12 ms·

Idea Generation

524 points by awaxman11 6y ago

minimaxir 6y ago
Legit surprised Sam didn't recommend using an AI to generate ideas. :P
- rexreed 6y ago
  Are you sure AI didn't generate this article?
austincheney 6y ago
I have always found that entire scenario very odd. How are you a start up founder if you don’t know what you want to start up? I always look at that like a soldier jacked up on adrenaline wearing an arsenal of ammunition ready to destroy the enemy having forgotten to ask who the enemy is or where they are. Lost. Maybe if they just start spraying ammo at everybody the enemy will suddenly make themselves known and something will stick. This entire scenario is completely at odds with Indie Hackers who continually stress to refine a good idea until you have both revenue and product/market fit before quitting your day job. This advise is well suited to people who have the reality of personal finances and time constraints, so I guess there are some people who have unlimited funding and time to burn in search of something they should already have.
- aklemm 6y ago
  It’s a form of entitlement. Similar to calling oneself a “keynote speaker” absent any mention of one’s area of expertise. To consider one’s self a founder without an idea is to ignore the importance of vision. Might be ok for a franchise, but these are always the same people talking about disrupting this and that.
  - elliekelly 6y ago
    And ignores the importance of execution altogether. It’s hard to do $thing before you even know what it is.
- peterwoerner 6y ago
  I knew I wanted to build my own company before I had a good idea for one. When I was in grad school I went out and executed a themed bottle opener which at best guess could make a few thousand dollars simply for practice and experience. Regardless of whether you are a founder or not, figuring out the important problems to solve is important to ones career.
- benjaminsuch 6y ago
  Agree. I think it's a very bad sign if someone asks for ideas. You don't ask for ideas, you encounter problems and based on those problems you make ideas on how to solve them. That's also the reason why one should make a prototype very fast and validate by a potential user/customer that you solve the problem the right way.
- kgin 6y ago
  That's a funny cultural thing about silicon valley. You're not incidentally an entrepreneur only if you've started something, you're an entrepreneur simply because you're the type of person who entrepreneues.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  I am sceptical too but it's not an unusual idea to think that perhaps you can just put smart people together and they'll work something out. God knows that much of that attitude is often lauded on HN for other things.
  - austincheney 6y ago
    Kind of. I am entering my fifth military deployment so I can speak to the nature of spontaneously formed teams of strangers. Intelligence is largely, but not completely, irrelevant. You learn to identify that a team is strongest due to a mix of good discipline and putting the proper personalities in the correct positions and then codifying a single common purpose. I recommend reading the book Good To Great for further examination.
  - AtHeartEngineer 6y ago
    Agreed, I work in an environment with a lot of really smart people, but not everyone thinks outside the box or is ambitious in that way
- dunkelheit 6y ago
  The problem with this way of thinking is that existing markets are probably efficient enough - meaning all easy ways to make a lot of money have already been exhausted. This means that any idea that you generate by encountering a problem and thinking of a solution is probably either too hard to implement or will generate relatively puny revenue stream (nothing to sneeze at, but probably not of much interest to VCs and founders chasing big bucks). What's the alternative? To wait for tectonic shifts in overall environment and circumstances, look for vacant ecological niches and pounce when you see one. To the outside view this will look exactly like a founder who doesn't know what to start up. Here is an example I like: John Carmack. The conventional view is that he is a brilliant game programmer (which is undoubtedly true). But the alternative point of view is that his shtick was to capitalize on the period of incredible advances in consumer hardware. Each of his games fully showcased what the best hardware of that time was capable of (order of magnitude more than the previous generation) which made them instant hits. Not coincidentally, he quit making games around the time this period of advancement stopped. Here is a post by @defmacro making a similar point: http://www.defmacro.org/2015/02/25/startup-ideas.html http://www.defmacro.org/2015/02/25/startup-ideas.html
  - austincheney 6y ago
    John Carmack's success is due to id Software incubated at Softdisk. The reality of that success, at least in the beginning, was an already established stream of revenue, a ready assembled team, and proper leadership. The brilliance and innovation of Carmack came later. They had day jobs, revenue, and product/market fit already established before spinning out of Softdisk to launch id. That isn't enough to account for the super stellar success they would later enjoy, but it fully explains launching a successful business. There isn't any magic or secret sauce there. > The problem with this way of thinking is that existing markets are probably efficient enough Oh, that's certainly not true. The challenge there is the expertise to see the current dysfunction versus the risk of solving for it. Solving for the dysfunction often comes at competition for the limited resources required for current practice of art and rejection from just about everybody. Knowing this there is a choice to be made: 1. Sustain the current practice with current income and no change in risk 2. Proceed with the solution knowing that failure is probable and that a startup begins with a financial valley of death (burns cash without the revenue to make up for it) while knowing the greatness of the idea is financially irrelevant. I say the greatness of the idea is financially irrelevant, because disruption requires some degree of originality and originality scares the shit out of people. That means the idea will burn money churning in frequent rejection until it achieves some manner of market assistance.
- the_reformation 6y ago
  > Stay away from people who are world-weary and belittle your ambitions.
- LockAndLol 6y ago
  > I always look at that like a soldier jacked up on adrenaline wearing an arsenal of ammunition ready to destroy the enemy having forgotten to ask who the enemy is or where they are. Lost. Maybe if they just start spraying ammo at everybody the enemy will suddenly make themselves known and something will stick. That is about the most American way of putting it. It also describes America in the middle East and lots of Africa. Weapons had to be sold and/or money had to be made. So people were attacked and when people started shooting back, suddenly there was a reason to invade.
eigen-vector 6y ago
This goes hand in hand with writing. (Good) Writing involves thinking deeply about an idea or a topic. Many good writers appreciate critical feedback, this involves getting your ideas validated or invalidated. It is quite easy to be in an environment of smart people thanks to the internet. By thinking deeply about a problem or ten, trying to write a clear essay on it helps with this.
imedadel 6y ago
How do you manage your ideas? I'm using a combination of Google Sheets, Notion, and a notebook. I rate each idea in Sheets using colors and I keep Notion and a notebook for research so that I don't think about an idea twice.
- x32n23nr 6y ago
  I find this odd. Have you worked on any of those ideas?
  - searchableguy 6y ago
    I do the same. I bookmark complaints from people and feature requests. Those that I want to research more gets pushed to notion or email with a specific tag.
  - imedadel 6y ago
    Oh yes. And it feels good to go back and mark an idea as done! Whenever I have a thought, I write it down. If I got that thought again, I might do a quick Google search and then give a rating to the idea. If I kept constantly thinking about it, I start researching it. The research part might take maybe an hour a week. The other steps don't really take much time. I find this to help with procrastination or losing focus.
- captn3m0 6y ago
  I keep most public: https://github.com/captn3m0/ideas https://github.com/captn3m0/ideas. A few are in my WorkFlowy, but only because I haven't written them down properly. And then I have a section in my notebook for ideas. Stuff graduates from there to my GitHub (or gets built) I've always believed in swombat's quote on HN[1]: >There's no such thing as an original idea. Every idea worth having has been had thousands of times already. No point in keeping ideas private. Keeping them public lets other people build things I would like to see, even if I may not have the resources (time/energy/motivation/expertise) to actually do it. It's a win for me either way. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250793
jameslk 6y ago
Having failed the startup game my fair share of times, I've found a more reliable way to come up with good ideas is to let others who need something give you ideas. Work in a specific industry long enough that you learn about the trade and type of problems and solutions needed. I currently focus on providing services to ecommerce companies, and I get to hear all the time about their pain points and things they wish they had. It's given me a lot of ideas for products to work on and the bonus to that is I already have established relationships with my market, making it much easier to iterate, build case studies, and sell. A lot of the demographic on HN is engineers. That is an industry. You can start with asking your engineer friends and colleagues what painful engineering problems they face, why nothing they use is good enough, and what they wish they had to fix it. If you find enough people saying the same thing, then you've found a potential market. And luckily engineers are early adopter too.
- mdorazio 6y ago
  > Work in a specific industry long enough that you learn about the trade and type of problems and solutions needed. The problem with this is that the recent grads with effectively no practical experience to speak of can't start startups with VC funding and dreams of grandeur this way. But I agree that this is the best path to start a company that's actually likely to succeed based on actual long-term profitability and legitimate problem solving.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    This is how you start a real company with actual potential that investors will love. But it doesn’t feed into the Silicon Valley career mill. So it doesn’t get talked about. SV’s assumption is that you want to “get signed” and start your path. Acquihire by acquihire you build a career. Some outliers get rich and motivate the others. The whole thing is a self-sustaining finance market. Failed founders provide the workforce, outliers provide the funds. And the mill keeps turning. (the real winners are GPs and LPs, the VCs are just as much hamster wheel runners as the rest of us, just later in the career)
- sc90 6y ago
  Skin in the game.
parhamn 6y ago
I think we need to have more founder-typing instead of prescribing everyone act like they can be good at everything. It’s much more important to find balance on your founding team than expecting to learn idea generation suddenly. We need better tools for these different types to find each other. Creatives, executors, evangelists, etc can be different people.
axegon_ 6y ago
I touched this subject in another discussion a few days ago briefly. Here is what I've learned over the years: People keep repeating that you should work on ideas that solve problems that you have yourself. Now given some time on your own, it's natural to start looking at your problems and seeing how to solve them for yourself and potentially others and make a profit along the way. If you want a sinister spin on this, nothing sells better than fear or hope. But this is HN and as far as tech people go, our instinct is to solve problems that are given to us. And often when we have problems on our own, we come up with a solution and don't really think about it twice. I was recently talking with someone about a project they had at their work and how their company paid something like 3 million euros to another company to build a "platform" for them. And given that their company isn't that large or doesn't have that many users (say 40k/month tops), that raised my eyebrow a bit. So I asked them to show me what that "platform" was. Long story-short, a website with a username and password registration, email verification, paypal subscription, which allows you to download a list of PDF's. To a developer the whole concept sounds like a joke - anyone with a few months of experience can mash that up in two weeks. "Oh but we have so many users and traffic, it's not that simple." Bruh... 40k users/month, 100 pdf's, ~2mb each is something a raspberry pi can serve without any issues. The truth is, most tech people are very much detached from reality(granted that the mass of people is the reality and not the other way around). We try to fix problems which we really don't have ourselves and we over-engineer the crap out of them. And commonly this is the result of the so called "idea generation". It's easy to create a startup that solves a niche problem. But we often fail to acknowledge how tiny these niches really are. It's easier to sell something that costs 10000 euros to 10 people and make 100k as opposed to selling something for 5 euros to 20000 people. The truth is, most people create 5 euro products which have a potential audience of 10 people, hence the reason why they make 50 euros as opposed to 100k. You can scroll through PH for days and keep repeating "omg, who needs this?!?!?" I know I have. And truthfully I doubt many people have hit the 50 euro mark, not to mention the 100k. But people make that mistake all the time. We are surrounded by people who will hook up an led to an arduino which will blink when someone mentions them on slack while they are watching a movie, while ordinary people are looking at a website which has payments and they think that's quantum physics. Tech people and ordinary people live in parallel universes at this point. The ideas we come up with are solutions to problems no one has. That's the reason why SaaS is proving to be a lot more successful strategy than B2C. My take on this is that every time you come up with an idea, don't bother sharing it with your tech friends first. In most cases you will get a 50-50 positive-negative response. Find people who are completely detached from your world and have no idea what the difference between a USB and RJ45 is. 1. Can you explain your idea in 4 sentences or less? 2. Do they understand it? 3. Do they have that problem? 3a(if Y on 3). Do they have a working solution, even if it takes 3 times the effort? If the answers to those are: 1. No 2. No 3. No 3a. Yes Then don't bother. You will almost certainly fail.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
godot 6y ago
> (By the way, it’s useful to get good at differentiating between real trends and fake trends. A key differentiator is if the new platform is used a lot by a small number of people, or used a little by a lot of people.) As a one-time founder, I feel embarrassed to have to ask this; but in the spirit of no-stupid-question and also that there's gotta be someone else wondering the same -- which one is the real trend and which one is the fake trend? By way of interpreting sentences in a normal way, I would assume "used a lot by a small number of people" is the real trend and "used a little by a lot of people" is the fake trend (going by order of mentions in both sentences). However, I struggle with this a bit. Dapps were used a lot by a small number of people as of a few years ago (think the cryptokitties trend), but it didn't exactly pan out as a real trend IMO. In other cases, yes, when early adopters love a product and use it a lot, that tends to become a real trend. On the other hand, Facebook apps in 2008 (when they were smaller apps like Superwall and such, before games took over) were somewhat "used a little by a lot of people" at the beginning. I think it wasn't until games took over where the "used a lot" (by a large number of people in that case) really took off.
- maxov 6y ago
  Nah, I think you're asking a good question! I think your interpretation is correct - a good sign for a platform is if it has a small base of passionate users who love the product. For some more context, the How to Start a Startup course is pretty good -- here is the lecture I think is most relevant: http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec06/ http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec06/ Any statement like this isn't going to apply in all cases, and you bring up some good examples. But it's a good general principle.
  - holbue 6y ago
    I see a lot of statements like this (also here in the comments), but is there actual any evidence behind those? Any research results, which has been replicated? If yes, it would be nice to see it together with such statements, to back them, because I have the feeling most of this is just anecdotical or ideas introduced by some kind of start-up gurus...
lordnacho 6y ago
> YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no ideas. I think every company in this no-idea track failed. How many people did they try this with? Most startups fail, so it will be interesting to see whether they funded enough of these. I think there's a rule of thumb about the upper limit on a probability that isn't observed, but I can't remember what it is. As for generating ideas, the founders I've come across have tended to know some industry well enough to understand some of the problems. Often this is very specific industry stuff, including understanding which experts are needed and what customers to focus on. Of course there's plenty of people who have grown up in some industry, but I think the other ingredient you need is enough general knowledge about business to be able to put some pieces together: how to get funding, what a corporate structure is, how to do certain mundane things like pay taxes. The intersection can be smaller than you think, because a lot of corporate types are comfortable where they are, plus they feel (rightly or not) that the job is providing a fair bit of the business infrastructure they need to use their expertise.
- otoburb 6y ago
  I thought that entrepreneurs-in-residence at VC firms are the equivalent of this idea of funding exceptionally capable potential-founders (many who seemed to have been past founders) with no ideas to execute in the current period.
jandrewrogers 6y ago
I don't know how it works for other people but I don't search for really great ideas, really great ideas find me. And once they latch on they don't let go. Most things I would classify as "really great ideas" are emergent patterns in industries I know very well. Also, most of these are not abstract product ideas per se, you can usually see a direct and plausible path to generating large quantities of revenue and profit.
dzonga 6y ago
ideas beget ideas. yeah, waves tectonic shifts are real. and hyper-iteration begets ideas. & filters good ideas from bad ones.
alexashka 6y ago
Stay away from people who are world-weary and belittle your ambitions. Unfortunately, this is most of the world. But they hold on to the past, and you want to live in the future. Here's an idea - if most people are world-weary (not true in my experience), maybe you should go and find out why and then try to figure out what you can do to make it less so (get therapy in your case Sam Altman). What's your track record Sam Altman, besides burning through other people's money and thinking most people are world-weary and need to be distanced from? Here's from his wiki: In 2005, at age 19,[9] Altman co-founded and became CEO of Loopt,[10] a location-based social networking mobile application. After raising more than $30M in venture capital, Loopt was shut down in 2012 after failing to get traction. So his track record is creating yet-another social-network, how original, burning through someone else's money and failing. Please tell us more Sam, you've clearly proven yourself to be an original thinker and capable operator of burning through other people's cash.
- juped 6y ago
  Sam Altman is clearly great at the one skill that matters (becoming a "made man"). I haven't been impressed by anything else from him. If you want a YC person worth listening to, I recommend starting with Michael Seibel instead.
- tlb 6y ago
  Social networks were not in the "how original" category in 2005. Facebook was started in 2004 and was still restricted to college students when Loopt launched. Loopt was quite different (mainly about location rather than friend graph.) It was an idea worth trying.
- wenc 6y ago
  Quote -- It’s important to be in the right kind of environment, and around the right kind of people. You want to be around people who have a good feel for the future, will entertain improbable plans, are optimistic, are smart in a creative way, and have a very high idea flux. These sorts of people tend to think without the constraints most people have, not have a lot of filters, and not care too much what other people think. The best ideas are fragile; most people don’t even start talking about them at all because they sound silly. Perhaps most of all, you want to be around people who don’t make you feel stupid for mentioning a bad idea, and who certainly never feel stupid for doing so themselves. -- I worry that many will take away the wrong lesson, i.e. that every idea has potential, no idea is stupid. Many companies are trying to inculcate this into their cultures thinking they can replicate SV's success by being more open. I think most will quickly find this to be an untenable way to live, because it's only half the picture. I think the real take-away is more nuanced. Open unconstrained environments tend to produce the very best ideas (not just good ideas), and it's important not to kill new ideas too early. That said, all those ideas eventually need to be tested against the crucible of reality. Generate lots of ideas, but be ready to ruthlessly edit and kill those that don't work in reality. As pg said, innovation is two-step process -- and those 2 steps (generate, then edit) are discrete, not to be mixed. High infant mortality during ideation means good ideas get killed. But loose or no filtering at all means you're throwing good money after bad. My improv teacher tells me that to produce great work, we have to work out of abundance (lots of ideas), and also work out of failure (fail a lot). Abundance in itself is not enough, nor is failure on its own.
fredsters_s 6y ago
> YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no ideas. I think every company in this no-idea track failed ...coinbase was a 'no idea' startup
- zhoujianfu 6y ago
  Were they not even interested in bitcoin in some way? If not, good counterexample... but if they were, I think saying something as vague as “we’re going to do a bitcoin company” around then would count as an idea, probably even a tectonic shift one.
- fredsters_s 6y ago
  on further investigation this is not true - they applied with a bitcoin wallet. Thanks for the fact check!
TrackerFF 6y ago
From my somewhat limited experience, working as a consultant (management, etc.) is great for identifying problems, and subsequently coming up with ideas (solutions). Reason is that you work very closely with companies, often many different in the same sector, and get to see all the various aspects, quirks, and flaws at nearly every level of operation. Just the act of getting exposed to all this, can work as a great catalyst for ideas and brainstorming - much better (imo) than just sitting around and trying to think up something, where one can easily fall for the "solution looking for a problem" trap. Now, unfortunately, most people can't just walk into those jobs - and you're not there to brainstorm solutions for every flaw you see. But if you ever get the chance to be in such a position, do try it out. A lot of profitable entrepreneurship revolves around "boring" business problems.
aazaa 6y ago
> A good question to ask yourself early in the process of thinking about an idea is “could this be huge if it worked?” There are many good ideas in the world, but few of them have the inherent advantages that can make a startup massively successful. Most businesses don’t generate a valuable accumulating advantage as they scale. Think early about why an idea might have that property. It’s obvious for Facebook or Airbnb, but it often exists in more subtle ways. This reminds me of David Heinemeier Hansson's talk at Startup School waaayyy back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY The gist: funders tell founders all the time to catch a wave. Go big or don't bother. The reason is that the funder must have a big payoff and small outcomes don't cut it. But there's plenty of room for a small, well-run company with no aspirations of getting bigger. I believe the analogy was: best Italian Restaurant in the city. The other advantage of thinking smaller than "huge" is that success is so much more likely because the competition tends to be less intense. Maybe the author and I have a different idea of "huge," but the examples suggest otherwise. If you're looking for a community that embraces the small startup idea and has developed a lot of material for exploring it, check out Microconf: https://microconf.com https://microconf.com
- ezl 6y ago
  I love this. Just a few days ago I was reading an old thread on HN about "patio11's law" (The software economy is bigger than you think) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23162651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23162651 The comments are great and they talk about these non-venture companies that are quietly churning out 10s of millions or maybe 100s of millions of dollars.
rb808 6y ago
The problem I see is 9/10 startups have stupid ideas but manage to pocket millions before the company crashes and burns. How do you get ideas like that will let you live well, but not necessarily be a good business? Doing sensible businesses just isn't viable in SV these days. > Stay away from people who are world-weary and belittle your ambitions. OK maybe that just is me.
rl3 6y ago
Ideas become better when refined. Sometimes over the course of years. You can assemble a larger composite idea under the umbrella of a single vision, comprised of many smaller ideas. There's of course a balance to be struck depending on the idea's scope and urgency. Both may change with refinement. Idea generation is both a learned skill and intrinsic to a person's circumstance and psychology. Ample unstructured time, low amounts of stress, and an affinity for day dreaming tend to help. Over time you grow to actually enjoy deep thinking as recreation. I've noticed whenever I'm focused on a particular idea, it kind of forms a lens that shapes my world view. Anything I then encounter I view as a puzzle piece, which my mind attempts to reconcile into the larger puzzle that is the foremost idea in my mind at the time. It's a very similar dynamic to PG's musings on the subject.[0] [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html
- chiefalchemist 6y ago
  > Ideas become better when refined. Agreed.This is why execution is more important than idea. Why? Because most ideas aren't born great. They evolve and progress. That's part of execution. The process of taking a good idea and make it great.
  - rl3 6y ago
    I think trying to say one is more important than the other is a false dichotomy. They are both very important. It's true that ideas tend to dramatically evolve as a result of execution. Likewise execution affords an opportunity for refinement that simply isn't there prior. I'd argue it's a different kind of refinement though from what you get while you're still in the green field stage. Thinking and research on their own—over the course of a very long period of time—offer insight that isn't easily gleaned under the high-stress environment of execution. A different kind of insight or refinement, if you will. It's worth noting that there are entire professions where the majority of what they do is think. Physics and philosophy come to mind. Why thinking is valued so little in tech by contrast, I don't know.
    - chiefalchemist 6y ago
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
In my view, business ideas are formed out of life experience. They happen as a consequence of observing situations, working in specific industries, engaging in certain hobbies or entertainment. I am confident that if I were required to make a dedicated effort to 'develop a startup idea' that was absent life experience, success would require more good fortune than if it were coming from a synthesis of experiences, observations and innovative thought. YC already did an experiment, as Sam notes, that points to the need for some type of fertile idea space that gains nutrients from ones life experience. I've had a bunch of ideas, each more or less fleshed out, and some actually acted on. I stumbled on all of them because I was trying to solve a problem that I had personally experienced.
peterwwillis 6y ago
> The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas for their startup. You really can't come up with a better set up to an episode of Silicon Valley. "I Want to start a start-up! But I have no idea what to start or how to start it. Can you tell me everything I should do?"
vumgl 6y ago
This post may be immoral if it hopes for the next big thing. I wonder if it does more harm than good for the world. If someone is to indeed invent the next big thing after the Mobile Phone, for sure they don't need this kind of motivational post. For "smaller" ideas, yes, read ahead. But think it is immoral to encourage a wide audience to shoot for the stars, and try big ideas that have a 0% chance of succeeding and 100% chance of causing lost time and effort, and even financial, social and personal hardship.
danans 6y ago
> It’s important to be in the right kind of environment, and around the right kind of people. That seems like the buried lede in the blog post. I don't know Sam or have any window into his motivations, but he seems to be (at least obliquely) addressing the current HN debate about whether fully remote is equivalent in efficacy to in-person for creative work. Without taking a stance in that cat fight, he is making the (IMO sensible) argument that creativity requires a particular type of human environment, regardless of whether that is remote or not, and social isolation from your professional peers isn't such an environment. Of course, he goes further to suggest that a creativity-fostering environment requires a particular kind of professional peer group.
asdf21 6y ago
Frustrating article -- I have several killer ideas (and ideas for decent execution paths for them as well,) but I tend to get pigeon-holed as "just an idea guy" and generally invalidated.. So I've tried to learn to program to execute them myself, but that's a slow, long process, I'm an excellent Project Manager but a B- programmer, plus trying to wear every hat in a company is not exactly fun. I've seen so much talent wasted on such poor ideas over the years, it's frankly unbelievable, and it never seems to change. /endrant
- christiansakai 6y ago
  I think your skill is really valuable. I am the opposite end of the spectrum. I'm an engineer and I think a decent programmer and a creative guy but when it comes to generating business ideas I'm just dead as a zombie.
  - RhodesianHunter 6y ago
    Ditto. That or I have a great idea, and then go and realize someone else is doing it and has been in business for years.
    - asdf21 6y ago
      That doesn't mean it's not a good idea. There was MySpace before Facebook, 2nd mover advantage and all that.
- jimhi 6y ago
  Talent wasted on poor ideas is better than talent doing nothing. Wearing every hat is hard, otherwise more people would do it. Few people worth working with want to join a team that wouldn't exist without them. What's that quote? "Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb."
chiefalchemist 6y ago
You need a safe environment. And you need people who realize the best idea is the one that most in the room will find a bit crazy at first. The rest is time and iteration.
dilandau 6y ago
Utterly banal gibberish that might have excited the imaginations of money-hungry Stanford grads 15 years ago, but this type of fluff has not aged well.
amiune 6y ago
> Finally, a good test for an idea is if you can articulate why most people think it’s a bad idea, but you understand what makes it good. It seems that all reduces to find if you have some information asymmetry to take advantage of
mrfusion 6y ago
So what are some good ideas right now?
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Disrupt elder care. COVID is showing how much of a disaster that is in its current state. Could start by setting up some kind of IoT auditing system.
mrfusion 6y ago
Here are some ideas but they don’t seem any good: Graham crackers with chocolate pre applied for making s’mores. A racing league for bipedal robots.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > A racing league for bipedal robots. If we permit meatware it might be ok.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Racing league for bipedal robots sounds like a good concept for a commercial/promotional event if you already have a bipedal robot company but it isn't something you would build a company around.
justicezyx 6y ago
Well, I doubt Sam is really good at generating ideas based on his track record. He had great achievement of identifying good ideas, but that's different from generating them as the original thinker.
davidivadavid 6y ago
Look, you don't even need an "idea" for your startup, much less one based on some ethereal "trend" you should try to catch. What you need is a goal and a vision for an improvement to something that people want. Take any current service, and try to figure out what metric people are really using to evaluate it. Now think about what it would take to 10x that metric. I'm stressing the really because that's where you have to do some folk anthropology and try to understand what people really want. If you think people eat food to maximize calories, providing them with 10x calories would sound like a good thing, but that's probably not what's happening. Maybe what you want to figure out is how to have 10x calories / dollar. But people don't just eat food for calories, they also eat it for the nutrient mix. What would be the perfect nutrient mix? Does it need to be custom? Can it be done at a good cost? (that's kind of what Soylent has been doing) Food is also one way we experience some of the most varied sensations: can you make something that's both incredibly nutritious, and that expands people's palates? Food is also built around social experiences, how can you improve the social experience of cooking and eating together? What's the metric? What does 10x that metric look like? Can you 10x along those 3 axes at the same time? Are there trade offs? Can you overcome them? I'm just using food as it's an obvious need/want everyone recognizes (low on the Maslow pyramid). But that can apply to literally anything, as long as you dig deep enough to figure out the underlying need/desire/want. And that way you can quit trying to find random "ideas" based on trends that are just at the surface of things. Jeff Bezos (and a bunch of other people) said it before: don't try to think of what's going to change, think about what's not going to change. People's desires are one of the most stable thing you can build on. Figure out that bit and you'll find a bottomless well of ideas.
courtf 6y ago
> It’s important to be in the right kind of environment, and around the right kind of people. Namely, people who went to an elite school (which inevitably implies they have rich parents) and aren't going to burden your fledgling cash grab with any world-weary ideas about integrity. Extra points if no one involved in the project has any programming talent. That frees up lots of time for coming up with brilliant ideas.
ritikm 6y ago
> YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no ideas. I think every company in this no-idea track failed. We were a no-idea company in the S12 batch. We ended up starting Streem [1], which was acquired by Box in 2014 [2] and ended up integrating and becoming Box Drive [3]. While we didn't build an enduring company, I'd say it was a moderate success by some metrics. YC had two no-ideas in S12 and another one or two in W13 before they shut the track down. Unclear if that's enough data to spot a trend, but YC is smart and likely had other data to back up the decision. Looking back, it was a painful process to go from "no idea" to what eventually became Streem. I don't think I'd ever go and decide to start another company without an idea in the future. [1] https://lifehacker.com/streem-offers-unlimited-cloud-storage-and-streaming-for-1563536464 https://lifehacker.com/streem-offers-unlimited-cloud-storage... [2] https://venturebeat.com/2014/06/16/box-acquires-streem-so-you-dont-have-to-keep-filling-your-local-disk-with-cloud-based-files/ https://venturebeat.com/2014/06/16/box-acquires-streem-so-yo... [3] https://www.box.com/drive https://www.box.com/drive
- fouc 6y ago
  Didn't ycombinator pick a number of startups with bad ideas or non-ideas and encouraged them to pivot? Or encourage new teams to form around a different idea? For example Reddit's original team wanted to do a "My Mobile Menu", and also Aaron Swartz pivoted from Infogami to merging with Reddit. I would almost count this partially under the "no idea" category.
  - nl 6y ago
    There's plenty of YC Companies that have changed their idea during YC, or pivoted completely during the program (I think Daniel Gross pivoted twice?) I think YC expects most companies to modify what they are doing during the program. But all of these things are very different to taking someone on board with no idea at all.
- ImaCake 6y ago
  The line about the experiment made me consider if "no ideas" is a symptom or a cause. Borrowing from epidemiology, I think "no ideas" might be an effect modifier. That is, it is just an intermediate step when going from the exposing factor to the outcome (the outcome, we know, is failing start-ups). It would be interesting to know what the real proximal cause is, or at least a really good proxy for it. Maybe YCombinator could benefit from the input of a biostatistician or similar statistical expert to design some cohort studies on start ups.
graycat 6y ago
Sometimes ideas are easy to find. An idea? Okay: Setup a software as a service Web site to solve quickly all traveling salesman problems with fewer than, say, 1 million cities, and everything equivalent in computational complexity to them. First difficulty: To write the server side software, basically are asking for an algorithm that shows that P = NP, and now we have had some decades to conclude that so far no one knows how to do that (with a von Neumann computer, but maybe could get a solution using a quantum computer). Well, for positive integer n <= 1 million, consider the traveling salesman problem on n cities. Without loss of generality, assume that n is a prime number (with factors only 1 and n). Then embed this problem in ..., and notice that ..., and then apply ..., exploiting special case ...! Right!!! Lesson 1: This idea was super easy to find! Lesson 2: What it takes to make this idea work is something new, and, if we get a solution, that would contradict the observation that there are no good new ideas because all the good ideas were thought of long ago. Lesson 3: Finding an algorithm that shows that P = NP is challenging, but with that algorithm would have one heck of a strong technological barrier to entry and a contradiction to the claim that it is easy to copy a startup! My real point: Have two lists. List A has the problems that plenty of people would pay big bucks to have solved. List B has the tools for solving problems. Pick a pair from lists A and B where the tool from B solves the problem from A. Next, if there is no suitable tool in list B, then do some research and find one. If can't find a tool for the problem from A, then pick another problem from A and try again to do the research to find the needed tool. The research need not be as challenging as proving that P = NP. But broadly one way to find "good ideas" is do some research that yields a tool that enables solving a problem from list A that has been sitting there for a long time unsolved due to the lack of a suitable tool from list B. That is, one way to find a "good idea" is to do some research. If we are restricting to having von Neumann computers do the data manipulations, then we can notice that the manipulations are necessarily mathematically something so that an enabling tool and the research are about forced to be in applied math. It might also be sufficient to use some of the math on the shelves of the research libraries, math that so far has been neglected by the information startup culture. Possible psychological issue: It may be that we frequently see good problems to solve but right away, within a few seconds, implicitly, maybe even unconsciously, reject solving the problem as a startup idea because we don't see a suitable tool for a solution. Well, then, slow down a little on the rejection step and consider some research or just what is already in the research libraries. Uh, there's a lot in the research libraries!
jamesrcole 6y ago
Another means: have really high standards. It’ll make you better at spotting when something ought to be easier to accomplish. You’ll instinctively feel irritated by the fact that it isn’t.
sytelus 6y ago
There are two kinds of idea generation: hole plugging and door opening. The former means you look for holes in current state of affairs and use available tech to plug it. The later means you invent something very new and open doors to entirely new opportunities. Former requires cheap short term less risky trials while later is usually more systematic long term expensive endeavors. Unfortunately startups have became synonymous only for the hole plugging even though door opening is an order of magnitude more rewarding. This is the difference between Twitter and flying cars. I hope there is YC like model that gets developed for door opening instead of keep fueling hole plugging through college dropouts.
7leafer 6y ago
"These sorts of people tend to think without the constraints most people have, not have a lot of filters, and not care too much what other people think." - And have that murine sense of when to leave the sinking ship when this disregard backfires.
Kiro 6y ago
Am I the only one with a list of over 1000 ideas that would all become billion dollar companies if I just had the time to do them all?
- keiferski 6y ago
  Nope. These idea generation posts don’t make any sense to me - I have too many ideas, most of which would at least be successful small businesses if I put a couple years into them. The difficulty is in focusing on one, to the exclusion of others.
- rytill 6y ago
  Can you share a random sampling of 10 of these?
- Gengar 6y ago
  I have the opposite problem. How are you generating ideas?
mifeng 6y ago
I'm sure this post is well intended, but it just pushes new founders into obvious, crowded categories like virtual conference and remote work SaaS. To find good ideas, founders need to go a lot deeper than asking themselves "what is different about the world today?"
jwblackwell 6y ago
The best ideas are fragile; most people don’t even start talking about them at all because they sound silly. I hear this expressed quite a lot and there's certainly some truth here. I think it can be quite misleading though. Many good ideas also just sound like pretty good ideas and turn out to be great businesses. Not every idea has to be completely crazy sounding. Perhaps this is even more true in B2B software / boring industries. VCs and Accelerators are incentivised to encourage the craziest "moonshots" because that's how they make money. If you're just looking to get rich selling software you don't need to go to mars.
bobnarizes 6y ago
My problem is, where to find these optimistic people that know about the field? I basically don't want to discuss my big ideas with colleagues, I just trust them as colleagues. Outside the company I don't have so much contact with people who are interested in start-ups, trends, etc. And corona is blocking the opportunity to visit some hacker spaces, meet-ups,...
rexreed 6y ago
Ideas aren't the primary issue. Execution is the main problem. Our amazing brains are fantastic at creativity and thinking in new ways, and coming up with all sorts of fantastical ideas. Some practical, most not. But our same day-dream happy brains are absolutely terrible at helping us execute on those ideas. Finding the most effective and efficient ways at making ideas come to fruition. And the millions of ways that an idea, no matter how great it may sound, may never come to pass. This is a "how to day dream better" post. Which maybe some people need I suppose. But I'd rather see a "how to make your dreams a reality" post.
netcan 6y ago
This is a hard topic to theorize (essay-ize). The retrospective view is somewhat illusionary. It's hard to capture what really happened att. I think a lot of the insight is in the first few paragraphs. Ideas in the "startup idea" sense, aren't one idea. They're a lot of ideas had over time. AirBnB couldn't have given their idea, like Tolkien couldn't have given middle earth to another writer. Spotting trends is similarly hard, and similarly treacherous. Retrospective examples (eg mobile phones) seem way easier than they are. One major pitfall for spotting trends is timelines. The whole 90s dotcom bubble, in hindsight, was mostly wrong about timelines. Browsers are important platforms, and controlling one does kind of make you "a microsoft." Moving early and grabbing market share is very important. Online markets do tend to be winner-take-all. They were just 10 years early.
codingdave 6y ago
> the world changes so fast that the big incumbents usually get beaten by fast-moving and focused startups. I'm not sure this is as true as founders hope. Yes, startups take the lead when change occurs. But then they also take on all the risk, fight it out with similar startups, and a few years later often get purchased by one of the old incumbents. And in those purchases, some specific founders get rich, but many others fail, and many devs work quite hard and don't end up where they thought they would. At the same time, the big incumbents get to just sit back and let other people fight it out, then re-buy their market share in the future.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Idea Generation

524 points by awaxman11 6y ago

minimaxir 6y ago

Legit surprised Sam didn't recommend using an AI to generate ideas. :P

rexreed 6y ago
Are you sure AI didn't generate this article?

austincheney 6y ago

I have always found that entire scenario very odd. How are you a start up founder if you don’t know what you want to start up? I always look at that like a soldier jacked up on adrenaline wearing an arsenal of ammunition ready to destroy the enemy having forgotten to ask who the enemy is or where they are. Lost. Maybe if they just start spraying ammo at everybody the enemy will suddenly make themselves known and something will stick. This entire scenario is completely at odds with Indie Hackers who continually stress to refine a good idea until you have both revenue and product/market fit before quitting your day job. This advise is well suited to people who have the reality of personal finances and time constraints, so I guess there are some people who have unlimited funding and time to burn in search of something they should already have.

aklemm 6y ago
It’s a form of entitlement. Similar to calling oneself a “keynote speaker” absent any mention of one’s area of expertise. To consider one’s self a founder without an idea is to ignore the importance of vision. Might be ok for a franchise, but these are always the same people talking about disrupting this and that.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  And ignores the importance of execution altogether. It’s hard to do $thing before you even know what it is.
peterwoerner 6y ago
I knew I wanted to build my own company before I had a good idea for one. When I was in grad school I went out and executed a themed bottle opener which at best guess could make a few thousand dollars simply for practice and experience. Regardless of whether you are a founder or not, figuring out the important problems to solve is important to ones career.
benjaminsuch 6y ago
Agree. I think it's a very bad sign if someone asks for ideas. You don't ask for ideas, you encounter problems and based on those problems you make ideas on how to solve them. That's also the reason why one should make a prototype very fast and validate by a potential user/customer that you solve the problem the right way.
kgin 6y ago
That's a funny cultural thing about silicon valley. You're not incidentally an entrepreneur only if you've started something, you're an entrepreneur simply because you're the type of person who entrepreneues.
renewiltord 6y ago
I am sceptical too but it's not an unusual idea to think that perhaps you can just put smart people together and they'll work something out. God knows that much of that attitude is often lauded on HN for other things.
- austincheney 6y ago
  Kind of. I am entering my fifth military deployment so I can speak to the nature of spontaneously formed teams of strangers. Intelligence is largely, but not completely, irrelevant. You learn to identify that a team is strongest due to a mix of good discipline and putting the proper personalities in the correct positions and then codifying a single common purpose. I recommend reading the book Good To Great for further examination.
- AtHeartEngineer 6y ago
  Agreed, I work in an environment with a lot of really smart people, but not everyone thinks outside the box or is ambitious in that way
dunkelheit 6y ago
The problem with this way of thinking is that existing markets are probably efficient enough - meaning all easy ways to make a lot of money have already been exhausted. This means that any idea that you generate by encountering a problem and thinking of a solution is probably either too hard to implement or will generate relatively puny revenue stream (nothing to sneeze at, but probably not of much interest to VCs and founders chasing big bucks). What's the alternative? To wait for tectonic shifts in overall environment and circumstances, look for vacant ecological niches and pounce when you see one. To the outside view this will look exactly like a founder who doesn't know what to start up. Here is an example I like: John Carmack. The conventional view is that he is a brilliant game programmer (which is undoubtedly true). But the alternative point of view is that his shtick was to capitalize on the period of incredible advances in consumer hardware. Each of his games fully showcased what the best hardware of that time was capable of (order of magnitude more than the previous generation) which made them instant hits. Not coincidentally, he quit making games around the time this period of advancement stopped. Here is a post by @defmacro making a similar point: http://www.defmacro.org/2015/02/25/startup-ideas.html http://www.defmacro.org/2015/02/25/startup-ideas.html
- austincheney 6y ago
  John Carmack's success is due to id Software incubated at Softdisk. The reality of that success, at least in the beginning, was an already established stream of revenue, a ready assembled team, and proper leadership. The brilliance and innovation of Carmack came later. They had day jobs, revenue, and product/market fit already established before spinning out of Softdisk to launch id. That isn't enough to account for the super stellar success they would later enjoy, but it fully explains launching a successful business. There isn't any magic or secret sauce there. > The problem with this way of thinking is that existing markets are probably efficient enough Oh, that's certainly not true. The challenge there is the expertise to see the current dysfunction versus the risk of solving for it. Solving for the dysfunction often comes at competition for the limited resources required for current practice of art and rejection from just about everybody. Knowing this there is a choice to be made: 1. Sustain the current practice with current income and no change in risk 2. Proceed with the solution knowing that failure is probable and that a startup begins with a financial valley of death (burns cash without the revenue to make up for it) while knowing the greatness of the idea is financially irrelevant. I say the greatness of the idea is financially irrelevant, because disruption requires some degree of originality and originality scares the shit out of people. That means the idea will burn money churning in frequent rejection until it achieves some manner of market assistance.
the_reformation 6y ago
> Stay away from people who are world-weary and belittle your ambitions.
LockAndLol 6y ago
> I always look at that like a soldier jacked up on adrenaline wearing an arsenal of ammunition ready to destroy the enemy having forgotten to ask who the enemy is or where they are. Lost. Maybe if they just start spraying ammo at everybody the enemy will suddenly make themselves known and something will stick. That is about the most American way of putting it. It also describes America in the middle East and lots of Africa. Weapons had to be sold and/or money had to be made. So people were attacked and when people started shooting back, suddenly there was a reason to invade.

eigen-vector 6y ago

This goes hand in hand with writing. (Good) Writing involves thinking deeply about an idea or a topic. Many good writers appreciate critical feedback, this involves getting your ideas validated or invalidated. It is quite easy to be in an environment of smart people thanks to the internet. By thinking deeply about a problem or ten, trying to write a clear essay on it helps with this.

imedadel 6y ago

How do you manage your ideas? I'm using a combination of Google Sheets, Notion, and a notebook. I rate each idea in Sheets using colors and I keep Notion and a notebook for research so that I don't think about an idea twice.

x32n23nr 6y ago
I find this odd. Have you worked on any of those ideas?
- searchableguy 6y ago
  I do the same. I bookmark complaints from people and feature requests. Those that I want to research more gets pushed to notion or email with a specific tag.
- imedadel 6y ago
  Oh yes. And it feels good to go back and mark an idea as done! Whenever I have a thought, I write it down. If I got that thought again, I might do a quick Google search and then give a rating to the idea. If I kept constantly thinking about it, I start researching it. The research part might take maybe an hour a week. The other steps don't really take much time. I find this to help with procrastination or losing focus.
captn3m0 6y ago
I keep most public: https://github.com/captn3m0/ideas https://github.com/captn3m0/ideas. A few are in my WorkFlowy, but only because I haven't written them down properly. And then I have a section in my notebook for ideas. Stuff graduates from there to my GitHub (or gets built) I've always believed in swombat's quote on HN[1]: >There's no such thing as an original idea. Every idea worth having has been had thousands of times already. No point in keeping ideas private. Keeping them public lets other people build things I would like to see, even if I may not have the resources (time/energy/motivation/expertise) to actually do it. It's a win for me either way. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=250793

jameslk 6y ago

Having failed the startup game my fair share of times, I've found a more reliable way to come up with good ideas is to let others who need something give you ideas. Work in a specific industry long enough that you learn about the trade and type of problems and solutions needed. I currently focus on providing services to ecommerce companies, and I get to hear all the time about their pain points and things they wish they had. It's given me a lot of ideas for products to work on and the bonus to that is I already have established relationships with my market, making it much easier to iterate, build case studies, and sell. A lot of the demographic on HN is engineers. That is an industry. You can start with asking your engineer friends and colleagues what painful engineering problems they face, why nothing they use is good enough, and what they wish they had to fix it. If you find enough people saying the same thing, then you've found a potential market. And luckily engineers are early adopter too.

mdorazio 6y ago
> Work in a specific industry long enough that you learn about the trade and type of problems and solutions needed. The problem with this is that the recent grads with effectively no practical experience to speak of can't start startups with VC funding and dreams of grandeur this way. But I agree that this is the best path to start a company that's actually likely to succeed based on actual long-term profitability and legitimate problem solving.
- Swizec 6y ago
  This is how you start a real company with actual potential that investors will love. But it doesn’t feed into the Silicon Valley career mill. So it doesn’t get talked about. SV’s assumption is that you want to “get signed” and start your path. Acquihire by acquihire you build a career. Some outliers get rich and motivate the others. The whole thing is a self-sustaining finance market. Failed founders provide the workforce, outliers provide the funds. And the mill keeps turning. (the real winners are GPs and LPs, the VCs are just as much hamster wheel runners as the rest of us, just later in the career)
sc90 6y ago
Skin in the game.

parhamn 6y ago

I think we need to have more founder-typing instead of prescribing everyone act like they can be good at everything. It’s much more important to find balance on your founding team than expecting to learn idea generation suddenly. We need better tools for these different types to find each other. Creatives, executors, evangelists, etc can be different people.

axegon_ 6y ago

I touched this subject in another discussion a few days ago briefly. Here is what I've learned over the years: People keep repeating that you should work on ideas that solve problems that you have yourself. Now given some time on your own, it's natural to start looking at your problems and seeing how to solve them for yourself and potentially others and make a profit along the way. If you want a sinister spin on this, nothing sells better than fear or hope. But this is HN and as far as tech people go, our instinct is to solve problems that are given to us. And often when we have problems on our own, we come up with a solution and don't really think about it twice. I was recently talking with someone about a project they had at their work and how their company paid something like 3 million euros to another company to build a "platform" for them. And given that their company isn't that large or doesn't have that many users (say 40k/month tops), that raised my eyebrow a bit. So I asked them to show me what that "platform" was. Long story-short, a website with a username and password registration, email verification, paypal subscription, which allows you to download a list of PDF's. To a developer the whole concept sounds like a joke - anyone with a few months of experience can mash that up in two weeks. "Oh but we have so many users and traffic, it's not that simple." Bruh... 40k users/month, 100 pdf's, ~2mb each is something a raspberry pi can serve without any issues. The truth is, most tech people are very much detached from reality(granted that the mass of people is the reality and not the other way around). We try to fix problems which we really don't have ourselves and we over-engineer the crap out of them. And commonly this is the result of the so called "idea generation". It's easy to create a startup that solves a niche problem. But we often fail to acknowledge how tiny these niches really are. It's easier to sell something that costs 10000 euros to 10 people and make 100k as opposed to selling something for 5 euros to 20000 people. The truth is, most people create 5 euro products which have a potential audience of 10 people, hence the reason why they make 50 euros as opposed to 100k. You can scroll through PH for days and keep repeating "omg, who needs this?!?!?" I know I have. And truthfully I doubt many people have hit the 50 euro mark, not to mention the 100k. But people make that mistake all the time. We are surrounded by people who will hook up an led to an arduino which will blink when someone mentions them on slack while they are watching a movie, while ordinary people are looking at a website which has payments and they think that's quantum physics. Tech people and ordinary people live in parallel universes at this point. The ideas we come up with are solutions to problems no one has. That's the reason why SaaS is proving to be a lot more successful strategy than B2C. My take on this is that every time you come up with an idea, don't bother sharing it with your tech friends first. In most cases you will get a 50-50 positive-negative response. Find people who are completely detached from your world and have no idea what the difference between a USB and RJ45 is. 1. Can you explain your idea in 4 sentences or less? 2. Do they understand it? 3. Do they have that problem? 3a(if Y on 3). Do they have a working solution, even if it takes 3 times the effort? If the answers to those are: 1. No 2. No 3. No 3a. Yes Then don't bother. You will almost certainly fail.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

godot 6y ago

> (By the way, it’s useful to get good at differentiating between real trends and fake trends. A key differentiator is if the new platform is used a lot by a small number of people, or used a little by a lot of people.) As a one-time founder, I feel embarrassed to have to ask this; but in the spirit of no-stupid-question and also that there's gotta be someone else wondering the same -- which one is the real trend and which one is the fake trend? By way of interpreting sentences in a normal way, I would assume "used a lot by a small number of people" is the real trend and "used a little by a lot of people" is the fake trend (going by order of mentions in both sentences). However, I struggle with this a bit. Dapps were used a lot by a small number of people as of a few years ago (think the cryptokitties trend), but it didn't exactly pan out as a real trend IMO. In other cases, yes, when early adopters love a product and use it a lot, that tends to become a real trend. On the other hand, Facebook apps in 2008 (when they were smaller apps like Superwall and such, before games took over) were somewhat "used a little by a lot of people" at the beginning. I think it wasn't until games took over where the "used a lot" (by a large number of people in that case) really took off.

maxov 6y ago
Nah, I think you're asking a good question! I think your interpretation is correct - a good sign for a platform is if it has a small base of passionate users who love the product. For some more context, the How to Start a Startup course is pretty good -- here is the lecture I think is most relevant: http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec06/ http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec06/ Any statement like this isn't going to apply in all cases, and you bring up some good examples. But it's a good general principle.
- holbue 6y ago
  I see a lot of statements like this (also here in the comments), but is there actual any evidence behind those? Any research results, which has been replicated? If yes, it would be nice to see it together with such statements, to back them, because I have the feeling most of this is just anecdotical or ideas introduced by some kind of start-up gurus...

lordnacho 6y ago

> YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no ideas. I think every company in this no-idea track failed. How many people did they try this with? Most startups fail, so it will be interesting to see whether they funded enough of these. I think there's a rule of thumb about the upper limit on a probability that isn't observed, but I can't remember what it is. As for generating ideas, the founders I've come across have tended to know some industry well enough to understand some of the problems. Often this is very specific industry stuff, including understanding which experts are needed and what customers to focus on. Of course there's plenty of people who have grown up in some industry, but I think the other ingredient you need is enough general knowledge about business to be able to put some pieces together: how to get funding, what a corporate structure is, how to do certain mundane things like pay taxes. The intersection can be smaller than you think, because a lot of corporate types are comfortable where they are, plus they feel (rightly or not) that the job is providing a fair bit of the business infrastructure they need to use their expertise.

otoburb 6y ago
I thought that entrepreneurs-in-residence at VC firms are the equivalent of this idea of funding exceptionally capable potential-founders (many who seemed to have been past founders) with no ideas to execute in the current period.

jandrewrogers 6y ago

I don't know how it works for other people but I don't search for really great ideas, really great ideas find me. And once they latch on they don't let go. Most things I would classify as "really great ideas" are emergent patterns in industries I know very well. Also, most of these are not abstract product ideas per se, you can usually see a direct and plausible path to generating large quantities of revenue and profit.

dzonga 6y ago

ideas beget ideas. yeah, waves tectonic shifts are real. and hyper-iteration begets ideas. & filters good ideas from bad ones.

alexashka 6y ago

Stay away from people who are world-weary and belittle your ambitions. Unfortunately, this is most of the world. But they hold on to the past, and you want to live in the future. Here's an idea - if most people are world-weary (not true in my experience), maybe you should go and find out why and then try to figure out what you can do to make it less so (get therapy in your case Sam Altman). What's your track record Sam Altman, besides burning through other people's money and thinking most people are world-weary and need to be distanced from? Here's from his wiki: In 2005, at age 19,[9] Altman co-founded and became CEO of Loopt,[10] a location-based social networking mobile application. After raising more than $30M in venture capital, Loopt was shut down in 2012 after failing to get traction. So his track record is creating yet-another social-network, how original, burning through someone else's money and failing. Please tell us more Sam, you've clearly proven yourself to be an original thinker and capable operator of burning through other people's cash.

juped 6y ago
Sam Altman is clearly great at the one skill that matters (becoming a "made man"). I haven't been impressed by anything else from him. If you want a YC person worth listening to, I recommend starting with Michael Seibel instead.
tlb 6y ago
Social networks were not in the "how original" category in 2005. Facebook was started in 2004 and was still restricted to college students when Loopt launched. Loopt was quite different (mainly about location rather than friend graph.) It was an idea worth trying.
wenc 6y ago
Quote -- It’s important to be in the right kind of environment, and around the right kind of people. You want to be around people who have a good feel for the future, will entertain improbable plans, are optimistic, are smart in a creative way, and have a very high idea flux. These sorts of people tend to think without the constraints most people have, not have a lot of filters, and not care too much what other people think. The best ideas are fragile; most people don’t even start talking about them at all because they sound silly. Perhaps most of all, you want to be around people who don’t make you feel stupid for mentioning a bad idea, and who certainly never feel stupid for doing so themselves. -- I worry that many will take away the wrong lesson, i.e. that every idea has potential, no idea is stupid. Many companies are trying to inculcate this into their cultures thinking they can replicate SV's success by being more open. I think most will quickly find this to be an untenable way to live, because it's only half the picture. I think the real take-away is more nuanced. Open unconstrained environments tend to produce the very best ideas (not just good ideas), and it's important not to kill new ideas too early. That said, all those ideas eventually need to be tested against the crucible of reality. Generate lots of ideas, but be ready to ruthlessly edit and kill those that don't work in reality. As pg said, innovation is two-step process -- and those 2 steps (generate, then edit) are discrete, not to be mixed. High infant mortality during ideation means good ideas get killed. But loose or no filtering at all means you're throwing good money after bad. My improv teacher tells me that to produce great work, we have to work out of abundance (lots of ideas), and also work out of failure (fail a lot). Abundance in itself is not enough, nor is failure on its own.

fredsters_s 6y ago

> YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no ideas. I think every company in this no-idea track failed ...coinbase was a 'no idea' startup

zhoujianfu 6y ago
Were they not even interested in bitcoin in some way? If not, good counterexample... but if they were, I think saying something as vague as “we’re going to do a bitcoin company” around then would count as an idea, probably even a tectonic shift one.
fredsters_s 6y ago
on further investigation this is not true - they applied with a bitcoin wallet. Thanks for the fact check!

TrackerFF 6y ago

From my somewhat limited experience, working as a consultant (management, etc.) is great for identifying problems, and subsequently coming up with ideas (solutions). Reason is that you work very closely with companies, often many different in the same sector, and get to see all the various aspects, quirks, and flaws at nearly every level of operation. Just the act of getting exposed to all this, can work as a great catalyst for ideas and brainstorming - much better (imo) than just sitting around and trying to think up something, where one can easily fall for the "solution looking for a problem" trap. Now, unfortunately, most people can't just walk into those jobs - and you're not there to brainstorm solutions for every flaw you see. But if you ever get the chance to be in such a position, do try it out. A lot of profitable entrepreneurship revolves around "boring" business problems.

aazaa 6y ago

> A good question to ask yourself early in the process of thinking about an idea is “could this be huge if it worked?” There are many good ideas in the world, but few of them have the inherent advantages that can make a startup massively successful. Most businesses don’t generate a valuable accumulating advantage as they scale. Think early about why an idea might have that property. It’s obvious for Facebook or Airbnb, but it often exists in more subtle ways. This reminds me of David Heinemeier Hansson's talk at Startup School waaayyy back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CDXJ6bMkMY The gist: funders tell founders all the time to catch a wave. Go big or don't bother. The reason is that the funder must have a big payoff and small outcomes don't cut it. But there's plenty of room for a small, well-run company with no aspirations of getting bigger. I believe the analogy was: best Italian Restaurant in the city. The other advantage of thinking smaller than "huge" is that success is so much more likely because the competition tends to be less intense. Maybe the author and I have a different idea of "huge," but the examples suggest otherwise. If you're looking for a community that embraces the small startup idea and has developed a lot of material for exploring it, check out Microconf: https://microconf.com https://microconf.com

ezl 6y ago
I love this. Just a few days ago I was reading an old thread on HN about "patio11's law" (The software economy is bigger than you think) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23162651 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23162651 The comments are great and they talk about these non-venture companies that are quietly churning out 10s of millions or maybe 100s of millions of dollars.

rb808 6y ago

The problem I see is 9/10 startups have stupid ideas but manage to pocket millions before the company crashes and burns. How do you get ideas like that will let you live well, but not necessarily be a good business? Doing sensible businesses just isn't viable in SV these days. > Stay away from people who are world-weary and belittle your ambitions. OK maybe that just is me.

rl3 6y ago

Ideas become better when refined. Sometimes over the course of years. You can assemble a larger composite idea under the umbrella of a single vision, comprised of many smaller ideas. There's of course a balance to be struck depending on the idea's scope and urgency. Both may change with refinement. Idea generation is both a learned skill and intrinsic to a person's circumstance and psychology. Ample unstructured time, low amounts of stress, and an affinity for day dreaming tend to help. Over time you grow to actually enjoy deep thinking as recreation. I've noticed whenever I'm focused on a particular idea, it kind of forms a lens that shapes my world view. Anything I then encounter I view as a puzzle piece, which my mind attempts to reconcile into the larger puzzle that is the foremost idea in my mind at the time. It's a very similar dynamic to PG's musings on the subject.[0] [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html

chiefalchemist 6y ago
> Ideas become better when refined. Agreed.This is why execution is more important than idea. Why? Because most ideas aren't born great. They evolve and progress. That's part of execution. The process of taking a good idea and make it great.
- rl3 6y ago
  I think trying to say one is more important than the other is a false dichotomy. They are both very important. It's true that ideas tend to dramatically evolve as a result of execution. Likewise execution affords an opportunity for refinement that simply isn't there prior. I'd argue it's a different kind of refinement though from what you get while you're still in the green field stage. Thinking and research on their own—over the course of a very long period of time—offer insight that isn't easily gleaned under the high-stress environment of execution. A different kind of insight or refinement, if you will. It's worth noting that there are entire professions where the majority of what they do is think. Physics and philosophy come to mind. Why thinking is valued so little in tech by contrast, I don't know.
  - chiefalchemist 6y ago

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago

In my view, business ideas are formed out of life experience. They happen as a consequence of observing situations, working in specific industries, engaging in certain hobbies or entertainment. I am confident that if I were required to make a dedicated effort to 'develop a startup idea' that was absent life experience, success would require more good fortune than if it were coming from a synthesis of experiences, observations and innovative thought. YC already did an experiment, as Sam notes, that points to the need for some type of fertile idea space that gains nutrients from ones life experience. I've had a bunch of ideas, each more or less fleshed out, and some actually acted on. I stumbled on all of them because I was trying to solve a problem that I had personally experienced.

peterwwillis 6y ago

> The most common question prospective startup founders ask is how to get ideas for startups. The second most common question is if you have any ideas for their startup. You really can't come up with a better set up to an episode of Silicon Valley. "I Want to start a start-up! But I have no idea what to start or how to start it. Can you tell me everything I should do?"

vumgl 6y ago

This post may be immoral if it hopes for the next big thing. I wonder if it does more harm than good for the world. If someone is to indeed invent the next big thing after the Mobile Phone, for sure they don't need this kind of motivational post. For "smaller" ideas, yes, read ahead. But think it is immoral to encourage a wide audience to shoot for the stars, and try big ideas that have a 0% chance of succeeding and 100% chance of causing lost time and effort, and even financial, social and personal hardship.

danans 6y ago

> It’s important to be in the right kind of environment, and around the right kind of people. That seems like the buried lede in the blog post. I don't know Sam or have any window into his motivations, but he seems to be (at least obliquely) addressing the current HN debate about whether fully remote is equivalent in efficacy to in-person for creative work. Without taking a stance in that cat fight, he is making the (IMO sensible) argument that creativity requires a particular type of human environment, regardless of whether that is remote or not, and social isolation from your professional peers isn't such an environment. Of course, he goes further to suggest that a creativity-fostering environment requires a particular kind of professional peer group.

asdf21 6y ago

Frustrating article -- I have several killer ideas (and ideas for decent execution paths for them as well,) but I tend to get pigeon-holed as "just an idea guy" and generally invalidated.. So I've tried to learn to program to execute them myself, but that's a slow, long process, I'm an excellent Project Manager but a B- programmer, plus trying to wear every hat in a company is not exactly fun. I've seen so much talent wasted on such poor ideas over the years, it's frankly unbelievable, and it never seems to change. /endrant

christiansakai 6y ago
I think your skill is really valuable. I am the opposite end of the spectrum. I'm an engineer and I think a decent programmer and a creative guy but when it comes to generating business ideas I'm just dead as a zombie.
- RhodesianHunter 6y ago
  Ditto. That or I have a great idea, and then go and realize someone else is doing it and has been in business for years.
  - asdf21 6y ago
    That doesn't mean it's not a good idea. There was MySpace before Facebook, 2nd mover advantage and all that.
jimhi 6y ago
Talent wasted on poor ideas is better than talent doing nothing. Wearing every hat is hard, otherwise more people would do it. Few people worth working with want to join a team that wouldn't exist without them. What's that quote? "Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb."

chiefalchemist 6y ago

You need a safe environment. And you need people who realize the best idea is the one that most in the room will find a bit crazy at first. The rest is time and iteration.

dilandau 6y ago

Utterly banal gibberish that might have excited the imaginations of money-hungry Stanford grads 15 years ago, but this type of fluff has not aged well.

amiune 6y ago

> Finally, a good test for an idea is if you can articulate why most people think it’s a bad idea, but you understand what makes it good. It seems that all reduces to find if you have some information asymmetry to take advantage of

mrfusion 6y ago

So what are some good ideas right now?

MattGaiser 6y ago
Disrupt elder care. COVID is showing how much of a disaster that is in its current state. Could start by setting up some kind of IoT auditing system.

mrfusion 6y ago

Here are some ideas but they don’t seem any good: Graham crackers with chocolate pre applied for making s’mores. A racing league for bipedal robots.

MattGaiser 6y ago
> A racing league for bipedal robots. If we permit meatware it might be ok.
imtringued 6y ago
Racing league for bipedal robots sounds like a good concept for a commercial/promotional event if you already have a bipedal robot company but it isn't something you would build a company around.

justicezyx 6y ago

Well, I doubt Sam is really good at generating ideas based on his track record. He had great achievement of identifying good ideas, but that's different from generating them as the original thinker.

davidivadavid 6y ago

Look, you don't even need an "idea" for your startup, much less one based on some ethereal "trend" you should try to catch. What you need is a goal and a vision for an improvement to something that people want. Take any current service, and try to figure out what metric people are really using to evaluate it. Now think about what it would take to 10x that metric. I'm stressing the really because that's where you have to do some folk anthropology and try to understand what people really want. If you think people eat food to maximize calories, providing them with 10x calories would sound like a good thing, but that's probably not what's happening. Maybe what you want to figure out is how to have 10x calories / dollar. But people don't just eat food for calories, they also eat it for the nutrient mix. What would be the perfect nutrient mix? Does it need to be custom? Can it be done at a good cost? (that's kind of what Soylent has been doing) Food is also one way we experience some of the most varied sensations: can you make something that's both incredibly nutritious, and that expands people's palates? Food is also built around social experiences, how can you improve the social experience of cooking and eating together? What's the metric? What does 10x that metric look like? Can you 10x along those 3 axes at the same time? Are there trade offs? Can you overcome them? I'm just using food as it's an obvious need/want everyone recognizes (low on the Maslow pyramid). But that can apply to literally anything, as long as you dig deep enough to figure out the underlying need/desire/want. And that way you can quit trying to find random "ideas" based on trends that are just at the surface of things. Jeff Bezos (and a bunch of other people) said it before: don't try to think of what's going to change, think about what's not going to change. People's desires are one of the most stable thing you can build on. Figure out that bit and you'll find a bottomless well of ideas.

courtf 6y ago

> It’s important to be in the right kind of environment, and around the right kind of people. Namely, people who went to an elite school (which inevitably implies they have rich parents) and aren't going to burden your fledgling cash grab with any world-weary ideas about integrity. Extra points if no one involved in the project has any programming talent. That frees up lots of time for coming up with brilliant ideas.

ritikm 6y ago

> YC once tried an experiment of funding seemingly good founders with no ideas. I think every company in this no-idea track failed. We were a no-idea company in the S12 batch. We ended up starting Streem [1], which was acquired by Box in 2014 [2] and ended up integrating and becoming Box Drive [3]. While we didn't build an enduring company, I'd say it was a moderate success by some metrics. YC had two no-ideas in S12 and another one or two in W13 before they shut the track down. Unclear if that's enough data to spot a trend, but YC is smart and likely had other data to back up the decision. Looking back, it was a painful process to go from "no idea" to what eventually became Streem. I don't think I'd ever go and decide to start another company without an idea in the future. [1] https://lifehacker.com/streem-offers-unlimited-cloud-storage-and-streaming-for-1563536464 https://lifehacker.com/streem-offers-unlimited-cloud-storage... [2] https://venturebeat.com/2014/06/16/box-acquires-streem-so-you-dont-have-to-keep-filling-your-local-disk-with-cloud-based-files/ https://venturebeat.com/2014/06/16/box-acquires-streem-so-yo... [3] https://www.box.com/drive https://www.box.com/drive

fouc 6y ago
Didn't ycombinator pick a number of startups with bad ideas or non-ideas and encouraged them to pivot? Or encourage new teams to form around a different idea? For example Reddit's original team wanted to do a "My Mobile Menu", and also Aaron Swartz pivoted from Infogami to merging with Reddit. I would almost count this partially under the "no idea" category.
- nl 6y ago
  There's plenty of YC Companies that have changed their idea during YC, or pivoted completely during the program (I think Daniel Gross pivoted twice?) I think YC expects most companies to modify what they are doing during the program. But all of these things are very different to taking someone on board with no idea at all.
ImaCake 6y ago
The line about the experiment made me consider if "no ideas" is a symptom or a cause. Borrowing from epidemiology, I think "no ideas" might be an effect modifier. That is, it is just an intermediate step when going from the exposing factor to the outcome (the outcome, we know, is failing start-ups). It would be interesting to know what the real proximal cause is, or at least a really good proxy for it. Maybe YCombinator could benefit from the input of a biostatistician or similar statistical expert to design some cohort studies on start ups.

graycat 6y ago

Sometimes ideas are easy to find. An idea? Okay: Setup a software as a service Web site to solve quickly all traveling salesman problems with fewer than, say, 1 million cities, and everything equivalent in computational complexity to them. First difficulty: To write the server side software, basically are asking for an algorithm that shows that P = NP, and now we have had some decades to conclude that so far no one knows how to do that (with a von Neumann computer, but maybe could get a solution using a quantum computer). Well, for positive integer n <= 1 million, consider the traveling salesman problem on n cities. Without loss of generality, assume that n is a prime number (with factors only 1 and n). Then embed this problem in ..., and notice that ..., and then apply ..., exploiting special case ...! Right!!! Lesson 1: This idea was super easy to find! Lesson 2: What it takes to make this idea work is something new, and, if we get a solution, that would contradict the observation that there are no good new ideas because all the good ideas were thought of long ago. Lesson 3: Finding an algorithm that shows that P = NP is challenging, but with that algorithm would have one heck of a strong technological barrier to entry and a contradiction to the claim that it is easy to copy a startup! My real point: Have two lists. List A has the problems that plenty of people would pay big bucks to have solved. List B has the tools for solving problems. Pick a pair from lists A and B where the tool from B solves the problem from A. Next, if there is no suitable tool in list B, then do some research and find one. If can't find a tool for the problem from A, then pick another problem from A and try again to do the research to find the needed tool. The research need not be as challenging as proving that P = NP. But broadly one way to find "good ideas" is do some research that yields a tool that enables solving a problem from list A that has been sitting there for a long time unsolved due to the lack of a suitable tool from list B. That is, one way to find a "good idea" is to do some research. If we are restricting to having von Neumann computers do the data manipulations, then we can notice that the manipulations are necessarily mathematically something so that an enabling tool and the research are about forced to be in applied math. It might also be sufficient to use some of the math on the shelves of the research libraries, math that so far has been neglected by the information startup culture. Possible psychological issue: It may be that we frequently see good problems to solve but right away, within a few seconds, implicitly, maybe even unconsciously, reject solving the problem as a startup idea because we don't see a suitable tool for a solution. Well, then, slow down a little on the rejection step and consider some research or just what is already in the research libraries. Uh, there's a lot in the research libraries!

jamesrcole 6y ago

Another means: have really high standards. It’ll make you better at spotting when something ought to be easier to accomplish. You’ll instinctively feel irritated by the fact that it isn’t.

sytelus 6y ago

There are two kinds of idea generation: hole plugging and door opening. The former means you look for holes in current state of affairs and use available tech to plug it. The later means you invent something very new and open doors to entirely new opportunities. Former requires cheap short term less risky trials while later is usually more systematic long term expensive endeavors. Unfortunately startups have became synonymous only for the hole plugging even though door opening is an order of magnitude more rewarding. This is the difference between Twitter and flying cars. I hope there is YC like model that gets developed for door opening instead of keep fueling hole plugging through college dropouts.

7leafer 6y ago

"These sorts of people tend to think without the constraints most people have, not have a lot of filters, and not care too much what other people think." - And have that murine sense of when to leave the sinking ship when this disregard backfires.

Kiro 6y ago

Am I the only one with a list of over 1000 ideas that would all become billion dollar companies if I just had the time to do them all?

keiferski 6y ago
Nope. These idea generation posts don’t make any sense to me - I have too many ideas, most of which would at least be successful small businesses if I put a couple years into them. The difficulty is in focusing on one, to the exclusion of others.
rytill 6y ago
Can you share a random sampling of 10 of these?
Gengar 6y ago
I have the opposite problem. How are you generating ideas?

mifeng 6y ago

I'm sure this post is well intended, but it just pushes new founders into obvious, crowded categories like virtual conference and remote work SaaS. To find good ideas, founders need to go a lot deeper than asking themselves "what is different about the world today?"

jwblackwell 6y ago

The best ideas are fragile; most people don’t even start talking about them at all because they sound silly. I hear this expressed quite a lot and there's certainly some truth here. I think it can be quite misleading though. Many good ideas also just sound like pretty good ideas and turn out to be great businesses. Not every idea has to be completely crazy sounding. Perhaps this is even more true in B2B software / boring industries. VCs and Accelerators are incentivised to encourage the craziest "moonshots" because that's how they make money. If you're just looking to get rich selling software you don't need to go to mars.

bobnarizes 6y ago

My problem is, where to find these optimistic people that know about the field? I basically don't want to discuss my big ideas with colleagues, I just trust them as colleagues. Outside the company I don't have so much contact with people who are interested in start-ups, trends, etc. And corona is blocking the opportunity to visit some hacker spaces, meet-ups,...

rexreed 6y ago

Ideas aren't the primary issue. Execution is the main problem. Our amazing brains are fantastic at creativity and thinking in new ways, and coming up with all sorts of fantastical ideas. Some practical, most not. But our same day-dream happy brains are absolutely terrible at helping us execute on those ideas. Finding the most effective and efficient ways at making ideas come to fruition. And the millions of ways that an idea, no matter how great it may sound, may never come to pass. This is a "how to day dream better" post. Which maybe some people need I suppose. But I'd rather see a "how to make your dreams a reality" post.

netcan 6y ago

This is a hard topic to theorize (essay-ize). The retrospective view is somewhat illusionary. It's hard to capture what really happened att. I think a lot of the insight is in the first few paragraphs. Ideas in the "startup idea" sense, aren't one idea. They're a lot of ideas had over time. AirBnB couldn't have given their idea, like Tolkien couldn't have given middle earth to another writer. Spotting trends is similarly hard, and similarly treacherous. Retrospective examples (eg mobile phones) seem way easier than they are. One major pitfall for spotting trends is timelines. The whole 90s dotcom bubble, in hindsight, was mostly wrong about timelines. Browsers are important platforms, and controlling one does kind of make you "a microsoft." Moving early and grabbing market share is very important. Online markets do tend to be winner-take-all. They were just 10 years early.

codingdave 6y ago

> the world changes so fast that the big incumbents usually get beaten by fast-moving and focused startups. I'm not sure this is as true as founders hope. Yes, startups take the lead when change occurs. But then they also take on all the risk, fight it out with similar startups, and a few years later often get purchased by one of the old incumbents. And in those purchases, some specific founders get rich, but many others fail, and many devs work quite hard and don't end up where they thought they would. At the same time, the big incumbents get to just sit back and let other people fight it out, then re-buy their market share in the future.

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