I’ve been doing it for 2 days in a row. I spent around 4 hours per day. Not so much but I should say: it works.
Disclaimer: it works but it depends on what you are trying to achieve. My goal was to find all the pains that people face learning Chinese (I picked this topic because I’m learning Chinese currently and may understand their pains better – but I’m not going to limit my search only to this language and only this topic, stay tuned!). The current result is:
- 26 pain points and 7 wishes
- 18 apps/tools that help with solving them
- 10 hacks/solutions users use to solve pain points
- 3 product ideas
How I did it
Small prehistory: I don’t remember exactly where I heard about this method first but eventually I’ve landed at the “Sales Safari” by Amy Hoy (for example, you can watch this video to understand what it is about: https://stackingthebricks.com/video-sales-safari-in-action/)
She didn’t give much details in it though, so I created my own approach.
I started from Reddit. Found subreddit that I thought could give me most ideas and insights.
I created a new spreadsheet in Google Sheet. My first intention was to use one file for all the ideas but after some refining, I created a structured file dedicated to only one problem: learning Chinese.
The file structure
It has 5 tabs:
- Solutions (for links to already existing apps/tools/webisites)
- Pains (what are people struggling with?)
- Methods/ideas (if somebody found some effective method to solve their problem it goes here)
- Ideas of apps (all ideas coming to me)
- Useful resources (links to github repos, free tools etc.)
Solutions tab
It has 4 columns describing a specific solution, first 2 are:
This is only my rating, and I didn’t dig into the solutions too deep, so it may be wrong. But it helps me to understand what personally I didn’t like or like in them.
Pains tab
This is how it looks
The most important column is third – I record there how many times I saw the issue or problem.
Other tabs are pretty straightforward, I just put links or ideas there.
Metrics… still zeros…
| Metrics | Value |
| Number of users | 0 |
| Number of paid users | 0 |
| Invested, in $USD | 0 |
| MRR, in $USD | 0 |
Let’s see what I will come to.