Finding your next startup idea — practical links for your ideation process
Updated in April 2023: this is a living document aggregating different idea-generation triggers. We’ve updated it with additional data sources that became more relevant since the original writing of this post.
How do entrepreneurs come up with a startup idea? This is probably one of the main barriers to starting a new venture. Yeah, execution matters most, but there is also a lot of value to the seed idea which is more about choosing the right market to focus on at phase -1.
At Emerge, we work with many repeat entrepreneurs and potential startup leaders in phase -1. Having spent endless hours with these groups of elite people, we’ve seen the frustration around the ideation process. We were also surprised to learn that finding a good idea for a venture is sometimes more challenging than finding a partner for that decade long journey in the eyes of some of these founders.
Having seen the different ways many entrepreneurs tackle the process of finding a seed idea to explore, we’ve curated a list of sources & ideas for inspiration for the ideation process. We’ve built this list together with some of the founders we’ve worked with (special thanks goes to Mula for igniting the idea!) and we’ve seen this come in handy for many of the entrepreneurs in our founders group.
These are mainly good leads to follow for inspiration, the hard parts are the steps to follow. Some of these ideas are good leads for a bottom-up approach (e.g. where can I apply this new tech), and others are ideal for top-down (e.g this domain is interesting and growing > these are the main problems > let’s figure out how to solve them). Hopefully other founders could contribute their own ideas for inspiration sources in the comments section below or at hi@emerge.ventures.
Our (work-in-progress) list:
Follow macro trends
- UN/US Statistics: http://data.un.org/ & https://www.usa.gov/statistics Follow demographic, economic, environmental, political, social trends
- e.g: increasing longevity > what are the challenges & opportunities. Same with urbanism , future of work, etc
- Labor market statistics: WEF Future of Jobs report, Occupational Information Network (O*NET) — free US jobs and skills database, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Indeed hiring lab, etc. Which jobs are on the rise? Which are disappearing? What are the areas of shortage?
Follow changes in regulation
- GDPR, Open Banking, etc. Think how these changes might affect different industries and/or businesses. What are the 2nd order changes?
- Example
Follow tech innovations & tech standards (good for bottom-up approach)
- Get inspired by top tier students (e.g. Stanford final projects, MIT media lab final projects)
- e.g — breakthrough in voice understanding tech may lead to a new wave of voice activated products
- Follow new standards: e.g 5G — what could be unlocked due to 5G’s impact on latency and amounts of data delivered
- Watch videos of tech innovation conferences
Explore future trends
- Gartner hype cycle and emerging technologies
- Ask chatGPT and the likes. You can ask about the size and growth rate of the fastest growing markets and industries.
- Review public companies’ annual investor day presentations to review markets trends. Example
- Use search trends based tools such as Google Trends, Exploding Topics, and Trend Hunter to see what people are interested in
- Just Google “future technology trends”. You’ll find some interesting blog posts and good leads to further investigate
Learn from others
- Follow what big tech is doing and create it for the rest. e.g Trigo Vision for ‘Amazon Go’
- Find an internal tool used by a leading company and create for the rest e.g. Asana
- East-West / West-East / West-West. Rocket Internet
- Follow latest seed investments for inspiration. Here
- Follow YCs latest batch for inspiration. Here
- Search for publicly available inspiration lists.
Use the community (top-down)
- Ask your fellow entrepreneurs about other directions they considered during their ideation phase.
- Pick the brains of VCs/CVCs/innovation hubs. Some investors have deep insights into certain industries and might be exposed to various problems that exist in these industries
- Interview B2B executives in different verticals and positions and ask “with which vendors are you frustrated and why?”, “what are your day to day challenges” , “how most of your efforts & resources are being used”? We strongly recommend The Mom Test — lots of practical tips on how to approach this
Follow methods mentioned in similar posts
- Paul Graham
- How to Get Startup Ideas (YC library)
