You don’t always need passion about the subject matter. I was not “passionate” about cron jobs but I needed some tooling, built Cronitor, and now I never have to work for somebody else, which is something I CAN get passionate about.

Perhaps I mean more of, “convinced this is an idea that could potentially be a commercial product” rather than “passionate”

But I think you're right in your first comment about being passionate about the idea! The thing is, you don't get a salary from day one or maybe even year one (as compared to, for example, to building a VC-funded startup or working somewhere) and so you need to find the energy and motivation from something else, and "passion" fits very well with this "something else."

As I recently wrote in one of the latest newsletters (you'll find it on MicroFounder, called "keep going"):

"It can be easy to abandon your project as soon as you launch and don’t see instant results – be it visitors or paying customers – but I’ve been looking closely how microfounders build their startups for the last 3+ years and I’ve almost never seen a real overnight success."

You don’t need passion you just need a real problem to solve.

Go to indiehackers.com and find out what profitable businesses people have created. Make a competitor. The profit margins in SaaS are phenomenal so there is always room for new entrants.

You can throw some keywords into the Google Keyword Planner tool, and see what people are searching for. Or just run a normal google search for "tools for <industry>" and see what pops up.

Don't be discouraged by competitors. Their existence basically pre-validates the market for you. Just make sure you can differentiate yourself somehow (usually, on price because your product will be less feature rich initially).

And I'll throw this in without any kind of justification: don't make a SaaS for other developers, or lawyers.

That's why I don't disclose any project data on IH anymore. Except for creating more competitors, I don't see any reason to do so. Lol

I'm curious: why not for lawyers?

I know a business owner who doesn't like to do work for lawyers. The justification is that they're more capable of suing him (based on his previous experience)

For customer acquisition do you think it’s all inbound content writing? Any other ideas?

https://30x500.com/academy/ is a course that provides a systematic way of looking for a viable idea.

Google for "sales safari amy hoy" and you'll find many summaries like https://egghead.io/learn/30x500/sales-safari

And it really boils down to: keep your eyes open when you're reading forums / mailing lists / discord etc. Pay attention to what people complain about, what they say they need or want. And then create products that address that.

Look at what non-tech people are struggling with. Think about ways to make their life easier with the tech you know, at a small expense.

This takes hanging out with non-tech people, or at least reading what they write, or what others write about them.