[wpietri]

Start with audiences you know and love. Talk with them about their work, their hobbies, their lives. Look for problems they experience, and ask: can I solve that with the tools I know?

Last year I was talking with my brother about the pain of kids' swim meets. He brings his son to an event where hundreds and hundreds of kids show up. They are often in multiple events. Actual swimming time is short, but he had to hang around all day waiting for the right races. This year he told me that somebody had created an app: the meet organizers upload the race data; he can just go in and star the kids he's shepherding. Then he gets a real-time schedule showing just the races he has to make, letting them go off and have fun rather than hanging around.

You can bet that whoever built that app had a family member who told me a story exactly like the one my brother told me. But they went and hung out at a few swim meets and did followup interviews with some of the organizers. Eventually, an app was born.

Problems are everywhere once you start looking for them. Keep a backlog of problems and solution ideas, and sort them by how good a business you think they'd make. Eventually you'll find one where you'll say, "Well, I'm willing to bet some of my time and money that I can make something worth buying."