How to Generate Great Ideas
Idea generation is crucial for most businesses and can be perceived as difficult if you don’t have the right mindset. I once met the founder of Sonos and software.com, John MacFarlane, and he claimed that he saw about 20 product ideas in every room he entered. Many of the best entrepreneurs in the world have a similar mind for ideas, both when it comes to startup ideas, feature ideas, project ideas and all other idea types. In this article, regular people will be taught how to change their mindset to generate the same amount of high quality ideas.
When trying to come up with new ideas there are really two phases you go through:
- Figuring out what problem to solve
- Figuring out how to solve the problem
The first of these will be covered in great detail in this article, and the other will be covered in another article that will be out August 17th 07:00 PDT.
In order to figure out which problem to solve, it is important to understand that the problem should be related to an important need, and preferably of a nature that make it non-obvious. To trick your mind into finding such problems, you should look for secrets and think about how different needs will be served in the future.
Look for Problems, Secrets and Future Products that Solve an Important Need
Idea generation can be looked on as a process where you have to trick your brain into the right mindset, rather than follow a set of consecutive steps. Every entrepreneur have a different background and since every good startup idea is completely new, there can’t be a step-by-step recipe for generating new ideas. In order to get in the right mindset, people should look for problems, secrets and future products that solve an important need.
In the table above, it is suggested that you choose a target market and make yourself familiar with the needs of people in that market. Review a typical day, and list up all the needs a particular person has in the first column. Initially, the table was created with every process that a person goes through during the day, instead of the needs, in the first column. However, by making sure that your mindset does not get too focused on which processes that people are doing today, but rather which needs people have, you will make sure to develop ideas that will actually help people in the future, and not only incrementally improve the processes people are going through today. It also take you one step ahead of today’s inventions, as it hopefully will make you less focused on what products people are using today, and instead focus more on what they should be using in the future.
People are More Willing to Pay for and Use a Product That Solves One of Their Problems
The advise you hear most often as you try to come up with a new idea for a startup is that you have to start with a problem. Trying to come up with important problems can be quite difficult, and many people end up with a short list of rather uninspiring ideas.
Start with a problem
A lot of the businesses that are started today are simple copies of successful companies, or people copying a proven business model and applying it to another industry. We have seen Uber for Dry Cleaning, Airbnb for Boats and Instagram for Cats among others. Although these companies in the right circumstances can become successful, I don’t believe these are the companies that are driving the world forward. Therefore, I encourage you to think bigger and generate more spectacular ideas.
The problem column in the table above is used to list up all the problems that any person might have with fulfilling that particular need. By focusing on any person here, and not only people from the target market, you avoid limiting you mind and thereby open up a lot of new opportunities. Most successful startups are solving an important problem, and it is therefore useful to list up as many problems as possible. Looking back at the table above, in order to solve the snoozing problem you can envision an idea about an app that works as a regular alarm, but set off an extremely loud alarm sound, lasting for a whole minute, if someone is trying to snooze. Similarly, it is possible to go through all the other problems in the second column, and try to find solutions to them.
Finding Secrets Instead of Problems Often Results in Better Ideas
I believe Peter Thiel is one of the best entrepreneurs and VCs of all time, and agree with him that competition is for losers. Entrepreneurs should try to change status quo by creating a monopoly and make something that is radically new, something that will drive the world forward. Peter has written an amazing book called Zero to One, which is describing different areas of this issue. I advise you all to read it in its whole, but if you are interested in reading only the main takeaways, then I have written a short article you can read.
In Zero to One, Paypal and Palantir founder, Peter Thiel introduces the concept of secrets. Secrets are problems that are possible to solve, but hard to come up with. They do usually fall into one of two categories:
- Secrets about people
- Secrets of nature
People secrets are secrets about people that are not commonly known. This includes things people do not know about themselves and things that people hide because they do not want others to know. Entrepreneurs should ask themselves what secrets are people not telling? What is underappreciated? What is forbidden? What is taboo? What is people not allowed to talk about? The best place to look for secrets is where no one else is looking. Most people think only in terms of what they have been taught. Are there any fields that matters, but haven’t been standardized? What fields do we know little about which is still very important to most people? E.g. nutrition is something that is not common to study, and still everybody need it.
The best place to look for secrets is where no one else is looking
Nature secrets are secrets involving something undiscovered about the world. As an entrepreneur, you should ask yourself what secrets are nature not telling you? One way of discovering such secrets is to study the physical world.
Thiel claims that a startup should be based on a secret. Building the startup on a secret will result in higher probability for success, actually creating something new, making the world a better place, and not just making an incremental increase in people’s life quality.
In the table above, there are two columns dedicated to generating secrets. The column for most common truths is used to write down beliefs that most people have about the need in discussion. The reason for why you would like to think about common truths is that some of them might be considered truths for no logical reason, and can therefore be questioned. Many great and innovative companies have started out challenging such a truth. The importance of this column is emphazised by Peter Thiel’s favorite interview question: What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
The world’s population is growing fast, and there is an ever growing need for rooms where people can sleep. In some of the smallest apartments and hotel rooms around the world, the bed is taking up a lot of the space. Therefore, we should challenge the truth that people need a bed to sleep in. Humans need to get a good night sleep, but it doesn’t need to be in a bed. Maybe there is a different type of furniture that can be used which will save up some space and make people sleep better?
Another column aimed at tricking your mindset into thinking about secrets is the column for things that are forbidden, taboo or not allowed to talk about. If the tool for solving a need you have is forbidden, then any entrepreneur who manage to fulfill that need, with an allowed solution, will be in a great position for success. Also, many companies and products are started when a regulatory change is made, because such a situation opens up an opportunity.
A product that makes something previously considered taboo into something acceptable is something that will likely become popular. Entrepreneurs should therefore be curious and explore new ideas around such issues. Further, things that people are not allowed to talk about or do not want to talk about can also be great starting points for startups. An idea that find a way around something that is not allowed can often be valuable, as can an idea that make it more comfortable to talk about something important that people usually do not want to talk about. Although there are already products on the market that is trying to solve the snoring problem, there is still none that has managed to dominate the market. Snoring happens when people can not move air freely through their nose and throat during sleep. Maybe an app or tool monitoring you sleep can figure out in which positions air can move freely, and then remind you during sleep to be mostly in those positions?
The how in the past, how now and how in the future columns are there in order to truly make you think about how that particular need will be solved in the future. With that in mind, you can imagine what the future will look like, and make something that you realize is missing. In other words, live in the future and build what seems interesting. There are e.g. many older people who are having a hard time getting dressed. If someone made a cheap robot or tool that would help them with this then that would save the older generation for a lot of issues and relieved health personnel for one of their duties.
The final column for value and price is there to make sure that you do not end up spending a lot of time thinking about or even developing a product that solves a need that is not important for people.
None of the ideas that I have mentioned here is world-class startup material, but I believe many of the problems that are mentioned are important. If you create your own table with the needs of people in a target market that you are familiar with, go through all the problems and secrets and think about ideas for how to solve them, you will most likely come up with a few good ideas. Then you iterate on the best ideas to make them better. Customer research is everything, and should be used when iterating on ideas and trying to understand exactly how you should solve the problem you have decided to solve. I will write another article on that which will be out August 17th 07:00 PDT.
Develop Domain Expertise to Better be Able to Find Important Problems and Secrets
Another prominent player in Silicon Vally who has tried to help people with generating ideas is Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator. He explains that finding a problem intolerable and feeling it must be possible to solve it, is the recipe for a lot of startup ideas. Preferably, you should look for problems you have yourself.
In addition to the focus on problems, Paul also has presented a lot of additional insight that is useful. First and foremost, he explains how developing domain expertise can make it easier for people to come up with new ideas. Some of the other tactics that you can try include:
- Living in the future, then build what’s missing
- Trying to come up with problems by thinking about what you need
- Thinking around what people use that is broken
- Looking at big companies and thinking about what they should be doing
- Trying to assemble different ideas randomly
- Taking something luxury and make it a commodity
- Making things easier
Although I agree that all of these tactics can help people generating ideas, I think people should focus mostly on 1 and 2 because the other ones will trick your mind into focusing on smaller inventions and lure you away from big breakthroughs.
Every process is an expense to the person doing it
If we attempt to break down a day into pieces, we will look at a set of different needs that people are trying to fullfil throughout the day. For an entrepreneur, it can be useful to look at these needs as an expense to the person doing them. What you should do is breaking down all the processes a person does to fulfill their needs each day, and ask yourself these questions:
- Do the person even have to do this process?
- What are the different steps in this process, and can one or more of them be cut off?
- Is there another way of doing this/achieving the goal of the process?
Make the Seek for Secrets and Problems an Everyday Mission in Order to Generate the Best Ideas
Taking on the mindset of some of the greatest legends in the Valley isn’t done overnight. Aspiring entrepreneurs should spend time thinking around the needs of people and businesses, and discover problems and secrets that are keeping those needs from being served in the best possible way. By choosing a few different target markets, and filling out the table above for people in those markets, your mindset will be tricked into thinking the entrepreneurial way. Sit down sessions might not end up yielding the results that you are hoping for, but it will help you integrate that mindset into your everyday life. When the seek for needs, problems and secrets are unknowingly happening in the back of your mind, while you are doing something else, you are much more likely to discover a great startup idea. And it is also much more probable that the ideas are something you are passionate about and enjoy doing, which is important since you will be doing it for years if you decide to start a startup.
When the seek for needs, problems and secrets are unknowingly happening in the back of your mind, while you are doing something else, you are much more likely to discover a great startup idea
[1] Peter Thiel. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (September 16, 2014).
[2] Paul Graham. How to Get Startup Ideas (November 2012). http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
[3] Paul Graham. Ideas for Startups (October 2005). http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html
