My experiment in working backwards from market to problems to solutions:
1. Start with listing markets that have a low degree of competition, but don't have a mega-monopoly owning them. These will mostly be small markets.
2. Examine the problem space within each and see if new technology (SW / HW) can deliver 10x improvements.
3. Determine whether these markets are a short enough hop away from deeper ones.
It's surprisingly hard to get a "map" of existing markets, but am curious about those the community can readily identify.
1. Start with markets with high competition. E.g. paid alternatives to Google forms.
2. Get a list of 50+ products competing in the space. If < 50 go back to step 1.
3. Google to find what people, who are on the paid tiers of those products, complain about. This is easy as I am now Googling brand names so should get laser targeted results (v.s. googling "problem I had creating a form" -> Stack Overflow user who'll never pay for a form!)
4. Interview them to dig in further. If you can't get any of these people to even spare 5 minutes to talk, then it might be an indicator that you wont get them to buy.
5. Based on this, derive a hypothesis for a MVP that would solve the problem, along with the market it serves and where to find these people.
6. Presell to people in #4. If they say no - dig in further as to why. If they say yes, aim for maybe $1000 monthly revenue presold, then build.
The reason for this approach is it filters for the "are people motivated enough to spend money" which I think is the biggest risk for the ideas I come up with. Since they are (they already use the "competitor" product"), can I carve out a niche where I do something better for a specific group of people? Can I reach them easily without spending crazy money on ads? And am I solving their problem?
Caveat is this is designed as an idea generator for an Indie Hacker style project, not a startup!