What do you mean "worth pursuing"? Do you mean that you can't find an idea worth investigating further? Or do you mean that you can't find an idea that survives a month of concentrated market research?
The latter is reasonable. The former isn't. You should be able to come up with lots of ideas worth following up on.
Let's play a game. Someone give me a product category, and I'll list ideas that are at least worth more research.
Furniture is a category or products I have so many problems with (with a viewpoint from Sweden)...
I'll let you write some ideas and then chime in with the problems I have seen.
I can't innovate on furniture directly, but maybe on the design, manufacturing, and distribution processes around it. I have no idea how this industry is structured, but here are some ideas.
- Made to order furniture. Let users design their own, or at least mix and match high level componets at a finer detail than ikea.
- High end IKEA. Combine the flexibility of Ikea with high end designs and materials.
- High level office furnishing service. Companies provide a high level description of their furnishing problem, rather than choosing specific items. I'm sure these consultants already exist, but maybe it can be done in a more automated, scalable way.
- bid/ask interface for used furniture markets. This would enable sellers to passively sell items.
- used marketplace that uses ML to extract features from pics. I think this may already exist. Not sure.
Very nice!
You hit close to home here!
Several ideas that are definitely worth looking into.
My problems, which might not be profitable to fix, are:
Very few pieces are composable, we need more things like https://www.prettypegs.com/
Unless you have the capability to build a new IKEA, this is to me the best venue for providing high quality customizability.
Finding furniture is a mess. There's missing information (dimensions, max load), close to useless search, and a bunch of places that sell the same things.
The latter is reasonable. The former isn't. You should be able to come up with lots of ideas worth following up on.
Let's play a game. Someone give me a product category, and I'll list ideas that are at least worth more research.