Idea-Generation Lenses · Use All Five in Generating Ideas
- Unfair advantage — where does each of us know more than 95% of people?
- Problem solving — what do customers or businesses already complain about loudly?
- Combinations — what two existing things aren't combined and would be compelling if they were?
- Aiding others — what could we offer to someone already growing fast or committing serious capex?
- Cross-geography / cross-sector — what works elsewhere and hasn't been built here yet?
There are very few truly "new" ideas. The real goal is to understand the competition and find a way to differentiate, avoid, or coexist. Good, growing markets will always have competition — if you can't find a competitor in your idea, you either are not looking hard enough or you may want to question the idea.
CoWork Ops Layer · Hour 1
Once a niche is picked, schedule thisCadence: Daily or weekly · Trigger: Recurring schedule
CoWork can do
- Pull top posts from 5–10 target subreddits matching pain-point keywords
- Pull Reddit and X mentions of competitor brands or category keywords
- Summarize into a digest (Word doc, Notion page, or email) with direct quotes for ad copy
- Flag new posts containing "I wish there was," "is there a tool that," "recommend"
- Maintain a running spreadsheet of customer language tagged by pain category
Setup cost: ~45 minutes once. Daily human time after that: ~5 minutes to skim the digest.