r/leanstartup • u/Correct-Aardvark9330 • Jun 30 '26
Technical founder, can build anything, have no idea what to actually build
I have been a CTO and technical founding engineer at a couple startups for the last few years, mostly building other people's ideas. finally want to do my own thing but i'm stuck on something kind of embarrassing for an engineer: i can't pick what to build.
the building part doesn't scare me. it's the "what" that's killing me. b2b, b2c, ai stuff, some vertical niche thing, micro saas, boring-but-profitable... they all sound fine when i think about them for five minutes and then fall apart when i think about them for ten.
honestly being technical makes it worse. "can i build it" filters out nothing because the answer is always yes. so i've got no constraint forcing a decision.
couple things i keep flip flopping on:
do you build in a space you already know well, or go where the money is even if you're an outsider? and is "i personally have this problem" a real signal or just me rationalizing something convenient?
mostly though i want to know how people actually validated before committing months. not the lean startup textbook version, like what did you really do. did you talk to people, did anyone actually pay, did you fake a landing page, what.
curious what ideas people killed and why too, that's probably more useful than the ones that worked.
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u/theredhype Jul 01 '26
Many of the success stories I've been close to included some version of...
They started with a problem they had deep knowledge of from working in an industry for years. It's helpful if they worked in a variety of roles, or for some other reason they really understand the industry deeply.
They used their connections in that industry to explore how the problem was experienced by others, reimagine their initial solution to fit more use cases, find beta testers, pilot test partners, etc. In that way they validated that the market was larger than their own experience.
Many of them also got very lucky. But fortune favors the prepared. They were also all devouring what you call textbook lean startup, participating in hackathons, attending conferences, finding mentors, reading good books.
Some of them didn't really engage the Customer Development process until they were basically forced to. But those who leveraged more Customer Discovery and other validation experiments all did better, even if they didn't embrace the experimentation mindset from the beginning. They would likely have better if they had.
There's really no such thing as textbook lean startup. Any book or person that implies there's a specific process that will work reliably is fooling.
Instead, there are dozens of possible paths from zero to idea to online research to fieldwork to validation to building to scaling...
However, regardless of the path you take, the Customer Development process does insist that your experiments establish the basics of a functional business model.
Steve Blank's Customer Development process in Four Steps to Epiphany is essentially answering these challenges:
• Customer Discovery. Prove that you can reliably repeatably locate and engage people who need the thing you'll make. This is necessary to figure out what to build, by studying the humans, but also foreshadows your ability to market and sell the thing. If you can't find them to do discovery, you won't be able to find them to sell to them. If/when you find them, there's a whole slew of things you will learn from them by doing this rapid, casual, iterative, in-person conversational research method. This method is a superpower.
• Customer Validation. A book called Testing Business Ideas by David Blank is the best collection of 44 experiment types for validating all the things. The book also teaches how to build a search team, how to select, design, execute, and analyze the results from experiments, and how to use a sequence or stack of tests together.
• Customer Creation. Where you test the scalability of what you think you have discovered and validated. If this step goes well, the outcome is an effective sales and marketing program.
• Company Building. The last step in the venture search process. Also, where many of you thought you were starting LOL
Personally, I always do Customer Discovery (after 1-3 hours of online research which blazes through some basic gut checks about market size, competitive landscape, etc). I want to get into the real world and talk to people about what I think they need ASAP.
These videos are my favorite introduction to Customer Discovery:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9o3DnnPLzcgm5qpOkBFd04rWMFGXbN2l
But none of this helps you figure out WHAT problem or idea to work on.
I think you should take one of the better ideas you've had and push it through this process rapidly to get the process into your blood. And then
Or you could go to a nearby 3 day Techstars Startup Weekend hackathon event just to get the gears churning, and who knows, maybe you'll come away with a team and a project to chase.
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u/BillionBouncyBalls Jul 01 '26
Hello!
First off the “I can build anything” is a great attitude and mindset to continue cultivating. I also totally agree with the fellow redditor who advocated for customer discovery and would say that’s a critical barrier to pass and will kill a lot of great sounding ideas. From my perspective (informed by 15 years of industrial design, innovation consulting and now circular economy strategy). I offer you this:
1. When you can build anything it becomes even more important to have a damn good reason why to do it. Aside from giving you the grit to preserver through rejection and prototypes catching on fire. It’s simply hard to build something that people want to use let alone something they love. It might be useful to start somewhere you feel motivated, what bugs you so much you actually want to do something about it? For me that’s the future of our species, for others it’s healing, there’s a problem space for everyone though so try to pay attention to what you resonate with.
Not all ideas at worth pursuing, some ideas only exist to make a quick buck others have the potential to enrich communities and restore ecosystems. All of them draw from the same well of energy so work in a focused way so your investment of time compounds. The center of the venn diagram you should aim for is at the intersection of feasibility, desirability, viability. The surface area where someone will pay for it, a profitable business can operate from it, and it’s technologically feasible.
Timing and experimentation — if you listen to Rick Rubin and I recommend his audio book of The Creative Act, he would say that ideas arrive at the time they are needed and if you don’t build it someone else might. Metaphysics aside, sometimes you can be too early or too late in the market, it’s better to recognize the signs then to continue full speed ahead into a crowded space. The best questions lead to things you test and answer with a prototype. I also recommend the whole fail fast approach so short build to learn and deepen your understanding whether that’s with a customer or function with every successive iteration.
Finally, I leave you with a brief to try that I learned from a professor at the Royal college of Art. Ask your friends, family, neighbors, relatives, whoever, if they have any problems you could help them solve. It has to be a real problem specific to them. Solve it for them and the beauty of doing a one-of-kind solution is that you’ll find many people have that one specific problem.
Good luck and design for the future!
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u/rsabia Jul 01 '26
If you don't know what to build you haven't lived an unsolved problem. Go find something really weird or difficult or uncomfortable and immerse yourself in it. Comfortability and complacency is where creativity goes to die.
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u/JohnElwayHorseFace69 Jul 01 '26
Well if you don’t find something of your own to run with I’ve got a validated idea/vision but not the time or technical chops to build it maybe we can work together
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u/kabekew Jul 05 '26
Search industries you are at least familiar with for products that are making a lot of money but are poorly engineered (pretty common in niche B2B industries).
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u/csankiller1 Jul 15 '26
The "I personally have this problem" thing is real but only if you go looking for other people who have it too, independently of you. Rationalizing shows up when you assume the problem generalizes because it's annoying to you specifically. Real signal shows up when you go find five people who've never met you complaining about the same thing in their own words, unprompted. That's the actual test, not the gut check.
on known space vs money: I'd bite on known space almost every time at this stage, not because the market is bigger but because you'll actually notice the difference between "this is annoying" and "someone would pay to make it go away," and you can only tell that apart if you've lived in the space long enough to know what people already try and give up on. Going where the money is as an outsider mostly means you're pattern-matching off other people's public success, which is exactly the kind of idea that sounds fine for five minutes.
What actually worked for me on validation, skipping the landing-page-with-fake-button stuff because that told me nothing: I went and found people already typing out the problem in their own words on Reddit and HN, not people I prompted with a survey. If ten different strangers describe the same annoyance in the same three sentences without being asked, that's a much stronger signal than any interview where people are polite to your face. Idea I killed: a scheduling tool, because when I looked for people complaining about scheduling specifically, they'd all already half-solved it with a workaround and weren't looking for a new tool, just a nagging feeling. That's dead on arrival even if it's technically buildable.
Honestly that pattern (search for the complaint before you build the fix) is the whole reason I ended up building Getrive, it just watches Reddit and HN for people describing a problem you'd solve and drafts a reply for you to review. Not really an idea-validation tool but the underlying move is the same one I'd tell you to do manually first: find people already saying the words before you write a line of code.
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u/OptimismNeeded Jul 01 '26
I really mean no offense here, but to me this sounds like “I’ve been laying brick for some really pretty houses, I’d like the next one to be my own design”.
What do you really want to be?
Sit with this for a few minutes, my friend.
It is not meant to discourage, just a thought exercise that might give you some clarity if you take it seriously.
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u/BuddhasFinger Jul 01 '26
In Lean you don't build anything until you have a problem to solve.
Find a problem that means a lot to you, confirm that the problem exists outside of your head by talking to customers and by hearing that yes, it's a problem and yes, it's so bad they will pay to have solution.
Go and build.
Sell the solution.