Summaries of Articles, Books and Talks on Entrepreneurship

How to Get Startup Ideas - Jared Friedman

How To Get Startup Ideas - Paul Graham

http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.
The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common:
1. they’re something the founders themselves want.
2. that they themselves can build.
3. that few others realize are worth doing.
You should only work on problems that exist.
The most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has.
Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas.
It doesn’t merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.
Example of a bad idea: a social network for pet owners
- It doesn’t sound obviously mistaken. Millions of people have pets.
- Surely many of these people would like a site where they could talk to other pet owners.
- The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with pets, they don’t say “I would never use this.” They say “Yeah, maybe I could see using something like that.”
- Even when the startup launches, it will sound plausible to a lot of people.
- They don’t want to use it themselves, at least not right now, but they could imagine other people wanting it.
- Sum that reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users.
- Made-up startup ideas are usually of the first type. Lots of people are mildly interested in a social network for pet owners.
When you launch a startup, you have to have at least some users who really need your product. Not people who would tell you “that’s a nice idea”.
When you have an idea for a startup, ask yourself: who wants this right now?
Who wants this so much that they’ll use it even when it’s a crappy version one made by a two-person startup they’ve never heard of?
If you can’t answer that, the idea is probably bad.
Facebook was a good idea because it started with a small market (colleges) there was a fast path out of.
The way to notice startup ideas is to look for things that seem to be missing.
So if you want to find startup ideas, don’t merely turn on the filter “What’s missing?” Also turn off every other filter, particularly “Could this be a big company?”
There’s plenty of time to apply that test later.
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.
Rather than trying to learn about “entrepreneurship.” “Entrepreneurship” is something you learn best by doing it.
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.
Even if you find someone else working on the same thing, you’re probably not too late.
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.
Filters you need to turn off: The unsexy filter and the schlep filter
The schlep filter is so dangerous that I wrote a separate essay about the condition it induces, which I called schlep blindness. I gave 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 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.
Sometimes you need an idea now.
When searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise. If you’re a database expert, don’t build a chat app for teenagers (unless you’re also a teenager).
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.”
Try talking to everyone you can about the gaps they find in the world. What’s missing? What would they like to do that they can’t? What’s tedious or annoying, particularly in their work?
One way to ensure you do a good job solving other people’s problems is to make them your own. When Rajat Suri of E la Carte decided to write software for restaurants, he got a job as a waiter to learn how restaurants worked. That may seem like taking things to extremes, but startups are extreme. We love it when founders do such things.
Finding startup ideas is a subtle business, and that’s why most people who try fail so miserably. It doesn’t work well simply to try to think of startup ideas.
If you do that, you get bad ones that sound dangerously plausible.
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.