Find your customers' pain points.

Many founders think they need that one brilliant idea. Something new, something that no one has seen before. But thinking this way usually leads you away from reality. The best products are not born out of visions, but out of frustration.

Not their own, but that of their customers.

In every industry, in every company, in every process, there are rough edges that don't run smoothly. Things that eat up time, are unnecessarily complicated or are simply annoying. And the best thing about them is that these problems have often been unresolved for years – because no one is interested in them. Too small for SAP, too individual for large providers, too troublesome for IT.

And that's exactly where your opportunity lies.

Niche problems are invisible – until you look closely

Most really exciting niches are not recognized at first glance. They are not on a company's website. They do not appear in tenders. And they are rarely the subject of strategy workshops.

They are hidden in everyday life:

• in the Excel sheets that are laboriously maintained,
• in the e-mails that are regularly sent manually,
• in the workarounds that teams use to make ends meet.

You won't learn about these pain points from the briefing. You'll learn about them in conversation. By listening. By asking questions. And sometimes only by chance, when someone casually mentions how they manage internally.

If you want to learn, you have to keep an open mind. The broader the range of your first projects, the more chances you have of discovering such niches. And when you find them, the rule is: hold on to them and develop them.

A small pain that can become big

A good niche problem has one central characteristic: it is known to many, but hardly anyone is dealing with it. It is real, tangible, urgent – but not prominent. And that's why no one has built a good solution yet.

If you're an agency and you identify a problem like this, you have a diamond in your hand. You can start a project with a real customer, build an MVP, collect feedback, and develop it further. And this is often exactly where your first product comes from.

The journey into the niche doesn't start with an idea – but with an “aha” moment in a customer project.

Leadtime is the perfect tool for finding niches. By structuring projects, documenting requirements and standardizing tasks, you can quickly identify where processes are repeated – and where no good solution yet exists. This turns your everyday project work into an idea machine. And small pains become scalable products.