What Should I Build? A Framework for Finding Your Best Business Idea

"What should I build?" is one of the most common questions we hear, and it's usually asked by people with too many ideas, not too few. If that's you, the problem was never a shortage of ideas. It's not having a way to tell which of your ideas is actually worth your next six months.

Here's a framework that cuts through it — three circles, one honest filter, and a real look at where Waymaker could go further to help with exactly this.

The three-circle framework

Draw three overlapping circles: Skills (what you're genuinely good at, not just interested in), Interests (what you'd still want to work on eighteen months in, when the novelty's worn off), and Opportunity (where there's an actual, provable gap — people paying for a worse solution, or not being served at all).

Most people build in the overlap of just two circles, and it shows. Skills plus Opportunity with no real Interest becomes a business you're good at and quietly resent. Interest plus Opportunity with no real Skill means a brutal, slow climb up a learning curve while competitors who already have the skill move faster. Skills plus Interest with no real Opportunity is a beautiful hobby that never becomes a business.

The center — all three at once — is where your best idea is sitting. It's rarely your most exciting idea on first read. It's usually the one that felt slightly obvious, because it draws on something you already know how to do.

Layering in how you actually build

The three-circle framework tells you what to build. It doesn't tell you whether you're the kind of builder who should build it that way. That's where Builder DNA comes in — the same idea can be a great fit for a Rapid Launcher and a terrible fit for an Architect, not because the idea is different, but because how each of them needs to approach it is completely different.

A Storyteller with the right skills-and-opportunity idea should build content-first and let the product follow. An Operator with the same idea should probably find a Storyteller or Connector to handle distribution while they build the engine. Same opportunity, different path in — which is exactly why "what should I build" and "how am I wired to build it" have to be answered together, not separately.

A practical way to run this yourself

List every idea you've seriously considered in the last year, even the ones you talked yourself out of. For each one, score it honestly, one to five, on Skills, Interest, and Opportunity. Don't round up. Then look at what's actually sitting in the middle — not what excites you most on paper, but what scores real across all three.

Cross-reference that against your Builder DNA archetype and ask: does the path this idea requires match how I actually like to work? If a Connector's top idea is a heads-down, months-of-building technical product with no one to talk to along the way, that's worth noticing before you commit, not after.

Where we think Waymaker could go further

Here's an honest gap, not a sales pitch: right now, Builder DNA tells you how you build, and the idea-generation content tells you what's possible to build — but there's no single tool that sits between them and says "given your specific skills, interests, and archetype, here are the three ideas most worth your time."

That's a real opportunity for an "Idea Fit Finder" inside Waymaker — something that takes your Builder DNA result, a short input on your actual skills and interests, and cross-references it against real opportunity signal (the same kind Market Radar already pulls for validation) to hand you a short, ranked list instead of a blank page. It's the natural next step after the archetype quiz, and it would turn "what should I build" from an article you read into a tool that actually answers it for you. Worth putting on the roadmap.

What to do right now, without waiting on that

Run the three-circle exercise this week, on paper, honestly. Take the Builder DNA quiz if you haven't. Then bring your shortlist to Cameron and ask it to push back on your top choice the way a sharp cofounder would — not to confirm what you already wanted to hear, but to actually stress-test it.

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Start with how you're wired to build. Take the free Builder DNA quiz, then bring your idea shortlist to Cameron for a real gut-check. Take the quiz here.