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How do you decide which "idea posts" are worth building as SaaS?

2•dabdabay•1h ago
I constantly see posts on Reddit, GitHub issues, Indie Hackers, etc. where people complain about workflows, manual processes, or missing tools.

The hard part for me isn’t finding ideas — it’s deciding which ones represent a real, repeatable problem vs. one-off complaints or niche edge cases.

Curious how others do this: • Do you rely on frequency? • Personal pain only? • Comments/upvotes? • Talking to users directly?

I’m trying to build less and judge better. Would love to hear real heuristics people use.

Comments

throwup238•55m ago
My heuristic is: if you have to ask, you're probably not the right person for the job.

What your describing sounds like the wantrepreneur process and it usually doesn't end well because you will likely have no existing experience in the business domain you are targeting, unless your target market happens to be developer tooling*.

Most successful startups are made by people who already know the problem they are trying to solve because they've experienced it first hand. They have the industry contacts to quickly find early customers and their search for "product-market fit" is usually about whether clients will pay enough to make the startup worthwhile rather than "do clients even want what I'm building."

Ideas are a dime a dozen. Competent engineers are a dime a dozen (relatively). Distribution is what builds startups and that requires industry experience and contacts, or a cofounder that can carry the domain side of the business (in which case they will be the ones filtering ideas).

* I'm assuming you're an engineer. Otherwise you're an idea guy without a clue on how to create viable ideas.

biglyburrito•1m ago
"wantrepreneur" is a great way of putting it... I've never heard that before.

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