May 28, 2026
I Got Laid Off After 7 Years. My SaaS Idea Was Hiding in the Problem I Was Trying to Solve.
In March 2026, after seven years at the same company, I got laid off.
No warning. No real explanation. Just a calendar invite, a fifteen-minute call, and then — nothing. Seven years of work, context, relationships. Gone.
I spent a few days being angry. Then I made a decision that, in hindsight, was probably obvious to everyone except me: I was not going to look for another job.
I was going to build something of my own.
The problem I didn't expect: I had no idea what to build
I had the motivation. I had the time. I had a developer background. What I didn't have was an idea.
So I did what everyone tells you to do. I went to Reddit. I Googled "saas ideas 2026." I read every indie hacker post I could find. I wrote lists. I crossed things out. I started over.
I asked myself the classic question: what problem do you have that nobody is solving?
Days passed. Nothing clicked.
I was overthinking every angle. Is the market big enough? Is it too competitive? Do I actually know anything about this space? Could I build this alone? Would anyone pay for it?
Ideas that seemed interesting in the morning felt stupid by afternoon. I kept reaching for something that felt validated — something where I could point to real people who genuinely had this problem, not just a hunch I'd talked myself into.
That's when I hit a wall I didn't know had a name.
The moment the idea found me
About a week into this, I caught myself doing something telling.
I had a tab open with a Reddit thread where someone was complaining about their industry software. Real complaint, real pain, lots of upvotes, clear gap. The kind of thing that should spark an idea. But I couldn't evaluate it — I knew nothing about that industry. I moved on.
Ten minutes later, same thing. Different industry, different thread, same problem on my end: I had no context to judge whether this was a real opportunity or a dead end.
I'd been spending hours finding pain points I couldn't do anything with — because they were in industries I didn't know.
That's when something clicked.
The problem I kept running into was the product.
Not the pain points themselves. Not the lack of Reddit threads. The real problem was that there was no curated layer between "raw complaints on the internet" and "a real, evaluated opportunity I could actually act on."
No scoring. No context. No domain grouping that would let someone with experience in, say, healthcare or logistics or education look at ideas relevant to their background.
I'd been trying to solve the wrong version of the problem. I wasn't looking for "any idea." I was looking for a validated idea in a domain I already understood.
Why domain knowledge matters more than most founders admit
Here's something I kept coming back to during those early weeks:
Almost every successful indie hacker I'd read about built their first product in an industry they already knew. The developer who'd spent years at an agency and built a tool for agencies. The accountant who automated the part of their job they hated. The teacher who fixed the problem every teacher has but nobody in tech ever notices.
That's not a coincidence. Domain experience compresses everything — your ability to understand the problem, your credibility with early customers, your instinct about what's a real pain versus a surface complaint.
The problem isn't that people don't have domain experience. Most people have years of it. The problem is that the SaaS idea resources available to them are either totally generic ("build a CRM!") or so raw (a Reddit thread in a category you've never worked in) that you can't evaluate them.
What I needed — and what I suspect most people who've spent years in a specific field need — is a way to find validated ideas organized around the world they actually know.
What I built
I started scraping Reddit. Looking for threads with high engagement, clear frustration, specific pain descriptions. I wrote a scoring system. I started grouping ideas not just by broad category but by niche topic — so someone who spent ten years in logistics could filter for logistics problems, and someone from the dental industry could see ideas that would immediately make sense to them.
Each idea needed to pass a bar before I'd include it: real source material (not vibes), a clear target customer, a gap in the existing competitive landscape, and scores for validation strength, build difficulty, and revenue potential.
And because I'm a developer building in the AI era, I added two things I wished I'd had when I was spinning my wheels:
A live AI preview — so you can see a working prototype of the product before you commit a single line of code. And a CLAUDE.md build spec — a complete technical blueprint you can drop directly into Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, or Windsurf and start shipping from day one.
That product is Nicheloom.
The thing about solving your own problem
There's a version of this story where I frame getting laid off as the best thing that happened to me. I'm not going to do that — it was a rough few months, and I'm still in it.
But there's something true in the cliché that the best product ideas come from your own frustrations. Not because your problems are automatically other people's problems. But because when you feel the friction firsthand, you understand it at a level that's hard to fake.
I spent weeks unable to find a validated SaaS idea. Every tool I found either gave me a generic listicle or dropped me into raw internet data with no way to evaluate what I was looking at.
That frustration is the exact thing Nicheloom is designed to remove.
If you're in the same place I was — motivated, ready to build, but spinning on what to build — browse the ideas. Filter by the domain you know. See which problems match your experience. Use the AI preview to stress-test whether the product makes sense before you write a line of code.
The research is already done. All that's left is the building.
Nicheloom surfaces validated niche SaaS ideas backed by real Reddit and App Store pain points. Every idea includes a live AI prototype and a ready-made build spec for AI coding tools.