If you're stuck at the "waiting for a good SaaS idea" stage, you might find these tips helpful.

Stop waiting for a great idea

I used to think that to build a successful SaaS business, you must start with a fantastic idea. And once you have that, everything else aligns into place.

And having tried that a few times by now, I can tell you that's not the case.

Because the types of ideas that you dream of are rarely successful.

Simply sitting there waiting for the muse to show up and, more importantly, tell you what we have to do is a recipe for failure.

Because that's not how businesses are built in the real world.

If you want to find a great idea, you must actively look for it by doing market research.

Ideas are solutions to problems. So, find the problem first, then look for ways to solve it better than the competition.

In your search for the solution, you'll find many ideas that you can put in front of your market to see if it resonates with them.

The winning solution is what I used to call "the idea". But as you can see now, it's almost impossible for it to come to you out of the blue.

You'll most likely find it by testing many ideas (or educated guesses).

Ideas with no competition are usually garbage

Another one of those myths about ideas is that the best ideas are the ones that no one else has thought of yet.

But in reality, if you find an idea with no competition, it's either because the numbers don't make sense in terms of return on investment (ROI) or there is no market for it (i.e., people don't need that product).

So before you start celebrating, make sure people are already buying a similar product from your competition. That's how you know that they want their problem solved and that they are willing to pay for the solution.

Then, focus on why they should buy it from you.

You've got to make your product better than the competition so people want to buy it from you, especially when there is a cost to switching from one solution to the next.

Focus on friends, not customers

When you're looking to see if your idea is something that people truly want, you're going to have to go out and validated it.

But if you try to do that with people that do not know and trust you, you're going to have to first create that trust, and then see if they would buy your product.

So it's a two-step process, which takes time.

On the other hand, selling a product to someone who knows and trusts you, like a friend, is much easier. Simply because the first step, where you need to build trust, is not required.

You can go directly to the validation step.

Just know that in order to get the right kind of validation, you'll have to charge for the product. Ego boosters are simply not enough.