Stocking the pond

1 September 2026

Your pond fills up on its own. Ideas arrive from your own irritations, your own workarounds, the things you personally find tedious, and that water holds good fish. Some of the best ones you will ever keep came from your own annoyance.

But a pond stocked from one source runs to one species. The fish start to look like each other. There is a second stream you can open, and strangers have been feeding it for years, in public, for free.

Amy Hoy named the method around 2010 and teaches it with Alex Hillman at Stacking the Bricks. She called it a sales safari, which is a better name than it first appears, because you are not hunting. You sit still and watch what the animals actually do, rather than what a survey says they would do.

Where the water is

Pick a group of people, not a topic. This is the part everyone gets backwards. “Project management” is a topic and it will teach you nothing. “Freelance illustrators who invoice their own clients” is a group, and they have somewhere they complain.

The good water has one quality in common: nobody is selling in it.

• Subreddits for a profession rather than a product
• Discord and Slack communities where practitioners talk shop
• One-star and three-star reviews — the three-star ones are richer, because those people wanted it to work
• Support forums for the incumbent tool everyone tolerates
• Stack Overflow questions that got answered but not solved
• Facebook groups, still, unglamorously
• Hacker News threads where the top comment explains why the thing is annoying
• Conference talk Q&As
• Job listings, oddly — a company hiring for a workaround is a company with a problem

Read for hours. Not minutes. The first twenty complaints teach you the vocabulary. The insight is at complaint number ninety.

What to actually write down

Verbatim, in their words, never yours. The moment you paraphrase, you have started fishing your own pond again. Keep their nouns, their verbs, the specific tool they named, the swear words.

Then sort what you have caught into rough piles:

• Things people are already paying to avoid
• Workarounds they built themselves
• Things they have simply accepted
• Things they ask for over and over that nobody has answered

That third pile is the interesting one. Accepted pain does not get requested, because they have stopped believing it can change.

The turn

Most people come back from a safari with problems. Problems are not ideas. A problem is water. An idea is the fish that only lives in that water.

What is hard is not finding complaints. Complaints are everywhere, and reading a hundred of them feels productive in the way reorganising your notes feels productive. What is hard is sitting with the ones that repeat. The third time the same frustration appears, phrased three different ways by three people who do not know each other, something is alive down there. Most people have already scrolled past it.

Three traps

You will want to fix the first complaint you see. Do not — it is just the loudest one.

You will want to ask them what they want. Do not do that either. Observed behaviour beats stated preference every time, which is why it is a safari and not an interview.

And you will be tempted to safari a group you do not like. That is a long marriage to a stranger you resent.

How to practise

Twenty minutes, once a week. One group, one watering hole, ten verbatim complaints into your pond as bubbles. No judging, no building. After a month you will have eighty, and the repeats will be obvious without you looking for them.

Don't look for the loudest complaint. Look for the one that keeps coming back.