Looking back, it was really easy to build something like a domain name recommender 15 years ago or online calculators and such 10 years ago and mailing list tools 5 years ago. I had the skills for doing all of these at the time. Now is the next best time. Although I work in tech, I struggle to find small niche ideas that require very little marketing (SEO driven) and take 3 weeks to build, ship and launch. It doesn't seem so hard. Am I looking for Unicorns?
Talk to people. Lots of people. Anything they do with a spreadsheet (domain specific business process modeling), or requires manual copy paste from one thing to another (integrations), is ripe for disruption.<p>Ask for pain points and their workarounds, not peddle your solution.<p>Let's say they value their time at $30 an hour. You build something that helps them shave an hour a month. Some will definitely pay you that much a month.
It’s very hard. That’s what happens when everyone has access to so many resources/tools to build things faster and easier than ever before. No such thing as an easy idea that pays you just 1k a month
"... find small niche ideas that require very little marketing (SEO driven) and take 3 weeks to build, ship and launch. It doesn't seem so hard."<p>Seems pretty hard to me. It's generally easy to come up with an idea. It's much harder to actually make money with one (in my experience).
Take yourself out of the tech bubble. Go to places where you mention python and people think about a snake, not the language. The detachment between what's available already and what people think is possible is often so huge.
You hear about all the success stories online in blogs and articles. What you don’t hear about is all the failed attempts that didn’t work. There are far more of them.
I would say focus on building distribution / a way to reach your audience first (blog, email list, etc). Once you got distribution nailed, and sufficient understanding of your audience (and also trust of your audience), it will be easier to make a product based on their pain and persuade them your product solves their problems.