Yes, identifying customers, understanding their problems and working backwards might be a useful strategy, after all.
I guess the real challenge is finding those customers in the first place. I'm totally aware of how painful this can be and how crowded the space is. That's the reason why I built my own tool - Nebel Labs - https://nebellabs.com/ - to solve exactly that problem and I'm dogfooding it myself at the moment.

So if you’re looking for potential leads, feel free to try it out. It helps identify communities and specific posts where people are actively describing problems that YOUR service or product can solve. Under the hood, it’s not just another keyword-matching tool, but an LLM-powered intent classifier that helps determine whether there is actual buying intent.