How to find ideas ($42K/month founder) | Starter Story

In the fall of 2023, Pat Walls was running a micro-SaaS agency and noticed a brutal bottleneck: for each new product, he had to spend nine to ten hours chatting with ChatGPT to generate technical documentation and a knowledge base for AI coding tools. He automated that process into a sequence using Make.com, saving seven hours per project. That internal fix became CodeGuide, a tool that generates technical documentation from codebases. Within two weeks of putting up a landing page built in 30 minutes, he had 1,800 waitlist signups. The episode traces how Walls turned that personal time-saver into a business doing $42,000 per month in revenue, and what he learned about finding ideas, validating demand, and distributing a developer tool without a network.

The idea as a byproduct of your own workflow

Walls did not set out to build a startup. He was solving a repetitive, painful problem in his own work. That is the core of his philosophy on finding ideas: the best ones emerge from your own friction, not from market research or trend spotting. "I was just trying to solve my own problem," he says. The insight is that if you are already paying the cost of a problem in time or frustration, you are the ideal first customer. You know the pain intimately, you know what a good solution looks like, and you will use the product yourself, which forces you to make it actually work.