DEV Community: Alan Descure

Opportunity Discovery: A Practical Guide for When You're Stuck

Alan Descure — Sat, 14 Nov 2026 18:19:52 +0000

Opportunity Discovery: A Practical Guide for When You're Stuck

The Problem in Concrete Terms

You have time, skills, and maybe even capital—but you cannot point to a specific, validated problem worth solving. Every idea feels either too small (a vitamin, not a painkiller), too crowded (ten funded competitors), or too vague ("people struggle with productivity"). You sit down to brainstorm and walk away with a list of features, not opportunities. The longer this goes on, the more you convince yourself that all the good problems are taken, or that you lack the "founder insight" everyone talks about.

This isn't writer's block. It's a process gap. You're trying to have ideas instead of finding them.

Why the Usual Fixes Fail

1. "Scratch your own itch" works only if your itch is shared by a reachable market willing to pay. Most personal itches are either too niche (you're the only one) or too generic (everyone has a todo app).

2. "Talk to customers" fails when you don't know who the customer is or what to ask. Cold outreach without a hypothesis gets ignored. Conversations without structure produce noise, not signal.

3. "Look at trending topics" (Product Hunt, Hacker News, Twitter) shows you what launched, not what works. Survivorship bias hides the graveyard. By the time a trend is visible, the low-hanging fruit is gone.

4. "Pick a big market and find a wedge" sounds strategic but usually leads to analysis paralysis. You spend weeks modeling TAM/SAM/SOM for markets you don't understand, then pick a wedge based on guesswork.

5. "Wait for inspiration" is not a strategy. It's procrastination dressed in mystique.

Step-by-Step Solution

Phase 1: Define Your Constraints (Day 1)

Before hunting, decide what you're actually willing to build. Constraints focus search; freedom paralyzes it.

Write down your non-negotiables:

Time horizon: How long before you need revenue? (3 months? 12? 36?)
Capital: Bootstrapped? Savings runway? Willing to raise?
Team: Solo? Co-founder? Can you hire contractors?
Technical depth: Code yourself? No-code? Need to hire devs?
Domain interest: Industries you'll enjoy for 3+ years. Industries you'll hate.
Distribution advantage: Existing audience? Network in a vertical? SEO skills? Paid ads experience?

Example constraint set: "Solo founder, 6 months runway, can code React/Node, no audience, prefer B2B SaaS, hate consumer apps, have network in logistics from previous job."

Keep this visible. Every opportunity gets filtered through it.

Phase 2: Map Your Access Vectors (Days 2–3)

Opportunities are discovered through people. You find problems by talking to people who have them. List every vector you have to reach potential buyers.

Create a spreadsheet with columns:
| Vector | Specific Contacts | Access Level | Vertical/Role | Last Contact |
|--------|-------------------|--------------|---------------|--------------|
| Former coworkers | 12 people | Direct Slack/email | Logistics, ops, engineering | 2023 |
| LinkedIn 2nd-degree | ~200 | Warm intro possible | Supply chain, warehousing | Never |
| Industry Slack/Discord | 3 communities | Member | Freight tech, 3PL | Active |
| Conference contacts | 8 people | Email | WMS vendors, shippers | 2022 |
| Cold email list | 0 | None | Need to build | N/A |

Action: Pick the top 3 vectors by access level × relevance to constraints. Ignore the rest for now.

Phase 3: Run Structured Discovery Conversations (Days 4–20)

Don't "chat." Run 20-minute interviews with a fixed script. Goal: find a recurring, urgent, expensive problem your constraints can address.

The Script (memorize this flow):

Context (2 min): "What's your role? Walk me through a typical week."
Current workflow (5 min): "Show me how you handle [process relevant to vertical] today. What tools? What people?"
Pain isolation (8 min): "What's the most frustrating part? How often does it happen? What happens when it breaks? What have you tried to fix it? How much does it cost you—time, money, reputation?"
Buying signal (3 min): "If a tool solved [specific pain], what would need to be true for you to pay for it? Who else signs off? What's your budget process?"
Referral (2 min): "Who else should I talk to who feels this acutely?"

Rules:

Record (with permission). Take notes after, not during.
Zero pitching. Zero feature ideas. You are a journalist.
Stop when you hear the same specific pain from 3+ people who don't know each other.
If 5 conversations yield no recurring pain, change your vector or vertical. Pivot the search, not the idea.

Output after each call: One-line problem statement in the interviewee's words. Example: "We lose $40k/quarter because our WMS can't auto-split shipments across 3PLs when inventory is fragmented."

Phase 4: Validate Willingness to Pay (Days 21–35)

A problem isn't an opportunity until someone commits resources to solve it.

Step 1: The "Concierge" Test
Pick the top 2 problem statements. For each, design a manual service that solves it. No code. Spreadsheets, Zapier, phone calls, you doing the work.

Step 2: Price It
Charge 10–20% of the stated cost of the problem. If they say "we lose $40k/quarter," charge $1k–2k/month.

Step 3: Sell to Your Interviewees
Email the 3+ people who described the problem:

"I'm building a done-for-you service that handles [specific pain]. It costs $X/mo, saves ~$Y. I'm taking 3 pilot clients this month. Interested in a 15-min walkthrough?"

Step 4: Collect Commitments

Strong signal: Signed agreement + payment (even $100 deposit).
Medium signal: "Yes, send contract" + intro to decision-maker.
Weak signal: "Sounds interesting, keep me posted."
Noise: "Cool idea!" with no next step.

Decision rule: 2+ strong signals = build the product. 2+ medium = run another 5 discovery calls on same problem. Else = discard, return to Phase 3.

Phase 5: Build the Minimum Sellable Product (Days 36–60)

You have paying pilot customers. Now automate only what they use daily.

Scope ruthlessly:

List every manual step in your concierge delivery.
Mark each: "Automate now" (used daily, high error risk) vs. "Keep manual" (weekly, judgment-heavy, low volume).
Build only "Automate now" items.
Ship to pilots weekly. Get feedback on workflow fit, not features.

Do not build: Admin dashboards, settings pages, onboarding flows, integrations "for later," multi-tenant architecture.

Do build: The core logic that replaces your manual work. A way for pilots to trigger it. Basic logging so you see failures.

Phase 6: Expand From Pilots to Market (Days 61–90)

Week 1–2: Onboard 3–5 more customers from referral chain. Same price. Same manual+automated mix.

Week 3–4: Raise price 20–50% for new customers. Test resistance.

Week 5–6: Document the exact onboarding steps that worked. Turn into a checklist. This becomes your sales process.

Week 7–8: Build only the feature that unblocks the next 3 deals. Ignore everything else.

Week 9–10: Write 3 case studies with numbers. "Client X reduced split-shipment errors from 12% to 0.8%, saving $38k/qtr." Use these in cold outreach.

Checklist

[ ] Constraints document written and visible
[ ] Access vector spreadsheet completed, top 3 selected
[ ] 15+ discovery calls conducted

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Opportunity Discovery: A Field Guide for When You’re Stuck Guessing

Alan Descure — Sat, 14 Nov 2026 18:11:26 +0000

Opportunity Discovery: A Field Guide for When You’re Stuck Guessing

The Problem in Concrete Terms

You have capacity—time, capital, or a team—but you don’t know where to point it. Every direction looks equally viable or equally risky. You’re not lacking ideas; you’re lacking a filter. The backlog is full of "maybe later" features, the competitor landscape is a blur of noise, and customer interviews feel like polite conversations that yield zero actionable signal.

Concretely, the stuck state looks like this:

The Spreadsheet Trap: You have a prioritization framework (RICE, ICE, WSJF) but every score is a guess because the inputs—reach, impact, confidence—are unknowns.
The "Strategic" Vacuum: Leadership asks for "big bets," but the only data you have is last month’s retention curve and a handful of support tickets.
The False Positive Loop: You ship something based on a loud customer request. Usage spikes for two weeks, then flatlines. You realize they asked for a faster horse, not a car.
Analysis Paralysis: You’ve read the market reports, scanned the G2 reviews, and mapped the TAM. You still cannot write a single sentence defining why now for any specific opportunity.

The core issue isn't a lack of creativity. It’s that you are trying to select an opportunity before you have discovered the evidence that makes one obvious. You are trying to decide in the dark.

Why the Usual Fixes Fail

1. Customer Interviews (Done Wrong)
Most teams run "discovery interviews" that are actually validation sessions. You pitch a concept, ask "would you use this?", and hear "yes." That isn't discovery; it’s politeness. Real discovery requires the customer to teach you their workflow, not react to yours. If you leave the call with a feature list instead of a workflow map, you wasted the hour.

2. Competitive Audits
Mapping competitor feature matrices tells you where the market was two years ago. It reveals table stakes, not gaps. Chasing parity puts you on a treadmill; it never reveals a wedge. The opportunity is almost always in the workflow step the competitor ignores because it doesn't scale or doesn't fit their architecture.

3. Internal Brainstorms / Hackathons
These generate volume, not signal. They optimize for internal excitement (cool tech, shiny UI) rather than external urgency (burning hair, budget allocated). The best opportunities usually look boring internally—"automate this manual CSV upload"—and get killed in a voting round because they aren't "strategic" enough.

4. Top-Down Mandates ("Go build AI")
A theme is not an opportunity. "AI," "PLG," or "Enterprise" are constraints, not starting points. Starting with the solution space (LLMs) forces you to retrofit a problem. You end up building a chatbot nobody uses because the real problem was a missing API endpoint.

5. Quantitative Dashboards
Dashboards show what happened (churn, drop-off). They rarely show why. You see a 40% drop-off at step 3. The dashboard cannot tell you if it’s a UX bug, a pricing shock, a missing integration, or a change in the user’s boss’s priority. You have to leave the dashboard to find out.

Step-by-Step Solution: The Evidence Stack

This process moves you from "I have no idea" to "I have three validated problem spaces worth betting on." It requires zero budget, only calendar control and a notebook.

Phase 1: Define the Hunting Grounds (30 Minutes)

Stop looking at "the market." Look at your adjacent possible.

List your current top 3 customer segments (by revenue or strategic value).
For each segment, write down the core workflow they use your product for. Be specific: "Upload CSV -> Map Columns -> Run Validation -> Export JSON," not "Data Onboarding."
Identify the immediate upstream step (what they do 10 mins before logging in) and the immediate downstream step (what they do 10 mins after logging out).
Constraint: You are only allowed to hunt in these 3 upstream/downstream zones. This kills the "boil the ocean" problem.

Phase 2: The "Shadow & Scribe" Sessions (2 Weeks, 6–8 Sessions)

Recruit 2–3 users per segment. Do not interview them. Watch them work.

The Ask: "Can I screenshare for 45 minutes while you do [Core Workflow]? I won't talk. I just want to see where it gets messy."
The Rule: Mute yourself. Do not help. Do not explain the UI. If they curse, struggle, switch tabs, open Excel, or screenshot an error—that is data.
The Scribe Method: Take timestamped notes in a two-column table.
- Column A (Action): "User exports report to CSV -> Opens Excel -> VLOOKUPs against master sheet -> Copies result -> Pastes into Email."
- Column B (Friction Signal): "Sighs at VLOOKUP error. 'This breaks every Tuesday.' Switches to Slack to ask colleague for formula."
Output: A "Friction Map" for each user. Highlight every tool switch, manual calculation, copy/paste, communication hop, and wait time.

Phase 3: The "Money & Mandate" Filter (1 Hour)

Review your Friction Maps. For every high-friction step, answer three questions using only evidence from the session (no guessing):

Budget Owner: Who pays if this step goes wrong? (Name a title: "Director of RevOps," not "the team.")
Existing Spend: What tool/service/headcount is currently budgeted to handle this step? (e.g., "They pay a contractor $2k/mo to clean these CSVs.")
Trigger Event: What specific change makes this urgent right now? (e.g., "New regulator report due Q3," "Acquisition doubled data volume," "Key Excel expert quit.")

Discard any friction point lacking a Budget Owner, Existing Spend, or Trigger Event. These are annoyances, not opportunities. You are left with Validated Problem Spaces.

Phase 4: The "Wizard of Oz" Test (1 Week per Space)

Take your top 2 Validated Problem Spaces. Do not build. Simulate the solution manually.

Define the "Magic Moment": The single output the user wishes appeared automatically. (e.g., "A clean, validated JSON file in their S3 bucket every morning at 6 AM.")
Recruit 3 Pilot Users: From your shadow sessions or waitlist. Pitch: "We will deliver [Magic Moment] manually for 2 weeks. Free. You give us 15 mins feedback daily."
Execute Manually: Use scripts, Zapier, VA labor, or your own hands. Deliver the output exactly as promised.
Measure Only Two Things:
- Adoption: Did they use the output in their downstream workflow without prompting?
- Complaint Velocity: When you are late or wrong, how loud/fast do they complain? (Silence = low value. Anger = high value.)

Phase 5: The Bet Document (30 Minutes)

Write a one-pager for the winning space. No vision fluff. Only:

The Workflow Step: [Specific step from Phase 1]
The Evidence: [Quote + Timestamp from Phase 2]
The Payer: [Title + Current Spend from Phase 3]
The Trigger: [Event from Phase 3]
The Validation: [Adoption % + Complaint Signal from Phase 4]
The Wedge: The smallest technical build that replicates the Wizard of Oz output.
Kill Criteria: "If we don't get [X] pilot users paying [Y] by [Date], we archive this."

Short Checklist

[ ] Hunting Grounds Defined: 3 segments + Upstream/Downstream steps mapped.
[ ] Shadow Sessions Booked: 6–8 sessions on calendar with real users (not champions).
[ ] Scribe Template Ready: Two-column (Action / Friction) doc open during sessions.
[ ] Zero Pitching: No concepts shown, no "would you like" questions asked during shadows.
[ ] Friction Maps Complete: Every tool-switch, manual step, and workaround documented.
[ ] Money/Mandate Filter Applied: Every candidate problem has a Budget Owner, Existing Spend, and Trigger.
[ ] Wizard of Oz Designed: "Magic Moment" defined

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Opportunity Discovery: A Practical Guide for When You're Stuck

Alan Descure — Sat, 14 Nov 2026 18:07:32 +0000

Opportunity Discovery: A Practical Guide for When You're Stuck

The Problem in Concrete Terms

You have the capacity to build. You have time, maybe some savings, perhaps a skill set that people pay for. What you don't have is a clear signal on what to build. Every idea feels either too small to matter, too crowded to enter, or too vague to validate. You've read about "finding your niche" and "scratching your own itch," but your own itches are either already solved by existing tools or too idiosyncratic to support a business. You've tried listing problems you encounter daily, but the list either runs dry after five items or balloons into hundreds of minor annoyances with no clear path to revenue. You're not lacking creativity—you're lacking a reliable filter that separates "this could work" from "this is a waste of six months."

The stuckness shows up in specific ways: you open a notebook or Notion page titled "Ideas" and stare at it. You scroll Product Hunt or Indie Hackers and feel a mix of envy and paralysis—everything seems taken. You've maybe built two or three side projects that died because you lost conviction halfway through, not because the code was hard. You can't tell if you're being too picky or not picky enough. The result is inertia disguised as research: reading more newsletters, bookmarking more frameworks, waiting for a "eureka" moment that doesn't arrive.

Why the Usual Fixes Fail

1. "Scratch your own itch" assumes your itches are marketable. Most developers' personal problems are either already solved (password managers, note-taking apps, habit trackers) or too niche to sustain a business (a CLI tool for your specific Kubernetes workflow). The advice works for a subset of people whose professional context exposes them to unsolved, high-value problems. If you're not in that subset, it's a dead end.

2. "Talk to customers" presumes you know who they are and what to ask. Cold outreach without a hypothesis wastes everyone's time. You end up having polite conversations that yield no actionable insight because you're fishing in the wrong pond with the wrong bait. The advice also ignores that access to the right people is often the hardest part—if you could easily reach 20 VPs of Engineering at Series B companies, you'd already have a network that surfaces opportunities.

3. "Look for complaints on Reddit/Twitter/forums" surfaces noise, not signal. People complain about everything. Distinguishing "I'd pay to fix this" from "I'm venting" requires context you don't have. The loudest complaints are often about problems with no budget (consumer annoyances) or problems that are symptoms of organizational dysfunction no software can fix.

4. "Follow trends" (AI, Web3, no-code, etc.) makes you a late entrant. By the time a trend is legible enough to write a blog post about, the low-hanging fruit is gone. You're competing with funded teams who started six months earlier. Trend-chasing also produces shallow ideas—wrappers around APIs that the platform will eventually absorb.

5. Frameworks like "Jobs to Be Done" or "Value Proposition Canvas" are analysis tools, not discovery tools. They help you structure an opportunity you've already found. They don't tell you where to look. Applying them to a blank page produces performative busywork: filling boxes with guesses.

Step-by-Step Solution

Phase 1: Map Your Asymmetric Advantages (Days 1–2)

Opportunity discovery isn't about finding a generic "good idea." It's about finding an idea you are uniquely positioned to execute and defend. Start by documenting your specific advantages—assets that would take a competitor months or years to replicate.

Do this now:

List every professional role you've held for 6+ months. For each, write: the core workflow, the tools used, the internal jargon, the metrics that mattered, the complaints that never got fixed, the manual workarounds people built in spreadsheets or scripts. Don't filter. A junior QA role at a logistics company might reveal more than a senior PM role at a SaaS unicorn.
List every industry you have secondhand access to. Spouse, siblings, close friends, former classmates, parents. What do they do all day? What software do they hate? What processes involve printing PDFs, re-entering data, or emailing spreadsheets? You don't need to know the industry—you need a trusted informant who does.
List your technical differentiators. Not "I know React." Instead: "I've built three Chrome extensions that scrape dynamic sites," "I've optimized Postgres queries for 100M+ row tables," "I've integrated with five different ERPs." Specific implementation experience beats general competence.
List your distribution channels. Newsletter subscribers, Twitter followers, Slack/Discord communities you're active in, former coworkers now at other companies, conference contacts. Even 50 relevant people is a channel. 10,000 random followers is not.
Score each asset on three dimensions (1–5):
- Depth: How much insider knowledge do you really have?
- Access: Can you get 5–10 conversations with decision-makers in two weeks?
- Pain intensity: Do you know of a problem people actively complain about and spend money/workaround on?

Keep only combinations scoring 10+. This is your search space. Everything outside it is a distraction.

Phase 2: Run Structured Discovery Conversations (Days 3–14)

You're not "chatting." You're running a repeatable interview process to test whether a problem is real, urgent, and funded.

The protocol:

Recruit 8–12 people per opportunity area. Use your access list. Ask for 20 minutes. Frame it: "I'm researching [specific workflow] for a potential tool. Not selling anything. Your experience would save me months of wrong turns." People say yes to helping, not to being pitched.
Use the same 7-question script every time. Deviating makes patterns invisible.
- "Walk me through the last time you did [workflow]."
- "What tools or workarounds did you use?"
- "Where did it break or slow down?"
- "What did you do when it broke?"
- "Have you looked for a better tool? What happened?"
- "If this problem were solved, what would change for you/your team?"
- "Who else should I talk to?"
Record and transcribe. Otter.ai, Fireflies, or manual notes. You will not remember accurately.
After each batch of 3–4 interviews, write a one-page memo:
- Problem statement in their words
- Current solutions and why they fail
- Evidence of budget (existing spend, headcount allocated, failed build attempts)
- Decision-maker title and org size
- Your confidence score (1–10) that this is a real, paid problem
Kill or continue. If confidence < 7 after 8 interviews, archive the area. Move to the next asset combination. Do not "pivot the idea"—pivot the search.

Phase 3: Validate Willingness to Pay (Days 15–28)

Conversations reveal pain. Only commitment reveals value.

Do this for each surviving opportunity (max 2):

Define the MVP scope ruthlessly. One workflow. One user type. No settings, no integrations, no admin dashboard. What is the smallest thing that delivers the "aha" moment? Write it as a user story: "As a [role], I want to [action] so that [outcome]."
Build a clickable prototype. Figma, Framer, or even a Loom video walking through mockups. No code. One day max.
Run 5–8 "pre-sale" calls. Same people or new ones from your network. Show the prototype. Ask: "If this existed today at $X/month per seat, would you put it on a company card?" Note: not "would you use it"—would you pay. $X should be your target price (start at $50–200/mo for B2B).
Collect commitments, not compliments. A commitment is: "Send me the invoice," "Introduce me to my manager," "I'll pilot with my team of 5." A compliment is: "This looks great, let me know when it launches." Only commitments count.
Threshold: 3 paid commitments or 2 pilot agreements. If you hit it, build. If not, return to Phase 1 with what you learned. The interviews weren't wasted—the

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opportunity-discovery: a practical guide

Alan Descure — Sat, 14 Nov 2026 17:56:36 +0000

Opportunity Discovery: A Practical Guide for When You're Stuck

The Problem in Concrete Terms

You have time, skills, and maybe some capital. What you don't have is a clear signal on what to build or sell. Every idea feels either too small to matter, too crowded to enter, or too vague to act on. You've read about "finding your niche" and "scratching your own itch," but your itches are either already solved or not monetizable. You've tried brainstorming sessions, trend reports, and competitor analysis—yet you keep landing on ideas that feel derivative, risky, or simply unexciting.

The stuckness isn't a creativity deficit. It's a filtering problem. You're generating possibilities but lack a reliable way to test them against reality before committing months of work. You need a process that moves you from "maybe this could work" to "here's evidence this works" without requiring a full build.

Why the Usual Fixes Fail

1. "Scratch your own itch" assumes your problems are representative and monetizable. They often aren't. Your workflow quirks might be too idiosyncratic, or the solution might be a feature, not a product.

2. Trend-chasing (AI wrappers, no-code tools, Web3) puts you in a crowd of thousands with the same timing. By the time a trend is visible in newsletters, the low-hanging fruit is gone.

3. Keyword research and SEO analysis reveal demand for information, not necessarily for paid solutions. People search for free tutorials; they pay for outcomes.

4. Competitor analysis teaches you what worked for them under their conditions—audience, timing, capital, distribution. Copying their surface-level features misses the underlying mechanics.

5. "Talk to customers" is correct but incomplete. Without a hypothesis and a concrete artifact to react to, conversations drift into polite feature requests that don't predict purchase behavior.

6. Building an MVP to test is expensive validation. You're committing engineering time before you know if the problem is real, urgent, and paid for.

Step-by-Step Solution

Phase 1: Map Your Asymmetric Advantages (Days 1–2)

List every asset you control that others don't. Be ruthlessly specific.

Category	Prompts	Example Output
Technical	APIs you've integrated, infra you've scaled, weird bugs you've fixed	"Built real-time sync for 50k+ concurrent users on Firebase"
Domain	Industries you've worked in, regulations you've navigated, workflows you've owned	"Implemented HIPAA-compliant data pipelines for 3 health-tech startups"
Distribution	Newsletters you run, communities you moderate, SEO authority you hold	"Run a 4.2k-subscriber newsletter for indie SaaS founders (42% open rate)"
Capital/Labor	Cash you can deploy, contractors you trust, co-founders aligned	"$15k risk capital + designer who owes me a favor"
Taste/Judgment	Products you've killed, bets you've won, patterns you recognize	"Correctly predicted 3/4 YC W23 batch failures from demo day videos"

Action: Write 15–20 items. Keep only the ones that are provable and hard to replicate. Discard "I'm a fast learner" or "I know Python."

Phase 2: Generate Problem Hypotheses from Advantage Intersections (Days 3–4)

Cross-reference your advantages. Each intersection is a hypothesis: "Because I have [Advantage A] and [Advantage B], I can solve [Problem] for [Buyer] better than alternatives."

Template:

Advantage 1: [Specific asset]
Advantage 2: [Specific asset]
Buyer: [Role, company size, context]
Problem: [Specific, recurring, expensive pain]
Current Workaround: [What they do now, why it fails]
Why Me: [Why your intersection makes this winnable]

Example:

Advantage 1: Built HIPAA pipelines for 3 startups
Advantage 2: Run newsletter for 4.2k health-tech founders
Buyer: CTO at Series A digital health company (50–200 employees)
Problem: De-identifying PHI for ML training takes 4–6 weeks per dataset and fails audits 30% of the time
Current Workaround: Manual scripting + external consultants ($15k–40k/project)
Why Me: I've solved the technical edge cases; I have direct access to buyers; I know the audit failure patterns

Action: Produce 8–12 hypotheses. Keep only those where:

The buyer has budget authority (not just influence)
The problem recurs (not one-off)
The workaround is demonstrably expensive (time, money, risk)
Your advantage intersection is causal to the solution, not decorative

Phase 3: Design a "Smoke Test" for Each Hypothesis (Days 5–7)

A smoke test is a concrete artifact that elicits a binary signal from a real buyer. Not a landing page. Not a survey. An artifact.

Hypothesis Type	Smoke Test Artifact	Success Signal
Service/agency	One-page scope + fixed price + 2-week delivery guarantee	Buyer signs SOW and pays deposit
SaaS tool	Clickable Figma prototype + pricing page + Calendly for paid pilot	Buyer books pilot and pays $500–2k setup fee
Data/productized	Sample deliverable (real data, real format) + Loom walkthrough	Buyer requests full dataset and negotiates contract
Marketplace	Curated list of 20 vetted suppliers/buyers + intro email template	Both sides reply asking for intros
Content/course	Module 1 delivered free + paid upgrade path	20%+ of recipients purchase within 7 days

Rules:

Build the artifact in ≤ 8 hours. If it takes longer, scope it down.
Price it. Free signals interest; paid signals value.
Target 5–10 specific buyers per hypothesis. Use your distribution advantages (newsletter, LinkedIn, warm intros).
Track: contacted → replied → meeting → paid/letter of intent.

Action: Run smoke tests in parallel. Kill hypotheses that don't generate ≥ 1 paid signal or LOI from 10 contacts. Keep the 1–2 that do.

Phase 4: Validate the Economics (Days 8–14)

For each surviving hypothesis, answer these with numbers, not adjectives.

Question	How to Answer
*What's the TAM for this specific wedge?*	Count buyers in your ICP on LinkedIn/Sales Navigator × average contract value. Ignore total market size.
What's the CAC?	(Hours to close × your hourly rate) + ad spend + tooling. Divide by closed deals.
What's the payback period?	CAC / (monthly margin per customer). Must be ≤ 6 months for bootstrapped; ≤ 12 for funded.
What's the expansion path?	List 3 adjacent problems the same buyer has. Can you upsell without new distribution?
What's the moat at 10 customers? 100?	Data network effects? Switching costs? Brand? Regulatory? If "nothing," it's a service, not a product.

Action: Build a simple spreadsheet. If the math doesn't work at your target scale (lifestyle vs. venture), kill it or reshape the wedge.

Phase 5: Commit to a Wedge and Ship V1 (Day 15+)

You now have:

A specific buyer you can reach
A problem they pay to solve
Evidence they'll pay you
Economics that work at your target scale

Build the smallest thing that delivers the paid outcome. Not the full vision. The wedge.

Constraints for V1:

Timebox: 4–6 weeks max. If longer, slice thinner.
Manual first: Use humans behind the API. Automate only what breaks.
Instrument: Log every user action, support request, and churn signal.
Price from day one: No "beta free" unless you're testing a network effect.

Short Checklist

[ ] Listed 15+ provable, hard-to-replicate advantages
[ ] Generated 8+ hypotheses from advantage intersections
[ ] Filtered to hypotheses with

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opportunity-discovery: a practical guide

Alan Descure — Sat, 14 Nov 2026 17:51:23 +0000

Opportunity Discovery: A Practical Guide for When You're Stuck

The Problem in Concrete Terms

You have time, skills, and maybe some capital. What you don't have is a clear signal on what to build or pursue next. Every idea feels either too small, too crowded, or too vague to commit to. You've read about "finding problems worth solving" but when you sit down to do it, you produce either a list of trivial annoyances (better to-do app, nicer weather widget) or massive systemic issues you can't touch (healthcare reform, climate change).

The stuckness shows up in specific ways:

You open a blank document to brainstorm and close it 20 minutes later with nothing usable
You've validated three ideas in the past year and killed all of them after talking to 5–10 people
You keep returning to "scratch your own itch" but your itches are either already solved or too niche to support a business
You consume endless content about opportunity discovery (newsletters, podcasts, frameworks) but none of it translates into a decision
You feel paralyzed by opportunity cost: picking one means not picking the others, and you have no confidence in your filtering criteria

This isn't "I need more ideas." This is "I need a reliable process to filter and commit."

Why the Usual Fixes Fail

1. "Talk to customers" without a hypothesis

You schedule calls hoping the customer will hand you a problem. They won't. They'll describe symptoms, workarounds, and feature requests for existing tools. Without a specific hypothesis to test, you collect noise, not signal.

2. Market research reports and trend databases

These tell you where the market was 6–18 months ago. By the time a trend appears in a report, the early opportunity window has narrowed. They're useful for context, not for finding your entry point.

3. "Build something for yourself" taken literally

Your personal problems are real but rarely representative. Unless you're in a role/industry with many peers sharing the exact same workflow, you'll build a tool for an audience of one.

4. Idea generation frameworks (SCAMPER, Jobs-to-be-Done, etc.)

These are thinking tools, not discovery processes. They help structure exploration but don't tell you where to explore or when to stop. You can run JTBD interviews indefinitely without converging.

5. Waiting for "founder-market fit" to strike

This is passive. Founder-market fit is built through deliberate exposure to a domain, not discovered by introspection.

Step-by-Step Solution

Phase 1: Define Your Constraints (Days 1–2)

Before looking outward, define the box you're searching inside. Write down honest answers to:

Time horizon: How long can you work without revenue? (3 months? 12? 24?)
Capital: What can you invest without jeopardizing your baseline?
Team: Solo? Co-founder? Willing to hire contractors?
Distribution advantage: What channels do you already have access to? (Email list, community, industry network, SEO domain authority, paid ad skill, cold outreach skill)
Technical ceiling: What can you build yourself vs. need to hire for?
Domain depth: Which industries/roles do you understand well enough to spot fake problems?
Exit criteria: What does "good enough to commit" look like? (e.g., "10 people say they'll pay $X/month" or "I can get 5 pilot users in 2 weeks")

Output: A one-page "Opportunity Filter" document. Every idea gets scored against this. If it fails a hard constraint, discard it without guilt.

Phase 2: Map Your Adjacent Possible (Days 3–7)

Don't search broadly. Search adjacent to what you already know. List:

A. Roles you've held (current + past 5 years)

For each: core workflows, tools used, handoffs, complaints heard, spreadsheets that shouldn't be spreadsheets, manual workarounds.

B. Communities you're embedded in

Slack/Discord groups, forums, subreddits, professional associations, conferences, newsletters you read. Where do people ask "how do I...?" or "does a tool exist for...?"

C. Problems you've paid to solve

Software subscriptions, consultants, agencies, courses, workarounds you've funded. What did you pay for? What was still broken after paying?

D. Upstream/downstream of your expertise

If you're a frontend engineer: designers (upstream), backend/API teams (downstream), QA, product managers, devops. If you're in B2B sales: marketing (lead gen), customer success (onboarding), revops (tooling).

Action: For each item above, write 3–5 "friction statements" in this format:

[Role/Person] spends [time/frequency] doing [manual task] because [tool gap/process break], resulting in [wasted time/errors/revenue loss].

Example:

Marketing ops managers spend 4–6 hours/week manually reconciling UTM parameters across ad platforms because naming conventions drift, resulting in misattributed pipeline and wasted ad spend.

Output: 30–50 friction statements. No filtering yet—just capture.

Phase 3: Rapid Disqualification (Days 8–10)

Score each friction statement against your Opportunity Filter. Hard constraints first:

❌ Requires regulatory expertise you don't have
❌ Sales cycle > 6 months but you need revenue in 3
❌ Needs enterprise distribution you can't access
❌ Technical complexity exceeds your build capacity + budget

Then soft constraints (score 1–5):

Pain intensity: Is this a "hair on fire" problem or a "nice to fix"?
Frequency: Daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly?
Budget ownership: Who pays? Do they have budget authority?
Switching cost: How hard to displace current workaround?
Your unfair advantage: Distribution, domain knowledge, technical approach, network?

Keep only statements scoring ≥ 18/25 on soft constraints and passing all hard constraints.

Output: 3–5 qualified problem areas. Not ideas—problem areas.

Phase 4: Micro-Validation (Days 11–21)

For each qualified problem area, run a 3-day validation sprint. Do not build. Do not make a landing page. Do not run ads.

Day 1: Find 10 people who have this problem

Use your mapped communities. Cold DM/email with a specific ask:

"I'm researching how [role] handles [specific workflow]. Not selling anything. 10-minute call, I'll share what I learn from 10 others like you."

Target people who currently do the workflow, not people who "would be interested."

Day 2: Run structured interviews

Use this exact script:

"Walk me through the last time you did [workflow]."
"What tools/processes did you use?"
"Where did it break or slow down?"
"What did you do when it broke?" (reveals current workaround)
"Have you looked for a better way? What did you try?"
"If magic wand: what would the ideal solution do?"
"Who else on your team deals with this?"
"If a solution existed that [specific value prop], what's the max your team would pay monthly?"

Day 3: Synthesize

Create a one-pager per problem area:

Verbatim quotes on pain
Current workarounds + costs (time/money)
Budget signals (what they pay now, what they'd pay)
Decision-maker identified?
Your confidence score (1–10) on: pain reality, budget existence, accessibility

Kill criteria: If fewer than 3/10 confirm the problem and have budget and you can reach the decision-maker, kill the problem area. Move to the next.

Phase 5: Commit to a Wedge (Day 22)

You now have 1–2 problem areas with evidence. Pick one. Define your wedge: the smallest, highest-value slice you can build and deliver in 4–6 weeks.

Wedge criteria:

Solves one step of the workflow completely
Deliverable as a productized service, no-code tool, or minimal code
Priced at 10–20% of the customer's current cost (time

Start here

opportunity-discovery: a practical guide

Alan Descure — Sat, 14 Nov 2026 17:41:26 +0000

Opportunity Discovery: A Practical Guide for When You're Stuck

The Problem in Concrete Terms

You have time, skills, and maybe even capital—but you cannot point to a specific problem worth solving. Every idea feels either too small (a vitamin, not a painkiller), too crowded (ten funded competitors), or too vague ("people need better productivity"). You sit down to research and end up doom-scrolling Product Hunt or reading market reports that tell you the TAM is $50B but nothing about what to build on Monday.

The stuckness shows up in three ways:

Idea paralysis: You generate concepts but kill them before validation because you "know" they won't work.
Research rabbit holes: You spend weeks mapping competitive landscapes for markets you have no intention of entering.
False starts: You build an MVP for a problem nobody actually has, then wonder why signups flatline.

The common thread: you are trying to find an opportunity instead of earning the right to see one.

Why the Usual Fixes Fail

Market research reports tell you where money was spent last year. They are lagging indicators wrapped in consultant language. By the time a trend appears in Gartner or CB Insights, the early-mover advantage is gone.

Keyword tools and SEO research reveal search volume, not willingness to pay. People search for "free CRM" and "how to lose weight fast"—neither indicates a viable B2B SaaS or sustainable consumer business.

Competitor analysis teaches you what existing companies do. It does not teach you what customers hate about those companies. The opportunity lives in the gap between what competitors deliver and what users tolerate.

Brainstorming sessions produce ideas filtered through your own biases. You default to problems you personally experience (developer tools, productivity apps) because they are visible to you. The highest-leverage opportunities are usually invisible to you—until you go look.

Waiting for inspiration is not a strategy. It is procrastination with better branding.

Step-by-Step Solution

Phase 1: Pick a Surface Area (Days 1–2)

You cannot discover opportunities in "business" or "tech." You need a specific domain where you have access—not expertise, access. Access means you can reach 10–20 practitioners this week without cold emailing strangers.

List every domain where you have access:

Current or former industry (you know the workflows, the jargon, the people)
Hobbies where you participate in communities (Discord, forums, local meetups)
Adjacent roles in your company (talk to sales, support, ops, finance)
Friends' and family's professions (ask for 15-minute walkthroughs)

Pick one. Commit to it for two weeks. If it yields nothing, move to the next. Do not parallelize.

Phase 2: Run Contextual Interviews (Days 3–10)

Schedule 10–15 conversations, 30 minutes each. Not "customer discovery calls"—that framing makes people perform. Call them "workflow walkthroughs" or "day-in-the-life chats."

Recruitment script:

"I'm trying to understand how [role] actually works day to day. Not the happy path—the messy middle. 30 minutes, no sales pitch, I'll buy you coffee/lunch/send a $20 gift card."

Interview structure (do not send questions ahead):

Context (5 min): "Walk me through last Tuesday. What did you do from 9 to 5?"
Tools & workarounds (10 min): "What tools do you use? What do you hate about them? What spreadsheets/Notion docs/scripts have you built yourself?"
Pain ranking (10 min): "If you could wave a wand and fix one thing about your workflow, what would it be? What's the second? Third?"
Budget & authority (5 min): "Who decides on new tools? What's the last tool your team bought? How did that decision happen?"

Critical rules:

Record (with permission) and transcribe. Do not rely on notes.
Ask "then what?" and "say more about that" more than any other question.
Never pitch. Never say "would you use a tool that..."
Listen for workarounds—they are the clearest signal of unmet needs. A shared spreadsheet passed around via Slack is a product waiting to happen.

Phase 3: Cluster and Rank Problems (Days 11–12)

Take your transcripts. Highlight every distinct problem mentioned. Write each on a sticky note (physical or Miro/FigJam). Group duplicates.

For each cluster, score 1–5 on four dimensions:

Dimension	1	5
Frequency	Mentioned by 1 person	Mentioned by 8+ people
Intensity	"Annoying"	"Costs us deals / causes compliance risk / makes me stay late"
Workaround existence	No workaround	Custom script, spreadsheet, or paid consultant
Budget accessibility	No budget, no authority	Team bought something similar last quarter

Sum scores. Keep clusters scoring 14+. Discard the rest. You should have 2–4 problem clusters left.

Phase 4: Validate Willingness to Pay (Days 13–17)

For each remaining problem, find 3–5 people from your interviews (or new ones in the same role) and run a problem-solution fit test.

Create a one-pager (Notion page, PDF, Google Doc) per problem:

Problem statement in their language (quote them directly)
Current workaround described
Proposed solution: 3 bullet points, no features—outcomes only
Price anchor: "Teams like yours typically pay $X/seat/month for this"
CTA: "I'm building this for 5 design partners. 50% off for life, weekly feedback calls. In or out?"

Send personally:

"Based on our chat, I put this together. Honest feedback—would you put this on your team's radar? No pressure."

Track responses:

Strong signal: "Send me the contract" or "Can I show this to my manager?"
Weak signal: "Interesting, keep me posted"
Noise: "Cool idea!" with no follow-up

You need 2 strong signals per problem to proceed. If zero problems hit this threshold, return to Phase 1 with a new surface area.

Phase 5: Define the First Slice (Days 18–21)

Pick the problem with the strongest signals. Do not build an MVP. Build a manual-first delivery.

Map the workflow end-to-end. Identify the single highest-value step you can do for the customer without code. Examples:

They need competitor pricing intelligence → You deliver a weekly curated report
They need compliant contract review → You review 5 contracts/week with a checklist
They need candidate screening → You screen 20 resumes against their rubric

Charge from day one. Even $100/month. Payment is the only validation that matters.

Set a 4-week deadline: deliver manually, collect feedback, document every edge case. Only then decide what to automate.

Checklist

[ ] Listed 5+ domains where I have direct access to practitioners
[ ] Picked one domain and committed to 2 weeks
[ ] Conducted 10+ workflow walkthroughs (recorded, transcribed)
[ ] Extracted and clustered problems from transcripts
[ ] Scored each cluster on frequency, intensity, workaround, budget
[ ] Kept only clusters scoring 14+
[ ] Created one-pagers for each remaining problem
[ ] Got 2+ strong buying signals per problem
[ ] Selected one problem and defined a manual-first delivery
[ ] Secured first paying design partner before writing code

Closing

Opportunity discovery is not a creative exercise—it is a sales exercise. You earn the right to build by proving someone will pay for the outcome. The steps above replace guesswork with evidence, and they work whether you are a solo founder, a PM exploring a new vertical, or an engineer tired of building things nobody uses. If you want a structured workbook that walks through each phase with templates, scripts, and scoring sheets, start here.

opportunity-discovery: a practical guide

Alan Descure — Sat, 14 Nov 2026 17:35:39 +0000

Opportunity Discovery: A Practical Guide for When You’re Stuck

The Problem in Concrete Terms

You are not "lacking ideas." You are drowning in noise.

You have a notebook full of half-baked concepts, a Trello board of "maybe someday" projects, and a browser history littered with Product Hunt launches and Indie Hacker interviews. You know how to build things. You can write code, design interfaces, write copy, or manage supply chains. The bottleneck isn't execution—it’s the paralyzing uncertainty of what to execute on.

The stuckness manifests in three specific ways:

The "Vitamin vs. Painkiller" Paralysis: You filter every idea through "Is this a must-have?" and discard 99% because they feel like vitamins. You’re left with nothing because you can’t distinguish a "nice-to-have" from a "latent pain" before you build.
The Market Size Trap: You discard niche problems because "the TAM is too small," then chase massive markets (CRM, Project Management, Email Marketing) where you have zero unfair advantage and die of obscurity.
The Validation Theater: You build landing pages, run cold outreach campaigns, or post "Would you use this?" polls on Reddit. You get polite encouragement or silence. You interpret silence as "bad idea" and encouragement as "green light." Both are usually wrong.

You are stuck because you are treating opportunity discovery as a creative brainstorming exercise instead of a forensic investigation exercise. You are waiting for a lightning strike instead of digging for gold.

Why the Usual Fixes Fail

1. "Scratch Your Own Itch"

Why it fails: Your itches are often idiosyncratic, already solved by tools you haven't configured properly, or too small to sustain a business. Worse, if you are a developer, your itches are usually developer tools—a saturated market where buyers expect free tiers and have high switching costs. You end up building a better vim plugin that 12 people use.

2. "Talk to Customers" (Generic Advice)

Why it fails: You don't know who the customer is yet. Cold DMing 50 founders on LinkedIn asking "What's your biggest problem?" yields generic answers: "Time," "Money," "Hiring." These are not actionable problem statements. You cannot build a product for "I need more time." You also lack the credibility to get honest, deep answers from strangers without a specific context.

3. "Keyword Research / SEO Gap Analysis"

Why it fails: This finds demand for information, not demand for solutions. People search "how to manage invoices" because they are doing it manually in Excel. They search "best invoice software" when they are ready to buy. Keyword tools show you the latter (high competition, high intent) but miss the former (high friction, low search volume, high opportunity). You optimize for the crowded buying intent, ignoring the quiet suffering intent.

4. "Clone X but for Y"

Why it fails: You import the complexity of a mature product without the distribution moat. You see the tip of the iceberg (the UI) and miss the 10 years of edge-case handling, integrations, and brand trust underwater. You build a "Notion for Plumbers" and realize plumbers don't want a block-based editor; they want a PDF that doesn't break on mobile.

Step-by-Step Solution: The Friction Audit Method

This method requires zero budget, no audience, and no coding. It requires access to places where work actually happens.

Phase 1: Define Your "Adjacent Possible" (30 Minutes)

You cannot discover opportunities in industries you don't understand. List every industry, role, or workflow you have direct, non-trivial exposure to.

Direct exposure = You have done the work, watched someone do the work for hours, or managed the budget for the work.
Non-trivial = You know the specific software they hate, the regulation they fear, the spreadsheet they maintain manually.

Action: Write a list of 5–10 specific contexts.

Bad: "Healthcare," "Real Estate," "E-commerce."
Good: "Prior authorization workflows for outpatient PT clinics," "Commercial lease abstraction for multi-tenant retail," "Amazon FBA reimbursement reconciliation for sellers doing $1M–$5M/yr."

If your list is empty, stop. Go get a part-time job, shadow a friend, or volunteer in operations for a non-profit for two weeks. You cannot debug a system you cannot see.

Phase 2: Harvest "Shadow IT" & Workarounds (2–4 Hours)

Opportunities live where software fails and humans compensate. You are looking for Spreadsheets, Zapier/Make scripts, Notion/Airtable bases, Chrome extensions, manual copy-paste loops, and PDF-to-Excel conversions.

Where to look (do this yourself, no tools required):

Reddit / Niche Forums: Search [Role] + "spreadsheet" or [Role] + "manual process" or [Role] + "workaround". Example: r/propertymanagement "spreadsheet", r/medicalbilling "manual".
LinkedIn "Open to Work" / Job Descriptions: Search for roles like "Operations Analyst," "Revenue Operations," "Clinical Coordinator." Read the responsibilities section. Look for: "Maintain tracking spreadsheet for...", "Manually reconcile...", "Compile weekly report from [System A] and [System B]..."
App Marketplace Reviews (Negative): Go to the Salesforce AppExchange, Shopify App Store, HubSpot Marketplace, Athenahealth Marketplace. Filter 1–2 star reviews for the category leaders. Read specifically for: "Doesn't handle [edge case]", "Export is broken", "Can't bulk edit", "Support ignores API bugs."
Government / Regulatory Filings: If your adjacent possible is regulated (healthcare, finance, construction, transport), search for "Consent Order," "Settlement Agreement," or "Corrective Action Plan" + [Industry]. These documents list exact process failures that companies are legally forced to fix.

Output: A raw list of 20–50 specific friction points. Format: [Role] tries to [Outcome] but [Current Tool] fails because [Specific Reason], so they [Workaround].

Example: Senior Accountant tries to close month-end but NetSuite revenue recognition module fails on variable consideration contracts, so they maintain a 40-tab Excel model with manual VLOOKUPs.

Phase 3: Filter for "Urgent, Expensive, Frequent" (1 Hour)

Apply three hard filters to your raw list. Be ruthless. Keep only items scoring High on all three.

Filter	Question	Low Signal (Discard)	High Signal (Keep)
Urgent	Does this block revenue recognition, cause compliance fines, lose customers this week, or stop a paycheck?	"Annoying," "Slow," "Ugly UI," "Nice to have dashboard."	"We fail audit if this is wrong," "We can't bill $200k until this spreadsheet is done," "Client churns if report is late."
Expensive	What is the fully loaded cost of the workaround? (Hours × Hourly Rate × Frequency + Error Cost)	Intern spends 1 hr/week copying data ($15/wk).	Senior Manager spends 10 hrs/month fixing reconciliation errors ($5k/mo + risk of $50k write-off).
Frequent	Daily / Weekly / Monthly (Monthly close, Weekly sprint, Daily standup)?	Quarterly planning, Annual audit prep, One-time migration.	Daily reconciliation, Weekly commission calc, Monthly board deck data pull.

Action: Score each item 1–3 on U, E, F. Sum scores. Keep only 9s (3+3+3). You will likely have 1–3 items left. These are your opportunities.

Phase 4: The "Concierge Validation" (1–2 Weeks, Parallel)

Do not build. Do not make a landing page. Sell the manual service.

Define the Deliverable: "I will produce the [Specific Output: e.g., clean reconciliation report / compliant prior-auth packet / accurate commission statement] for you every [Frequency] for $[Price = 10-20% of the 'Expensive' cost calculated above]."
Find 3 Prospects: Use the specific contexts from Phase 1. Message peers, former colleagues, or cold-email the exact title you identified in Phase 2.

Start here