In 2014 I was really enjoying my day job. I was creating games and virtual worlds for the website GaiaOnline.com. My main focus was preparing content for events like Halloween and Christmas. These were tight deadlines because, come what may, you can’t move the dates of a holiday.
No matter how fun your dev job is, you’ll always have that idea in the back of your mind. It is an idea that gets you through boring meetings that pull you away from your actual work. You dream of moving on from your company and into the riches your great vision will provide you.
The reality
As a developer, I was given a lot of projects to work on. Some were downright boring, and others were magical. When I thought about my own projects outside of the company, I gravitated toward what would be fun to work on.
Many of these revolved around games. When they failed to make any money, I simply moved on to the next project.
Some of the projects that I tried were:
- Online clipboard
- Seek the Word Puzzles
- Quote website
- Voice Mp3 Files
If I went back through everything, there were probably 30 projects that I don’t want to recall.
I spent a lot of time with nothing to show for it. True, I learned a lot, but I needed an income.
What works?
Finally, after randomly posting products, I stumbled across one that made me money. It was called ItemScribe, and it created product descriptions. This was before AI was a thing, and I had to create 1000s of fill-in-the-blank templates and manually write each one.
This didn’t make a huge amount, but it supported me through all of 2020 when I couldn’t find development work due to COVID-19.
As developers, we learn to recognize patterns. We look at data and know what code needs to be written. We know how to repurpose functions with some tweaking to save time. This pattern recognition can spill into other parts of our lives as well.
So I asked myself, what made ItemScribe different? Why did it make money when all the others didn’t?
The only answer was that it solved a problem.
In fact, if your product doesn’t solve a problem, then you’ve got a problem!
Project vs Product
That seems obvious, but trying to build a product that solved someone’s problem never occurred to me.
I was always looking for a project (from the Developer’s point of view), not a product (from the Customer’s point of view).
Choose a project if you want to have fun writing that multi-player game. To make money, you have to make a product, and you have to put yourself in the user’s shoes.
Once I knew the answer to making money was to solve a problem, I tried to go this route. However, while there was some information in 2020 about solving problems, there wasn’t enough.
So… I made some more fun projects.
Also, I got a three-year contract, so my research was sporadic, but I knew I would need an income once the contract ended, so I kept looking for an answer.
Pain Points!
Once I encountered the phrase “Pain Points,” things got a little easier. However, most of the information was specific to an industry rather than pain points as a concept. Many websites advised finding customer irritations from an existing customer base.
What I couldn’t find was anything about the process of developing products based on annoyances that customers have.
Then AI came along. AI has been a mixed blessing for me. It pretty much killed off ItemScribe. On the other hand, it has allowed me to look up information no one thought to put on a website.
I did finally find some books on the subject, which gave me a lot of better insight into the process.
So, in other words, my pain point was not being able to find pain points. Hence, this website.
How to find profitable products
This is the method I’ve been using to find products to build and what I’ve incorporated into my software that will streamline this process for you.
Start with the target audience.
Marketing is about math and human behavior. The math part is straight-forward. It’s the human behavior that’s going to throw you for a loop.
Rob Walling – Start Small. Stay Small.
This is a little difficult to do at first. We developers like to think of the product first. But to give your work the best possible chance of success, you’ll need to consider who will use it before you write that first line of code.
You may have heard of niche marketing. This is defined as targeting a specific niche market. This allows startups to focus their efforts and resources on a smaller, more defined audience.
If you already have a product in mind, you can reverse engineer it and find the target audience by working backward. Ask yourself, who is most likely to use this?
Find the Pain Points
Once you know who you are writing for, it is easier to find out what bothers them. This involves delving deep into their needs and challenges to understand what keeps them up at night.
I often check Reddit or Quora to see what people are complaining about. You can also look at reviews of existing solutions. What don’t people like about it?
One trick is to try to write software to solve your own troubles. If you can do that the chances are that someone else will also have the same problem.
Targeting the pain points is still tricky. Look at the pain point list categories on the homepage or use AI to help brainstorm.
Consider Solutions for each point.
Once you have a list of pain points, you can start brainstorming products for each. Most of the ideas will be rubbish, but that’s ok. Once you filter past the wrong ideas, the only thing left is the right ones.
For example, a teacher’s pain point might be having limited time for lesson planning and grading.
Could you write an app or website to solve that concern?
Balance Practical Solutions with Passions
You must balance your passion with a solution that will make money. To be clear, money-making products can be fun to build, but a project with fun or interest as the primary reason to build is very likely to fail.
You are going to need that passion to carry you through.
Why? One word: MARKETING
You Must Market!
We’ve all been through the process of finishing a project. The temptation is to jump to the next project and stay in our comfort zone of writing. That’s what I did.
I was pretty scared of the concept of marketing. You may be, too. But without it, our code lies in collecting digital dust on our hard drives.
A commitment to marketing is a lot longer one than a developer usually has with his code.
I won’t go into a long tale about what you need to do to market, but if you follow the steps for product creation based on a pain point, marketing becomes much more straightforward. You can use the pain point in the marketing rather than try to sell your feature list.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the key factor determining the profitability of projects is determining a problem to solve and then marketing that hardship alongside your product.
Despite the temptation to move on to the next project, it is crucial to commit to marketing efforts in order to prevent our work from going unnoticed. While the marketing concept may seem daunting, integrating it into the product creation process can simplify the overall marketing strategy and help highlight the pain points that resonate with potential customers.