The Best Startup Ideas

“The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.” Paul Graham.

Generating good startup ideas has been a hard puzzle for entrepreneurs. We know there is not any deterministic (1) way to find the good ones. There are multiple factors having effect on the success. We also know that one of them is fortune. So, selecting the better one can become unpredictable to some extent.

Fortunately, it is not totally a random process. There are some patterns that show us whether it is good or bad.

The most common framework in evaluating a startup idea has 3 dimensions:

1- Magnitude
2- Influence
3- Frequency

If an idea has a high score on these 3, we can say that it is really a good one! For example, Uber solves a high magnitude problem that influences almost everyone and occurs on daily basis.

On this post, we’re not focussing on other key factors. So, we assume you have a great execution with an awesome team!

Entrepreneurs start businesses to solve a problem. Users are buying products for the same. Startups which are paid are serving for the below in one way or another:

1- Fulfilment of a certain need (furniture, computer, antivirus)
2- A better way than the old one (airbnb, uber)
3- Entertainment (youtube, games, social media)

If a product doesn’t serve for a certain need, user acquisition will be limited to a marketing activity instead of sales. The entrepreneur needs to convince the users to use her product. Sometimes (like the social media) without a community it doesn’t mean anything. If there were no friends in Facebook would you wanna use it? Facebook started with zero user base. It’s literally a dead-lock. You cannot acquire users because you don’t have any. And you cannot scale it up because you cannot retain your users. Building a community is really an art. It does require various skills and resources.

(1) Systematic Innovation offers a deterministic way for product innovation.