How to Get Startup Ideas

Resources

https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html https://www.julian.com/guide/startup/ https://startupclass.samaltman.com/

Get to the forefront of knowledge on a subject and wait for market changes. More info on that in How to (tech) Startup. Most good startup ideas have already been tried or thought of, so your new idea will only work if market pull makes it the right time.

Don’t try to get startup ideas if you want to have startup ideas. Forcing yourself to think of one will lead to fake ideas that nobody really needs enough to use. Try to help a narrow amount of ppl very deeply instead of helping a broad amount of ppl shallowly (and ofc if you have something that can help a broad amount of people very deeply that’s even better).

When you have an idea, ask yourself, who wants this right now? Who wants this so much that they’ll use it even if it’s a junky prototype made by a no-name startup. If you can’t answer that, the idea is probably bad.

But this is only a good way to start. You want to also have a path out of an idea. (Facebook was initially made for Harvard/colleges. But once it spread, the idea could get out very quickly). But knowing whether there’s a path out of an idea is hard. Bill Gates probably didn’t know for sure if there was a path out of his idea to program Basic.

There’s no guaranteed way to know for sure. If you’re the right sort of person, you’ll have the right sorts of hunches. And the way to turn yourself into the right sort of person is to get to the leading edge of a field that’s changing fast. This can be the leading edge as a doer or as a user.

”Live in the future, then build what’s missing.”

You don’t think up start up ideas. You notice them.

Don’t kill early startup ideas by asking if they’re going to turn into big companies. You have to gradually develop the mindset of questioning things and not accepting the status quo.

”Pay particular attention to things that chafe you.” Things that are annoying

A good trick to naturally thinking of solutions is to work on cool and interesting projects. You’ll naturally build new stuff and it trains your brain to think of new ideas + some of your projects might lead to new things.

The clash of different fields leads to good ideas. If you’re a CS student, instead of taking the standard software internship, go for a biotech internship.

A good idea will often seem obvious, so don’t worry about that and don’t feel that you’re too late. If there’s nobody else working on the idea with the kind of lock-in that will prevent users from switching to you, trust that you can do it better. It’s better to have a good idea with competitors than a bad one without. One caveat is that you need to be able to phrase what you can do that the incumbents are overlooking. Just making a better UI is often not enough.

Counter-intuitive things about startups

1. The fact that startups are so counter intuitive.
2. Trust your instincts about ppl.
3. There’s no faking. Either you have a good product or you don’t. We’ve been trained our entire lives to look for the tricks that can help game the system, and continue when starting up. But there’s no tricks.
4. Starting up has become this dream thing for many ppl; (including me). But it’s much harder and more time-consuming than you think.
   1. A startup isn’t necessarily the best way to accomplish your idea. It’s designed to grow hard and fast and never stop. You can just start a normal business or something else.
5. You don’t know whether or not you’ll be up to the challenge.
6. Don’t try to think of startup ideas. Train your brain to think of startup ideas unconsciously.
   1. learn abt things that matter
   2. work on problems that interest you
   3. with ppl you like and respect

If you have to come up with startup ideas on demand, here are some tricks:

• find some gaps in your domain of knowledge that are promising and you think there might be demand for
• ask yourself what’s unusual about you that makes your needs different from others
• if you’re young, are there things your friends would like to do that current tech won’t let you do?
• talk to as many people as possible about the gaps they find in the world
• if you’re young and want to create a social network, find the most influential/famous queen bees in your area and offer to be their personal software developer to build anything missing in their social lives
• look for dying fields and ask yourself what would make future people say “this replaced X” (journalism is a good example)
• are there groups of scruffy but sophisticated users that are currently being ignored by the big players
• startups usually ride big waves (market pull) so be on the lookout for waves that will affect the future