There are tricks to get more of any kind of idea, like keeping a notebook with you and jotting down suggestions to yourself during the day, then doing triage and record the best ones at the end of the day. Once you get into the habit of looking for ideas, you'll start to see them everywhere. Most will have fatal problems (and practice also makes you better at seeing these quickly), but some won't.
The next step is to break out of your personal routine and small circle of problems. If you're only building ideas based of your own life, and your life is generally pretty comfortable, you'll only be solving problems that are relatively meaningless in the grand scheme of things. So get out of your own neighborhood and immediate circle of friends, and learn how to talk to people everywhere. Everyone has problems (and ideas on how they should be solved).
For validation: you definitely need to put in the time talking with the people who you imagine most need what you're building. People have habits, and solutions of some kind already in place for any problem -- you need to give them a solution that better enough that they'll change their habits for it. Find out in detail what they already do before you try to "fix" it.
If you're only building ideas based of your own life, and your life is generally pretty comfortable, you'll only be solving problems that are relatively meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
There's so much truth in this. This combined with the other idea that you should 'scratch your own itch' can result in bit of frustration. Many (myself included) fall into this trap and find ourselves trying to dig deep to find problems we can solve. Sometimes we fool ourselves in thinking we have problems that we really don't have. Then you end up with meaningless solutions or even worse, solutions looking for a problem.
The next step is to break out of your personal routine and small circle of problems. If you're only building ideas based of your own life, and your life is generally pretty comfortable, you'll only be solving problems that are relatively meaningless in the grand scheme of things. So get out of your own neighborhood and immediate circle of friends, and learn how to talk to people everywhere. Everyone has problems (and ideas on how they should be solved).
For validation: you definitely need to put in the time talking with the people who you imagine most need what you're building. People have habits, and solutions of some kind already in place for any problem -- you need to give them a solution that better enough that they'll change their habits for it. Find out in detail what they already do before you try to "fix" it.