Getting a startup idea: Part 1, Choosing a topic

Knowing you want to start a company, but not having an idea is scary, and I think a really common situation among entrepreneurial types. It’s probably the #1 reason entrepreneurs stay in jobs they don’t like, followed closely by not knowing who they will work with.

Getting an idea is a process. I’ve found that its a process of continually decreasing the scope you are searching in. Specificity breeds creativity and good ideas.

This is my journey over the last 6 months of moving from “I want to do a startup!” to “I want to do a healthcare startup!” My hope is this will help people working to get their own startup idea.

The Start

I decided in January 2014 (7 months ago) that I wanted to leave my job and start a company. If you asked me “What are you interested in?” (which people did) I really wouldn’t have been able to answer. I would have said something about what I was working on at Facebook, but that felt empty. This was a problem I needed to solve. I had energy, but no direction.

The Problems List

I didn’t know what I wanted to do and didn’t know how to judge interestingness of any idea I would come up with. Was it fleeting? Was it based on something deeper and longer lasting in me? I’ve worked on projects before that I didn’t care about, it hurts. I wanted to work on something I could work on for years.

I knew at that point, my greatest asset was time. I wasn’t planning on leaving my job for about 6 months. From previous experience, I knew my best ideas haven’t come from sitting down and trying to “think of ideas”. They have come from living normal life and encountering interesting problems.

I also knew listing out problems would be much better than listing out ideas. Ideas are solutions and it’s super easy to find someone “already doing it” and get discouraged. Problems are observations. Until you stop seeing the problem in the world, it isn’t solved. Problems last, ideas don’t. Ideas turn on your judgement filter “Is this a good idea?” Problems don’t. Problems are inherently good, because you know the exist. You see them existing.

Not knowing if it would be useful, I started an Evernote “Problems” note, and just started writing down stuff when it came up in my life.

An excerpt from early additions to my Problems list:

People still get killed as peds and bikes in car accidents. This seems crazy.
Making music is hard. Make it as easy as vine.
Prisons are ridiculous. Costly and overcrowded
Hard to box bikes in an airport. Can you do a service for this?
I don’t know my neighbors
Managers are inefficient. Can technology replace them?
Sales people are inefficient.
Personal medical history is totally fragmented
Teachers spend so much time grading stuff, can this be automated?
Passwords are totally ridiculous?
Dish washing is annoying

Post-Processing

Listing problems is fun. For me it turned on a new filter, that I didn’t usually have on as I lived my normal life. I was aware of everything (small and large) that just didn’t seem right. Every time I noted something I felt like I scored a point.

It didn’t come totally naturally and took some warm up time. I think we’re taught not to complain too much, and to “make things work”, so, it feels a little indulgent to think everything is broken.

I was adding a few problems every day. By March, I had ~100 problems. It started to get overwhelming. The day I planned on leaving my job was getting sooner, and I didn’t have a way of deciding between anything on the list. It was ALL OVER THE PLACE.

Occasionally a problem would stay in my memory as “really interesting” just to be pushed out by another interesting one next week. I’ve been in the place of the schizophrenic entrepreneur before. Every other day you have a new “world changing” idea, you get excited, you discover ten reasons why its not a good idea, then you find something else amazing. This process repeats until you get fatigued and probably quit trying. I didn’t want that to happen, but that’s how I felt.

One night in March, I had an idea to categorize all of the Problems. To go through each and tag them with categories. My intention here was solely organizational, but it unveiled something much more important.

Excerpt from post-processed Problems list:

healthcare Personal medical history is totally fragmented
healthcare dental work. How do I know what foods are good and bad for my teeth? I generally just feel guilty.
healthcare Physical therapy still has to happen in the office of the doc. Why can’t it come to you?
health Idea: cloud based trainers. Pay monthly fee to get access to unlimited trainer time.
health Fix gyms. Make sign up super easy and make retention feel like you use even if you aren’t. Eg health tips and push notifs

work Companies spend a lot on perks. How do they know which actually lead to happier more productive more retained employees?
work Employers are looking for the best services for their employees. How do they comparison shop? How do these guys get reviewed?
work Managers are inefficient. Can technology replace them.
work Sales people are inefficient.

transportation Not all employers offer shuttle service. Facebook doesn’t have shuttles to Oakland. They are one of the biggest employers around.
transportation People still get killed in as peds and bikes in car accidents. This seems crazy.
transportation Hard to box bikes in an airport.

What I started to see were topics that over the last 3 months, my mind had continually come back to. This was my first glimpse at areas that didn’t feel “flavor of the week” to me (healthcare, transportation and work). They felt real. They felt like areas that I actually cared about. Problems that I’d be willing to work for years on. It took this inductive process to pull these topics out of me. If you had asked me in January what areas I was interested in working in, I wouldn’t have answered these.

Leaving my job

Having a list of topics was a big step for me. It gave me confidence that I had things I was interested in working on, and they weren’t simply passing interests. I spent the next two months wrapping stuff up at my job and decided to spend the month after I left in Paris. I wanted to be in a place away from my normal life habits and pressures. I wanted to be somewhere to basically reset.

Paris: Making a decision

I left my job in June and spent the whole month in Paris. I spent most of my time there doing very little. Reading, biking, socializing with people at the hostel, watching the World Cup. But I did revisit this list a few times while I was there. It was my unwritten goal to know what “topic” I wanted to work on when I got back. I tried a few times to re-organize the list to get out new insights, but this didn’t pan out. So, after getting frustrated at that, one night I said to myself: “If I had to decide on a top 3 problems on this list right now, what would they be?” Answering that question felt easy, and the result…

• Finding therapists is hard
• Why do I still need to go to the doctor in person?
• HSAs are so annoying to use

All three were flavors of healthcare. I don’t think it hit me till the next day that I had just made my decision. I realized, even if I didn’t work on these specific problems, I had chosen healthcare as my topic area. I had put hundreds of topic areas in a multi-month long survival of the fittest match and I had a winner.

I got lucky that all three Problems were in healthcare. In hindsight, this question is a forcing function to get my overly-analytical self out of decision paralysis. If the three had been in different areas, I could have changed it to: “If I had to decide on one idea right now, what would it be?” and then choose the topic area of that idea. At this point, the magic is in discovering your lasting interests, not finding a good idea. That comes next.

Having spent more time thinking about it, I now understand why healthcare is a good fit for me: it’s quickly changing, technology is changing it, I wanted to do something b2b-ish, there is a lot of money in the industry, and it’s something of core importance to people.

I have a topic, now what?

I got back to San Francisco at the end of June with a topic in hand, also knowing that I knew basically nothing about it. Starting June 31, I decided to spend all of July learning everything I could about healthcare. I wanted to get to the point where I could walk into a room with any professional in the industry and sound smart. While I learned, I would be noting down interesting problems and ideas. I’ll write about this process in my next post.

The Steps

To summarize the steps to getting to a startup topic area:

1. Start a “Problems List” of problems you observe in your life.
2. Add daily. Aim for at least 50 problems on the list. Enough that some topics will start repeating.
3. Tag problems with categories, group by category, and see what you tend to think about.
4. Repeat steps 1–3 until you have a few topic areas that feel like real interests. Not just passing ideas. If you only have one winning topic area, you’re done.
5. Force yourself to choose the top 1–3 problems on your list. Choose the topic area where those problems live.