“How to Get Startup Ideas” Remix
After reading Paul Graham’s seminal How to Get Startup Ideas, I wanted a digest that reflected my understanding of the key points, but still read as an essay. Here’s my remix — I hope you enjoy it.
Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas. It may be best not to make too much of a direct frontal attack on the problem — i.e. to sit down and try to think of ideas.
At YC we call ideas that grow naturally out of the founders’ own experiences “organic” startup ideas. The most successful startups almost all begin this way. If you look at the way successful founders have had their ideas, it’s generally the result of some external stimulus hitting a prepared mind. [Apple, Google and Facebook] grew out of things their founders built because there seemed a gap in the world.
What you need to do is turn off the filters that usually prevent you from seeing them. The most powerful is simply taking the current state of the world for granted. The advantage of taking the status quo for granted is not just that it makes life more efficient, but also that it makes life more tolerable. If you knew about all the things we’ll get in the next 50 years but don’t have yet, you’d find present day life pretty constraining, just as someone from the present would if they were sent back 50 years in a time machine.
Start to question things. Pay particular attention to things that chafe you. Why is your inbox overflowing? Because you get a lot of email, or because it’s hard to get email out of your inbox? Why do you get so much email? What problems are people trying to solve by sending you email? Are there better ways to solve them? And why is it hard to get emails out of your inbox? Why do you keep emails around after you’ve read them? Is an inbox the optimal tool for that?
Give yourself some time. You have a lot of control over the rate at which you turn yours into a prepared mind, but you have less control over the stimuli that spark ideas when they hit it. The best plan may be just to keep a background process running, looking for things that seem to be missing. The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not “think up” but “notice.”
[When you notice something,] ask yourself: who wants this right now? Who wants this so much that they’ll use it even when it’s a crappy version one made by a two-person startup they’ve never heard of? If you can’t answer that, the idea is probably bad. When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they’re making — not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently. Usually this initial group of users is small, for the simple reason that if there were something that large numbers of people urgently needed and that could be built with the amount of effort a startup usually puts into a version one, it would probably already exist.
You can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. Not all ideas of that type are good startup ideas, but nearly all good startup ideas are of that type.
When you find the right sort of problem, you should be able to describe it as obvious, at least to you. When these problems get solved, they will seem flamingly obvious in retrospect.
