# Finding an idea

> No idea yet? Buildpad helps you find one by digging into what you know, checking real conversations online, and landing on an idea worth pursuing.

Not everyone arrives with an idea. The **Find an idea** phase is a conversation where Buildpad digs through what you already know, do and notice, checks the promising bits against real conversations online, and helps you land on one idea you want to pursue. It is not a generator that prints ten ideas on demand. The idea comes out of your own experience, with Buildpad asking the questions and doing the checking.

*Candidate ideas collect as orange notes on the canvas while facts about you go into frames.*

## How you get there

There are three ways into the phase, and they all end up in the same place.

- **During onboarding.** When the onboarding chat asks what you want to build, tap **Brainstorm ideas** or say in your own words that you do not have an idea yet. The onboarding chat stays short and gathers your background instead of an idea. Your project then opens with a single **Find an idea** phase instead of a roadmap.
- **From the dashboard.** Pick the **Brainstorm ideas** quick start. Buildpad creates a new project and switches its first phase to **Find an idea** straight away.
- **From a planning phase.** If you tell Buildpad in a planning phase such as **Build roadmap** that you do not have an idea yet, it switches that phase to **Find an idea**. The chat continues where it was, only the phase title changes.

## How the conversation goes

Buildpad opens by saying it will surface what you have already been noticing, and asks for a little patience while the first questions look for something real. Then it asks one question at a time, starting with the easy ones, like your work and the areas you know well, and moving to the more personal ones once you are talking.

It is looking in a few specific places:

- a problem you have yourself
- something that is normal in your world but not in most people's
- a trend or an odd pattern you have noticed
- a problem so painful or unglamorous that nobody wants to touch it
- something others dismiss as a toy
- a link between two fields you know
- a belief almost nobody agrees with
- a problem someone has already asked you to solve

Expect it to push. When an answer is thin or contradicts something you said earlier, Buildpad asks again rather than nodding along. An idea does not need to be new, either. Existing products usually mean real demand, and the question becomes where your edge is.

## Checking against real conversations

When you mention something that annoys you, Buildpad checks whether other people complain about it too. It searches the relevant communities on Reddit and reads the threads, then brings the actual posts and quotes back into the chat. You see the steps as small icons in the reply, with tooltips like **Searched Reddit** and **Read a Reddit post**.

Hearing the complaint in someone else's words is the point. It shows you whether something is a chorus or just you.

*Buildpad brings real quotes back into the conversation so you can judge the demand yourself.*

For feasibility and prior art, Buildpad also runs quick [web searches](https://buildpad.io/docs/research). It keeps these short. Deep research and building belong to the phases that come after the idea.

## Candidates on the canvas

Every time a thread points at something that could be an idea, Buildpad writes it down as an orange note under a tan **Candidates** label, even when it is rough. Unwritten candidates get lost as the conversation moves on. Facts about you, like your background, your time and your constraints, go into frames as yellow notes, so the phases that follow can use them.

Once a few candidates exist, Buildpad walks through them with you. For each one it asks whether the connection to your life is real, whether you are seeing something most people are not yet, and whether you would actually do the unglamorous work it would take to build it. It also revisits anything you brushed past. The dismissal itself is often the signal.

If nothing lands after an honest look, Buildpad says so. You can come back later or start a new project.

## Landing on one

When a candidate clicks, the phase wraps up the same way every planning conversation does:

1. **Commitment.** Buildpad asks how seriously you are pursuing this and how much conviction you have in the idea itself.
2. **A goal.** Together you set a goal that matches that commitment. Someone set on making it happen gets an outcome in the world, like opening the Two Ends shop with its first orders in. Someone still deciding gets a goal that settles the doubt, like confirming that people will pay for a clean-burning candle. The confirmed goal goes on the canvas as a note.
3. **Capture.** The chosen idea becomes a note, the context relevant to it is filed as facts in the frames of their topics, and the candidate notes come off the canvas.
4. **Ultraplan.** After a recap you can correct, Buildpad proposes [Ultraplan](https://buildpad.io/docs/ultraplan). Approve it and the roadmap of phases is built from this conversation and the canvas.

Buildpad then walks you through the phases, and when you say you are ready, the **Find an idea** phase completes and the first phase of your roadmap is waiting in the [phase list](https://buildpad.io/docs/phases).

> **Tip:** Answer with specifics. "Every clean candle still gives me a headache" gives Buildpad a community to search and a complaint to look for. "Something in wellness" gives it nothing to check.