“I started looking on forums and I noticed there were a lot of other IT admins that had the exact same problem.”

Look for Pain Points in Forums Before Building Anything

Thomas didn't start with a clever idea — he started with a real complaint he personally experienced at work, then cross-referenced it against forum conversations to confirm he wasn't alone. This community-based validation gave him confidence that a market existed before he wrote a single line of code. The pattern: live inside the problem, then find others who share it.