accomplish a task that caused frustration, and then use those responses as inspiration.
To all Makers that have created and sold a SaaS product: What drove your conclusion that this is a "real" issue? Were you able to see the same work-around over and over again from users? Or were there some users that expressed their willingness to pay for a solution? If either of these are examples that fit your experience, please provide a specific example of how you validated the problem and what you learned.
Replies
Asking people about the last frustrating task they did is a good start. People describe real problems much better than features they imagine.
Before IFTTT, the workaround I kept seeing was people managing their online lives by hand. They copied the same post from a personal social network to a professional one. They moved photos into Dropbox folders one at a time. Nobody called it a problem. It was just a chore they did.
That's the signal I trust most. Not people saying "I'd use that." People already doing something tedious to get the result, every week, without being asked.
The second signal came later. In 2010 I shared a short post about a side project with a strange name, "ifttt," and one sentence to explain it: if this, then that. People understood it right away. That told us more than any survey.
So my order would be: find the repeated workaround first. Then see if people will give you something real for the fix: their time, an email, money. If you see both, the problem is real.