You need an idea with "substantive want" behind it.

PG's coveted shirt with the statement "I built something people want" is clearly the Hacker's Pulitzer Prize. As I read the post "Build your business around an idea" http://warpspire.com/posts/idea-businesses/ I had this voice screaming in my mind that the concept of basing your business around merely an idea just rang hollow and as a kind of kitsch inspirational poster to hang in some corporate board room or vast expanses of cubicles. Excuse the cynicism, but I've heard lots of ideas and aspirations that, for their grandeur and loftiness never get translated, and there's nothing sexy about a beauty never revealed to anyone. On the other side nor is there about the ugly one that gets revealed to everyone, all the time, to the point of inducing vomiting and other instinctual purging reflexes. Yes an idea beats the heck out of just a product, but if your idea sucks then you'll be hard pressed to get a good idea out of it, as well as on the other end, if you have an overly 'good' idea, good to the point of fantastic--as in fantasia, fantasy, la-la land, then you'll keep building your towers to heaven. There are lots of things people want that you can deliver via a start up, and then there are lots of things you simply can't. Seeing things as they are, contrary to pithy idealistic reveries, is the first step to discovering things as they can be. Don't get me wrong I'm as apt to be Quixotic as the next guy, One of my favorite lines in the musical "Perhaps too much sanity is madness . . . but maddest of all to see things as they are and not as they should be" I'm all for envisioning a better world. I'm all for seeing things as they should be and not as they are. But even Don Quixote operated within the bounds of plausibility. You could see a shaving basin as being something that could be worn upon the head, you could see the windmill tilted at as having massive arms as a giant would have. But the story, nor the idealism, would have been the same if his delusions saw the Golden Helmet of Mambrino in a pile of entrails or if he'd seen a giant monster when it was just a sock on the side of the road. Yes there's a big problem with people only grasping at product straws, but there's the other end of the spectrum that have beams in their eyes that they mistake for ideas, ideas that they think you can base a business on. The great variety in evolution leads many to believe that 'anything is possible' when the reality couldn't be further from the truth. Yes the viable variations are many and should be explored BUT there are paths that never produce anything, there are things that are perennially and, on a meta-fitness level, never fit.