How to Get Startup Ideas

Why is it so important to work on a problem you have? Among other things, it ensures the problem really exists. It sounds obvious to say you should only work on problems that exist. And yet by far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has.

When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they're making — not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently. 

You can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. Not all ideas of that type are good startup ideas, but nearly all good startup ideas are of that type.

Nearly all good startup ideas are of this type. Microsoft made Altair Basic. There were only a couple thousand Altair owners, but without this software they were programming in machine language. Thirty years later Facebook was exclusively for Harvard students, there were only a few thousand, but those few thousand users wanted it a lot.

How do you tell whether something is the germ of a giant company, or just a niche product?

Often you can't. 

So if you can't predict whether there's a path out of an idea, how do you choose between ideas? The truth is disappointing but interesting: if you're the right sort of person, you have the right sort of hunches. If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing fast, when you have a hunch that something is worth doing, you're more likely to be right.

It doesn't mean you have to be one of the people pushing it forward. You can also be at the leading edge as a user.

The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not "think up" but "notice."

The key is to have a mind that's prepared in the right way.

If you look at the way successful founders have had their ideas, it's generally the result of some external stimulus hitting a prepared mind.

ust one that in the worst case takes a year rather than a weekend.

When you find the right sort of problem, you should probably be able to describe it as obvious, at least to you. 

It’s a weird process: you're trying to see things that are obvious, and yet that you hadn't seen.

What you need to do here is loosen up your own mind, and not to make too much of a direct frontal attack — i.e. to sit down and try to think of ideas. The best plan is to keep a background process running, looking for things that seem to be missing. Work on hard problems, driven mainly by curiosity, but have a second self watching over your shoulder, taking note of gaps and anomalies.

Don't let that deter you.

It's exceptionally rare for startups to be killed by competitors — so rare that you can almost discount the possibility. So unless you discover a competitor with the sort of lock-in that would prevent users from choosing you, don't discard the idea.

A crowded market is actually a good sign, because it means both that there's demand and that none of the existing solutions are good enough.

A startup can't hope to enter a market that's obviously big and yet in which they have no competitors. 

You'll need to turn off these two filters if you want to notice startup ideas.

The schelp filter is preferring not to deal with tedious problems or get involved in messy ways with the real world. Which is a reasonable preference, because such things slow you down. But this preference is so widespread that the space of convenient startup ideas has been stripped pretty clean. If you let your mind wander a few blocks down the street to the messy, tedious ideas, you'll find valuable ones just sitting there waiting to be implemented.

.. it keeps you from working on problems you despise rather than ones you fear.

The unsexy filter, while still a source of error, is not as entirely useless as the schlep filter. If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing rapidly, your ideas about what's sexy will be somewhat correlated with what's valuable in practice. Particularly as you get older and more experienced. Plus if you find an idea sexy, you'll work on it more enthusiastically.

Best way to discover startup ideas is to become the sort of person who has them and then build whatever interests you, sometimes you don't have that luxury. Sometimes you need an idea now. For example, if you're working on a startup & your initial idea turns out to be bad.

When you use the organic method, you don't even notice an idea unless it's evidence that something is truly missing. But when you make a conscious effort to think of startup ideas, you have to replace this natural constraint with self-discipline. You'll see a lot more ideas(bad ones), so you need to be able to filter them.

When searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise.

The place to start looking for ideas is things you need. There must be things you need.

One good trick is to ask yourself whether in your previous job you ever found yourself saying "Why doesn't someone make x? If someone made x we'd buy it in a second." If you can think of any x people said that about, you probably have an idea. You know there's demand, and people don't say that about things that are impossible to build.

The next best thing to an unmet need of your own is an unmet need of someone else.

What would they like to do that they can't? What's tedious or annoying, particularly in their work? Let the conversation get general; don't be trying too hard to find startup ideas. You're just looking for something to spark a thought. Maybe you'll notice a problem they didn't consciously realize they had, because you know how to solve it.

One way to ensure you do a good job solving other people's problems is to make them your own.

That's why most people who try fail so miserably.

The best approach is more indirect: if you have the right sort of background, good startup ideas will seem obvious to you.

But even then, not immediately. It takes time to come across situations where you notice something missing. And often these gaps won't seem to be ideas for companies, just things that would be interesting to build. Which is why it's good to have the time and the inclination to build things just because they're interesting.

Live in the future and build what seems interesting. Strange as it sounds, that's the real recipe.