Ideas, ideas, ideas. Everyone has ideas, but we don’t always have the right ones at the right times. This especially goes for creating a business. Oftentimes, entrepreneurs, or aspiring entrepreneurs struggle to come up with good ideas for their startups. They often take large amounts of time — months and maybe even a year to come up with a good idea, which makes sense because they are likely going to be spending the next few years of their life working on this startup.
This goes for me too. Except I didn’t spend months coming up with an idea — but still, coming up with an idea was not easy. Now you may be asking yourself: what is this kid even talking about? Well, over the course of the past week, I was working on my masterpiece, which, in my case, is a startup, for a program called AlphaX (information on this program in my previous blogs). I spent last week coming up with an idea to do a Hackathon (explained in my first blog) on, and this week, I completed the Hackathon (as of 15 minutes ago).
Second Hackathon
This week was the second Hackathon I have worked on (the first one was a few weeks ago). Last week, I said that in AlphaX we stay in Stage 1, which involves a Hackathon and a Rabbit-Hole-A-Thon. In order to progress to Stage 2, the main requirement is to have a masterpiece idea. Before, I did not have any idea of what I was going to do, so this is now my second time in the Stage 1 loop. However, I now actually have an idea of what my startup could be.
Workshop
On Monday, I had my weekly workshop for AlphaX. In this workshop, we focused on cold emailing/messaging. We learned how to write a good cold email, which involves being concise, relatable, and true. This is a useful skill to have because it is very helpful for finding potential opportunities and building bridges between people. You should never let fear stop you from sending a cold email (most of the time — I’m sure there are specific situations that you could think of but that's beside the point).
Progress
This past week, I worked on my Hackathon. Well, it was more on Thursday and Friday because I had to study like 3 hours per day on top of doing my homework for tests 😞. Throughout the week, I did, however, think of how to structure my startup/service. Last week, I decided on the idea of creating a service that helps people come up with ideas for startups. This week, starting on Monday, I had absolutely NO IDEA of how my startup was going to be structured. So, I thought of ideas from Monday through Wednesday until on Thursday, the idea finally clicked (it is a VERY VERY rough draft of my idea though), and I started creating the MVP — Minimum Viable Product, not the Most Valuable Player in this case.
I decided on using Typeform to create a small form that asks very human questions, to seem friendly and to allow users to understand what the questions are asking easily. This form asks for the user’s name and some personalized information on their interests/ideas.
Once this is obtained, the information is then sent to a Google Sheet, where I then manually copy and paste the information into a format for ChatGPT to create a list of more personalized ideas. Keep in mind, this is a very rough draft and definitely needs A LOT of polishing (and hey, if you guys have any ideas, please comment them on this blog).
I then email the user the ideas generated (and yes, I know this seems like something that anyone can do by themselves, but the questions I use help to get information out of the users easily in an easier method than if one were to do it on their own).
If you’re wondering why I did not put the link to my MVP here, it’s because it is not automated and honestly, I kind of don’t want to, neither do I have the time to manually do this for a bunch of people (assuming people are actually reading this blog).
Future
I plan on polishing this process and making it more automated. Additionally, I plan on adding more interactive methods that are very user friendly to help users come up with ideas easily. I also plan on adding a dataset of ideas or some other way of getting good ideas to match them with users.
Olympic Mindset
Every week, students of the AlphaX program work to better their Olympic Mindset. If you’re wondering what this is, I explain it in my first blog. But, if you don’t feel like reading that, I’ll just give a small explanation here. An Olympic Mindset is simply a mindset that is used by people who want to achieve something on an Olympic level (for example, a large successful business, competing in the Olympics, etc.).
This week, I reread How to Get Startup Ideas by Paul Graham. This is because I was looking for ideas on how I should structure my service that helps people develop ideas (that’s a lot of ideas). This reading dives into the process of ideating and how to do it well — it is mainly about startup ideas, BUT it still provides valuable insight on how to actually create good ideas.
My main take away was this one thing: Turn off filters.
- Now, you may be wondering, what the heck does this mean — this makes no sense. Well, all this means is that one way to come up with good ideas is that you should be able to think of ideas that are not the most appealing to work on — you should not be blinded by ideas that seem hard to do or boring to do. While yes, you generally do want to be motivated when making a startup, there are many opportunities to create a successful startup in the boring ideas. This is because other people are discouraged from doing them, so it gives you an upper hand if you work on it. This past week, I did not necessarily do this, but it is still important to know when ideating, nonetheless.
In the future, I plan to hopefully use this if necessary — to not be blinded from opportunities that seem difficult or unattractive to do. Hopefully, you can do this too, especially if you are trying to create a startup.