I’m not saying this is the only way to come up with a business idea – there are shed loads of approaches – but this really helps people (Myself, clients, friends, my dog… I could go on) who want to start a business but are nervous about risk.
Most advice tells you to find a painful problem and validate whether people will pay to solve it. That works, but it’s intimidating for beginners.
This system flips it: skip the problem validation and validate through existing products instead.
Why? A product people are already paying for has already validated the problem AND proven demand. When you build something similar, you massively decrease your risk. You’re not guessing—you’re copying what works.
Step 1: List your long-term interests
Write down everything you’ve been interested in for 3+ years. For me that’s education, building businesses, fountain pens, gaming, etc. It could be anything for you.
Then rank them from most to least interesting.
People get stuck here because interests overlap. The fix: round-robin tournament with a coin flip test.
Say you have 8 interests. Pit them against each other—Gaming vs Fountain Pens. Make one heads, one tails. Flip the coin. If it lands on heads and you’re happy, go with it. If it lands on heads and you think “damn, should’ve been the other one,” you’ve just found your real preference. Simple.
Pick your top interest and focus on that.
Step 2: Find products with proven demand
Start exploring products and services in your interest area. Look at marketplaces where businesses sell stuff.
Examples:
Amazon for physical products Udemy for courses Etsy for handmade/niche products
You’re looking for two things:
Products that interest you Products with lots of reviews
Reviews = validation. If a product has 1 review, demand is weak. If it has 1,000 reviews, it’s definitely selling well and solving a real problem.
Make a list of 5-6 products with decent review counts that interest you.
Critical: Look at REAL products, don’t just brainstorm with AI.
When you see real products with real reviews, you’re pre-validating demand before you build anything. That’s where the decreased risk comes from.
Step 3: Mine negative reviews for pain points
Reviews are feedback directly from users. As you build your business, the iteration loop -the thing that directs your product’s focus and features toward better product-market fit- is driven by customer feedback. You’re building what your target market wants, not what you think they want. Slight distinction, but vitally important.
By looking at reviews before you even test an idea, you’re gathering data about what people love about that product category and what they dislike. This is your opportunity to step into the market and solve these little sub-problems that reviewers have identified.
Here’s how:
Go to the 1-4 star reviews. Look for sentences with negative sentiment—things like “I had a problem with…” Copy those sentences into a file.
Ask AI to bucket similar complaints together. Maybe all the sentences about bad UI go in one bucket, all the complaints about poor buttons go in another. Then ask AI to order the buckets from largest to smallest.
This immediately shows you the biggest pain points about this solution. There’s an old saying in entrepreneurship: the solution is the problem. Every solution creates its own problems.
The top 3 buckets of problems become half your roadmap for creating a new product.
Step 4: Mine positive reviews for what works
Now look at 5-star reviews. You want to learn what people love about the product and why it works for them. This is the second half of your roadmap.
Copy sentences about what people love. Again, use AI to bucket similar sentiments together and order them by frequency.
Go for the top 3 (you can do more if there are lots of positives).
Now you’ve got 3 positive features that MUST be in your new product and 3 negative problems that need to be addressed.
Step 5: Test the idea (not the product)
Formulate an idea test that brings together an offer highlighting:
The positives you’ll keep The new features you’ll add The benefits those features will have on eliminating the sub-problems you discovered
Articulate exactly how you’d solve those problems. Maybe people found the layout of a book too difficult to read. Maybe a printable on Etsy had resolution issues. Whatever it is, be clear about your offer and list out features with their benefits.
Now test the idea – NOT the product, just the idea.
Find a community on Reddit, Facebook, or anywhere you have quick access to a group of people. Post the idea, pointing out the features you’d include, the benefits, how you’d solve those sub-problems.
See what interest you get. Do people comment “this is a great idea”? Do they say “I’ve seen this before, it’s crap”? Is it more positive than negative?
This is your first primary validation.
Make sure you post where your actual target market hangs out. Just give it your best guess—it’ll be people interested in your interest area, so you’ll have a good idea.
Finally, if you get lots of positive comments, positive reinforcement, DMs, etc., that’s a good indicator you should press forward and test it with an actual MVP product.
And that’s one of the ways I’ve go too come up with tailored business ideas.
P.S. I’ve got pretty bad dyslexia, so I write with my voice using voice memos on my iPhone. I then drop the transcript into Notion and let its AI sort out the mess. So you might find a few em dashes stuffed in here and there depending on whether it used Claud or ChatGPT. Either way, thanks for understanding and I hope you know I appreciate you taking the time to read this. And any feedback is really appreciated.
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