How I came up with a new app idea

If you want to come up with a new product idea, you need to start with THE CUSTOMER you want to build the business around.

You see, programmers spend millions of hours learning programming languages such as html, css, node, js,…..You cannot spend all this time learning these languages just for learning sake.

The aim of programming is to solve problems for customers. We learn to code so that we can build tools and software for people.

HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT PROBLEM TO SOLVE WITH YOUR PROGRAMMING KNOWLEDGE.

step 1: “choose a customer. Then build a solution for that customer”
I chose ‘taxi drivers’ as my customer. (here, you don’t need to think about which customer to choose.

Any profession that first comes to your mind is your customer. Because the method presented below will work for any type of customer eg. teacher, musician, etc,… you choose to build for)

Before step 2, I don’t have the product I want to build for taxi drivers in mind, but I know I want to build something for taxi drivers.

step 2: “listen to the story of the customer”

The story of the customer refers to how the customer performs his/her day to day duties. In my case I met a few taxi drivers in my community, had a chat with them and listened to their story. Below is a typical taxi driver’s story

“we wake up early in the morning and wipe our taxis with water and rag. Then we drive to the filling station to fill our petrol tank. Then we drive on the road and look at people on the roadside to see if they need to go somewhere quickly. Then we ask them how much they will pay for us to take them there.
If they pay for what we want to receive, we pick them up. When we get to their destination, we collect the money from them in cash. Then we move on to find other people”

step 3: “identify key points(takeaways) from the story”

Some of the takeaways from the taxi driver’s story are 1)“wipe our taxis with water and rag” 2)“Then we drive on the road and look at people on the roadside to see if they need to go somewhere quickly.” 3)“we collect the money from them in cash”

step 4: “ pick a product from the list and build”

I build my taxi app ( I am not here to market it and it is not on the app market either) using the second takeaway from the story. Then I showed the working prototype to the taxi drivers to see how they would respond.

After learning to program, you have to build products for the market. This is a simple way of coming up with the right product for the market and how I came up with my app idea.

1. pick a customer
2. listen to the story of the customer
3. take away key points from the story
4. pick a product from the list and build