Where Startup Ideas Come From
How to come up with a weird take on the world.
This is Part Two of my Real-Time Journal — Starting a Startup, where I document in real(ish) time our attempts to start a startup.
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After our Kindle Highlights management idea, Zach and I knew what we didn’t want to. We didn’t want to start our startup without a very clear idea of what our value proposition would be to our customers.
While that’s good, it’s a very long way from having an idea for a startup.
So, after a month break for the 2018 holidays, we got back together to try and generate some ideas for our next venture.
Now I recognize that this is not the way most people start a startup or a business. Most people who start a startup are captured by an idea FIRST and then work on turning that idea into a reality.
If that’s you, GREAT!
Zach and I are coming at the problem from almost the exact opposite direction. We’re interested in starting a company that makes more money than the time/resources put into it. We like working together and have similar ideas about how to run a company that we want to try out. That means the idea is really secondary.
However, a company still needs an idea. So we set out to find one the only way we knew how, by brainstorming.
Brainstorming
We started doing the typical unstructured brainstorm where we throw out ideas and riff on them for a little bit. For instance:
Me: “Task time tracking sucks. Let’s do that.”
Zach: “What sucks about it?”
Me: “It should be better.”
Zach: “GDPR is gonna be a real pain. Maybe there’s something there.”
Me: “Like what?”
Zach: “I don’t know. But there’s something.”
Clearly, this strategy was not getting us much of anywhere. We did generate several ideas and interest areas, by they were generic, least common denominator ideas like time tracking.
Paul Graham called these “sitcom ideas” because they’re ideas that sitcom writers give to characters because they sound plausible (social networking site for pet owners) but there’s no real value proposition.
Researching
Next, we tried researching what other people were working on to see if we could just take one of their ideas.
We looked at recently funded companies by y-combinator and 500.co.
We also looked at the fastest growing SaaS companies and INC’s most 5000 most interesting companies.
While research like this is worthwhile it’s not a good way to generate a startup idea because it’s missing a fundamental piece…
Why us?
Or as Naval Ravikant might say, what specific knowledge do we bring to these problems that make us uniquely qualified to solve them? (Note: this is why the scratch your own itch theory is so tempting)
Discussion
After a few weeks of brainstorms and research, we settled into a new strategy — a good old fashion, open-ended discussion.
We’d meet, talk about things that interested us, problems we had at work, etc. We’d discuss what new technologies or ways of thinking that might solve these problems.
After a couple of weeks of this, we actually generate some decent (though by no means complete ideas)
For instance, one big trend I’m interested in is the unbundling of media, especially news, into small, one-reporter newsletters. I’m also a big fan of audio content (podcasts and audio-books) and I noticed that there isn’t much short-form (less than ten-minutes) audio content out there.
In our discussions, these two ideas smashed together to form an idea for audio newsletters.
I think discussions work best for this kind of smashing together because they don’t have the pressure to generate AN IDEA like a brainstorm or research. Instead, you walk down interesting rabbit holes, cross-examine ideas, and discover and develop themes across areas of interest.
Conclusion
Things we tried:
👎 Brainstorming
👎 Researching other ideas
👍 Discussion
Takeaways
Generating a startup idea from scratch is hard to do because it’s basically a bet that you’re smarter than the market.
The best place to start is your specific knowledge and interests. You want to find an idea that’s a weird take on the world because that’s what’s most likely to be something the market is missing. That also means, in the early stages at least, a good startup idea is probably hard to explain to your friends.
The best way to get to weird ideas is an open-ended discussion with no particular agenda.
Also, remember an idea is not a complete business (far from it). A lot more testing a digging deeper is required.
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