Lenny Rachitsky explains how founders can spot product ideas by identifying latent demand. He cites Snapchat's TBH feature and the Arabic app Sarahah, which topped the U.S. App Store, as examples of ideas that crystallized existing user motivations.
Chapters
After building all these apps, there's this senior in high school, he told me about this trend called TBH that kids were playing on Snapchat. I looked on the App Store and the number one app in the United States was an app called Sarahah. But the thing that was most interesting was the entire app was in Arabic. The number one app in the United States was in Arabic. And that was the strongest signal that you could ever have that people want something. And so when I meet with founders, I often tell them the way you should be searching for product ideas is this concept of latent demand, where people are trying to obtain a particular value. And if you can actually crystallize what their motivation is and build a product around, you can have this kind of intense adoption.