Startup ideas: The search for unique information

Imagine a bucket. Here’s one to help.

At the bottom of the bucket is the mainstream. If you know something that other people don’t, you are at the edge of the bucket.

Good startup ideas start with unique information — something the founders noticed that no one else did.

This is painfully obvious to anyone thinking about innovation.

Tito, Prashast and I shut down our startup, Product ML, a few months ago. We went through a process of coming up with startup ideas and it was much harder than we thought. This is the story of why we struggled to find a “good startup idea”.

Let’s do a startup! This was our first mistake. Decide you want to do a startup and then come up with the idea. But no! We are better than everyone else. The standard advice doesn’t apply to us.

Googling “how to come up with startup ideas” brings up an excellent essay by Paul Graham.

Focus on a problem you have, understand that well, build a product to solve the problem. Validate with customers. Since you have the problem, you are the first customer. Wow, a blueprint for entrepreneurship.

Let’s think, people! What problems do we have?