Thread by @jakobgreenfeld

After spending the last few weeks reading everything I can on how to come up with great product ideas, I've come up with what I call the "The Grand Unified Theory of Product Ideation"
jakobgreenfeld.com/gut

While there is certainly no lack of advice on how to come up with product ideas, most of it is fragmented and contradictory.

Many thinkers that beginners look up to for advice, recommend completely different things.

Since it took me far too long to get some clarity in my thinking, I figured that many others have this problem too.

Hence, I tried to put the best ideas on how to come up with promising product ideas into a coherent context.

One key distinction is:

Organic ↔ Inorganic.

Organic ideas are solutions to problems you noticed in your own life, inorganic ideas are related to other people’s problems.

The second key distinction is:

Bottom-up ↔ Top-down.

When you start only with a category in mind, you’re following a top-down approach, while if your ideation efforts start at some smaller scale you’re doing bottom-up ideation.

In total, we end up with four different ideation categories.

Organic, bottom-up ideation (“scratching your own itch”) is all about solving problems that you currently have yourself or had in the past.

This method is recommended, for example, by @levelsio and by @tylertringas.

Organic, top-down ideation (“Live in the future, then build what’s missing.”) is about picking a field and immersing yourself in it until you get to the edge.

This is what, for example, @paulg recommends to aspiring startup founders.

Inorganic, bottom-up ideation ("idea extraction") is about trying to find other people's pains by talking to them.

This method is recommended by @nathanbarry, @robwalling, among others.

Inorganic, top-up ideation ("idea safaris") is about picking a field and then observing it carefully from the outside. For example, you visit forums to find out what people in the niche complain about.

This is recommended by @amyhoy and @alexhillman.

There are lots arguments you can make about the usefulness of these methods relative to each other. But I like the pragmatic approach by @patio11:

Approach them in order listed above. training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/ar…