3 Ways To Come Up With $1,000,000 Ideas

Spend 15 Minutes A Day To Get Million Dollar Ideas

Randomly Useful
SYNERGY [Newsletter Booster]
6 min readApr 8, 2024

--

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

You’re sitting down trying to come up with that startup idea that’ll take your life to the next level and finally allow you to leave your 9–5 job. But then, you get lost. So many entrepreneurs face this exact same problem. However, over the past couple decades in Silicon Valley, methodologies have been developed to come up with ideas that can completely change your life in a short period of time. Want to know how? Well, I’ll be telling you three proven strategies to come up with million dollar ideas. A very successful entrepreneur called Jay Samet said that if you use this next strategy over the next 30 days, you’ll have more million dollar ideas than most investors in Silicon Valley.

So what’s this approach and how can you use it? Well, once when Drew Houston was traveling on a bus going from Boston to New York for work when he realized that he had forgotten his thumb drive with all of his work on it. Now, incredibly frustrated over having to choose whether he would arrive late to work or come completely unprepared. At that moment, he promised himself that he never wanted to face this issue again. And that, my friends, was the birth story of Dropbox, a cloud storage company that solved that problem and is now worth $8 billion. And the point of this story is that people hate problems. In fact, they’re happily willing to pay to have problems disappear. And I don’t mean in that Tony Soprano mafia kind of way.

Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

I mean, where there’s a problem, there’s usually a startup idea or opportunity to solve it. And that, my friends, means dollar bills. Anyway, here are three steps to implement this problem-based approach to coming up with million-dollar startup ideas. Step one. over the next 30 days, every single day, you just take 15 minutes and write down a problem that you faced or that you’ve seen in the world. Maybe you lost your keys, or maybe your lawnmower broke down, or maybe you had to listen to your mother-in-law for an hour tell you how to run your life. Now, three problems a day doesn’t seem like too much, but trust me, after day 20, it’s gonna be really difficult, and you’re gonna have to dig deep to find these problems in the world.

But after 30 days, you should have 30 problems written down. Step two is going to be to rate each problem from 0 to 10 on three criteria. How often does it happen? How severe or painful is that problem? And are they actively looking to solve this problem? So now each one of your problems is gonna have a rating between zero and 30, and you wanna put them in order from the highest to the lowest. And step three is that for those top 10 problems that you have that rank the highest, you’re gonna come up with three ideas of products that could solve that problem. And ta-da, just like that, you have 30 ideas. Problem equals startup idea. Lost your keys? Well, there’s a product called Tile that helps with that.
Your lawnmower broke down? taskrabbit. Mother-in-law’s trying to tell you how to run your life? Well, not all problems have solutions. Okay, but you’ve actually already heard about this problem-based approach. Okay, fine, but I bet you haven’t heard about this next strategy. The secret around this next method is in this fish called Remora Fish also known as the sucker of the sea. And frankly, why should you care? Well, you see, these fish have a suction pad on the top of their head that allows them to attach to larger sea creatures like whales, sharks, turtles, allowing them to hitch a long distance free ride.

Photo by Ishan @seefromthesky on Unsplash

But they aren’t just in it for the free ride. They also get a free meal. With sharks, they get to eat clouds of flesh after an attack takes place. And with whales, they feed off parasite inside their teeth and on their skin. So why am I suddenly going all National Geographic on you? Well, because this is the perfect analogy for the next strategy that I call the Remora strategy. This is where you find a large and growing company and choose to build products for their customers. But the goal here is not to compete directly, it’s to create complimentary services and goods that can service the exact same target customer. So if you chose Airbnb, for example, you could, for hosts, create a subscription for small shampoo bottles and soap, or you could create a property management startup for people who have Airbnbs but don’t wanna go through the hassle, hassle of managing them. Now this strategy is amazing for three key reasons. Number one is that you get to ride the existing demand that is created by this larger company. Just like the fish rides the shark. Number two is that you can let them go out there and find the customers and then you can just identify those customers and go and sell to them. Free lunch. And number three, most of these massive companies don’t care about the million dollar scraps left on the side. So for this idea, come up with 10 companies and for each one of those, come up with three ideas of complimentary products that these individuals would have just by knowing that they use this specific service.

Now for this next strategy, I want you to go out and buy a crystal ball because I’m gonna teach you how to predict Okay, not really, but hear me out here. Windows of opportunities constantly open as the world changes. And if we’re able to predict some of these trends, we’re able to identify businesses that are not being built today to address tomorrow’s needs. And so there are many types of trends that we can look at. About 10 years ago, a legislation was passed that allowed individuals to invest in startups and to be able to own a piece of that startup’s equity. Now, as a result of that, there was a boom of crowdfunding startups like Republic that generates millions and millions of dollars every year.

Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash

So political trends or changes can give way to huge opportunities. Economic trends like the recession can give way to companies like Groupon, which actually was born in the middle of the 2008 recession. logical advances like the release of the Apple Vision Pro, for example, which is a headset that gives access to an entire world of new apps built in that ecosystem. And this has been going on forever and ever. The internet gave way to e-commerce, electricity gave way to the light bulb. And if there’s one thing we can count on is that things will constantly change. So sit down and figure out which trends you can identify in the market. You can read articles, research the internet, find forums. Then for each one of those ideas, I want you to come up with five to ten startup ideas
that would target that change. So you have a startup idea, what next? Now, most importantly, my friends, remember that ideas are a dollar a dozen. They do not matter at all. So everything I just taught you right now is completely useless unless you actually take action with that idea.

--

--

Randomly Useful
SYNERGY [Newsletter Booster]

I write article on random genre, that are simply very useful. I share my understandings on topics I find interesting. And some stories motivate you. :)