Brad Costanzo shows two ways to find startup ideas. First, contact successful businesses and ask about their pain points and paid solutions. Second, search Twitter for "is there an app for" to spot unmet needs people are looking for.
Chapters
Okay, as promised, got a couple of awesome ways that you can generate ideas for your next major business venture. App, software, or technology solution. I mean, fortunes have been made from the two methods that I'm about to reveal to you right now. The second one's gonna blow your mind at how fun and easy it is. So the very first thing you're gonna do is find an industry that you may have an affinity with, skills in experience with, or contacts. And, and you're simply going to identify some of the biggest players in that industry that you can find. Use Google, use your network, use Facebook. And ideally, you're going to find businesses that are successful. Ideally, they're paying for advertising and they've got a higher than average customer value. They're not selling things for a few bucks. And that's kind of important because you want to be able to create a solution that they're willing to pay good money for so that ideally one good result from them creates a, you know, a positive ROI on your solution. That being said, what you're simply going to do is contact them and you're going to pretend, if you need to be, to be a software developer or software entrepreneur looking to do some research. So I would maybe call you up and say, hey, this is Brad Costanzo, you know, you're the owner of the business or etc. Great. I'm a software entrepreneur or a software developer. You choose. And I'm researching some of the challenges currently faced by, I don't know if you're in the legal profession, lawyers or law firms right now, and that's because I'm developing some solutions to make their lives easier and to bring a new app or software to market. And I was hoping that you could have, you know, you had a few minutes for me to see if there's any way that, you know, some of the challenges that you're facing could be worked into the software that I'm, that I'm currently developing. The reason I picked you is because you seem to be, you know, very prominent, very successful. And I thought you'd have some good insights. Now, see, that's very unassuming. I'm not asking to sell them anything, but then I would ask, do you have about five or 10 minutes right now, or can I, can I just get on your schedule and I think I can make it worth your while if we discover something useful. If they say yes, when they say yes, because some people will, and you really only need one for this to work, jump on with them and just ask them questions. What Are some of the biggest challenges you're having right now? What are some of the tasks that you find yourself doing repeatedly? What are the most tedious tasks? Do you have any low level employees that you feel should be able to be outsourced by a software that could do their job for them if it only existed? What do you wish existed? What software or SaaS are you using now that A you really like or B you are sick of and you wish could be improved? What are you paying for right now? You want to find out? It's great to find out what they're paying for because then you can go research what they're using and see that's interesting. How can I compete? Could I improve something on this? Can I make it a little bit better? By the way, if you're not a software engineer or entrepreneur or whatever, I'll show you how to be in just one second. The point is reach out to people in a market. It can be any market, ideally one you like. And ask them questions. Then dig through the data, analyze it. See, this is not magical. This is simply the type of work that most people aren't willing to do because maybe it makes them uncomfortable, but it's kind of things that generate multi million dollar, sometimes billion dollar ideas. It just all depends if you're willing to pick up the phone and make a call, right? Not rocket science. Now as I promised, I'm going to move to the second one and this is much quicker to do. And you're probably not going to find your multimillion dollar immediately with this, but you might. And I got this from my buddy Dan Martell, who I'll introduce you to in a second. But what Dan did or he told me was go to Twitter and do the Twitter search. You know the little search bar up there. And in quotes, type in is there an app end quote or is there an app for end quote? And the reason why you're doing those end quotes because that string, you're looking for people in the Twitter universe who are typing in, is there an app for doing xyz? Because if they're looking for it, maybe they looked in Google and they didn't find it. They're asking Twitter. Those could be like, oh my God, forehead slapping, simple. I'm gonna go create that. So step one, go ask individuals, go ask people who are own a business or you might be able to solve their problems and just become a question and answer machine. Dig through the data, see if it comes up or just search Twitter. Is there an app for end Quote and dig. Now, it doesn't happen overnight necessarily, but it does happen. I know I've done this and this is one of the ways that I came up with one of the ideas for a business that I grew and sold. Speaking of that, if you are the least bit, if you already have your idea or you're like, okay, I got my idea, now what? So what? I don't know how to bring it to market and I'm sure as hell not a software engineer developer. The good news is you don't have to. My friend Dan Martell, who I interviewed on my podcast recently and he told me the Twitter thing, he recently just put out a, a great video on how to do no cost, zero cost product development and true customer validation. And so Dan is a guy who's like started and sold like three big, big really successful Internet apps software as a service and he just did one recently. So the guy knows what he's doing. He's a friend of mine, he's a guy that I turn to whenever I have some of these questions. And he's got a great little video, it's linked right down here below and you can go check it out right now. Absolutely. For free. In fact, it's the thing that I highly suggest you doing because there's people like Dan, when they talk, you really want to listen. So hopefully this has been useful. Let me know if you have any other questions, but enjoy and go check out Dan's idea to exit video.
