Paul Graham - Startup Ideas
http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
Live in the future and build what seems interesting. Strange as it sounds, that's the real recipe.
Instead of asking "What problem should I solve?", ask "What problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?" and build a solution for it.
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.
"You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally." Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
Paul Buchheit says that people at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field "live in the future." Combine that with Pirsig and you get: Live in the future, then build what's missing.
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.
Pay particular attention to things that chafe you. The advantage of taking the status quo for granted is not just that it makes life (locally) more efficient, but also that it makes life more tolerable. If you knew about all the things we'll get in the next 50 years but don't have yet, you'd find present day life pretty constraining, just as someone from the present would if they were sent back 50 years in a time machine. When something annoys you, it could be because you're living in the future.
Coming up with startup ideas is a question of seeing the obvious. That suggests how weird this process is: you're trying to see things that are obvious, and yet that you hadn't seen.
A good way to trick yourself into noticing ideas is to work on projects that seem like they'd be cool. If you do that, you'll naturally tend to build things that are missing. It wouldn't seem as interesting to build something that already existed. Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones.
If you can afford to take a long view (and arguably you can't afford not to), you can turn "Live in the future and build what's missing" into something even better: Live in the future and build what seems interesting.
The clash of domains is a particularly fruitful source of ideas. If you know a lot about programming and you start learning about some other field, you'll probably see problems that software could solve. In fact, you're doubly likely to find good problems in another domain: (a) the inhabitants of that domain are not as likely as software people to have already solved their problems with software, and (b) since you come into the new domain totally ignorant, you don't even know what the status quo is to take it for granted.
Don't feel like you have to build things that will become startups. That's premature optimization. Just build things.
Because a good idea should seem obvious, when you have one you'll tend to feel that you're late. Don't let that deter you. Worrying that you're late is one of the signs of a good idea. 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.
If you're building something differentiated from competitors by the fact that it works on phones, but it only works on the newest phones, that's probably a big enough gap.
Err on the side of doing things where you'll face competitors. Inexperienced founders usually give competitors more credit than they deserve. Whether you succeed depends far more on you than on your competitors. So better a good idea with competitors than a bad one without.
There are two more filters you'll need to turn off if you want to notice startup ideas: the unsexy filter and the schlep filter.
Stripe as an example of a startup that benefited from turning off this filter, and a pretty striking example it is. Thousands of programmers were in a position to see this idea; thousands of programmers knew how painful it was to process payments before Stripe. But when they looked for startup ideas they didn't see this one, because unconsciously they shrank from having to deal with payments. And dealing with payments is a schlep (schlep = difficult journey) for Stripe, but not an intolerable one. In fact they might have had net less pain; because the fear of dealing with payments kept most people away from this idea, Stripe has had comparatively smooth sailing in other areas that are sometimes painful, like user acquisition. They didn't have to try very hard to make themselves heard by users, because users were desperately waiting for what they were building.
The unsexy filter is similar to the schlep filter, except it keeps you from working on problems you despise rather than ones you fear. We overcame this one to work on Viaweb. There were interesting things about the architecture of our software, but we weren't interested in ecommerce per se. We could see the problem was one that needed to be solved though.
Turning off the schlep filter is more important than turning off the unsexy filter, because the schlep filter is more likely to be an illusion.
A good trick for bypassing the schlep and to some extent the unsexy filter is to ask what you wish someone else would build, so that you could use it. What would you pay for right now?
Focus on users, not competitors. The most important information about competitors is what you learn via users anyway.
The best technique I've found for dealing with companies that have bad ideas is to tell them to go sell the product ASAP (before wasting time building it). Not only do they learn that nobody wants what they are building, they very often come back with a real idea that they discovered in the process of trying to sell the bad idea.
Don't sell what you can make, make what you can sell.
- Channel/distribution
- Problem
- Solution
- Business
- Idea
- Product
- Search for market/problem
- Solution
- Find ways to reach them (channels/distribution)
- Is there a problem?
- Is the problem painful enough? ($$?, urgent, important)
- Is the problem frequent enough? (weekly vs once 8 years?)
- Are there enough people with the same problem? (500 ppl vs 20M)
- How hard is it to reach to people with problem? (channels)
- Is market saturated by big brands? (i.e. spring water)
- Is solution at least 3x better than current substitute for any segment of market?
- Does the solution-business model work? (subscription, cross-sell, upsell, partnerships, sponsorships, grants, etc)
- Is there a segment that can be the early adopters?
- Is there a road to other bigger segments?