A Few Ideas About Finding Startup Ideas For The Strategic Founder
1. Great ideas seem wrong at first –which is why not many people have attempted them in the first place. Do you have an idea that you strongly believe in? Does it have a ‘secret sauce’ that you think other (smart) people haven’t figured out the way you have? Does it have the potential for making a great difference in the world? Why haven’t you started working on that idea? Go ahead and try the idea out. Everything about a startup is an experiment.
2. Solve problems in the domain you understand most — your field of expertise, especially. In that space, you can easily see what others don’t see.
3. Solve problems that you yourself have experienced before or are currently experiencing. Doing this gives you a great edge: You could predict what users like you would need or not need. Scratch your own itch!
4. The next best thing to do (if you can’t solve your personal problems) is to ask friends or other people about what problem they currently face or have faced in the past. Then try solving it. But realize that you would have a harder time understanding your users – since you don’t face or haven’t faced the problem yourself. It takes way more effort and time to get the right feedback from potential users when you use this approach. Be careful.
5. Your idea should be able to help people get more done with less; otherwise, it wouldn’t work. Since entrepreneurship is about productivity and value creation, your idea should be able to create value and prosperity for your customers. If not, it is a bad idea. Creating prosperity and wealth is solving problems and creating value.
6. At first, don’t worry if your idea will work — or not – everything is an experiment. Test your idea out first. Fortunately, it is very much cheaper to test ideas out today that it used to be decades ago.
7. At first, don’t worry about how big your company will be. The score will take of itself. Just go ahead and do stuff that matters to users and do it really well.
8. You may have to change your initial idea. Or at least, you must evolve from what you would have originally started out with. You may have to change your original idea to another one that serves your customers better. Remember that you are building for people, and they decide what you build for them.
9. The best way to get startup ideas is to NOT think about startup ideas. The best startup ideas are organic, not made up. Don’t make a conscious effort to generate a startup idea; let it come naturally to you through your own experiences with your work, with people, and with the world.
When you work on organic ideas, you will naturally unleash the best part of your creative self. You will have intuition — you will make good decisions even when data may not be able to help. This is hardly true when you work on made-up ideas; which is the more reason you should work on problems that you are personally experiencing now or the ones you have personally experienced before. Again, scratch your own itch! (Paul Graham has an excellent essay on that.)
10. All you need is an idea, a touch of confidence, and a push to get started. Don’t overthink it; don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. And realize that there is no much of a market for ideas – execution trumps it all.
If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. It is not what you think you are that is stopping you; it is what you think you are not. So be wary of over-planning and perfectionism.
(More ideas about startup ideas here.)