12 ms·

A summary of my learnings on how to find startup ideas

128 points by Lior539 4y ago

Lior539 4y ago
Hi folks! I’ve been searching for new startup ideas and problem areas to tackle. Here's a summary of my learnings on how to do it. I’m sharing it with you in the hopes that you’ll be able to point out what’s missing and help me fill in any gaps
dr-neptune 4y ago
Another useful idea in this same quest is to keep an ideas file that is easy to update. Then hold yourself accountable to add at least 1 idea a day, no matter how silly. Over time you will find yourself dredging up all kinds of ideas without meaning to (while doing other things) and before you know it you will have a long list that can then be prioritized and explored
- acuozzo 4y ago
  I like this, but my issue is that the ideas I have are exceptionally hard to vet since I'm such a weirdo¹. My dream would be to start a so-called "micro-startup" selling B2B software for $10+K/month in revenue. I have the technical skills and, even though I'm rather far removed from the business unit of my company, I have some decent ideas (I think…). How do I figure out if HR/recruiting would want/need my idea(s)? [1] I spend my free time archiving Laserdiscs and writing software for improved NTSC post-processing.
  - jeffclark 4y ago
    > How do I figure out if HR/recruiting would want/need my idea(s)? My best advice is to try to make the sale, even before you have something ready. You'll learn what parts of your pitch are connecting with them, and which are confusing to them. But more importantly, you're going to understand if you get the problem as well as you think you do. And you're going to understand if they like your solution to that problem as much as you hope they do. So, email a few of these potential customers. See if they'll take a call with you. If none do, you're not there yet. But if even one does, you're about to get a ton of information in 30 minutes. Good luck!
  - makestuff 4y ago
    Yeah I have no desire to build the next stripe, but if I could have a nice one person SAAS company that replaced my salary that would be the dream. However, it seems like the issue is if you do not keep scaling someone else will come along and do it at a larger scale to beat you on price forcing you out of business.
    - finneganscat 4y ago
  - dr-neptune 4y ago
    One way could be to time cap something and put it out there. Many may fail, but perhaps one will take off. Here is a blog where a dev makes many small startups and sees how they do: https://tinyprojects.dev/ https://tinyprojects.dev/
nate 4y ago
Another way I like to look at this is to define Innovation in a bit of a different way then most people think about it. If you think about Innovation as simply "removing steps from a process", it's a playground for all sorts of ideas. In a nutshell, take any process at all. Maybe something you do a lot. Or something you have some vested interest in. Or something that you aspire to learn. Really break it out into its nitty gritty step by step details. Now mull over where you see steps that can be removed or combined. That's what most of the time people get really excited about. E.g. "They used to have to do these 7 things to order a cab, and now its just these 3 things" Concept is described really well in this book: https://www.amazon.com/Something-Really-New-Creating-Innovative/dp/0814400329 https://www.amazon.com/Something-Really-New-Creating-Innovat...
- LouisSayers 4y ago
  I'd define it a bit more generally as a reallocation of resources that results in a higher yield. You may not exactly remove a step, but simply adapt it - e.g. self-checkout. I'm sure there must be some examples where an innovation added steps - e.g. the takeoff checklist for pilots.
  - achillesheels 4y ago
    I’d define it as necessarily causing greater physical efficiencies of human motion or human action per circadian periodical cycle, where high-tech causes necessarily >10 efficiencies in coordinating human action for achieving the same goal.
- Lior539 4y ago
  That's a great tip! Thanks for sharing nate. I'll have a look at the book too
- nicbou 4y ago
  I'm sometimes surprised that no one thinks about doing this at all. You can watch thousands of people do something and think "if only we..." It's particularly maddening if the rest of the sentence is "put that information online" or "shared those updates somewhere", because the solution is dirt cheap to build. Hunting information is an expensive waste of time. The flip side is that sometimes, things are done a certain way for a reason that's not immediately obvious.
fisian 4y ago
This reminds me of innovation management [1], but done by individuals (founders) instead of existing organisations. The wikipedia article links some more techniques, including some of which are in the post like brainstorming. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation_management
- contingencies 4y ago
  IMHO the last thing innovation needs is management. Commercialization needs management, whereas innovation needs exploration and intuition. Methods can be deployed, but not by managers.
BWStearns 4y ago
I giggled a bit at "war" being a new thing instead of basically the oldest thing (yeah I get what they meant but still). I think regulatory opportunity is often under-appreciated. Very subtle, boring things can move a business model or technology from impossible to insanely valuable.
- s1k3 4y ago
  Repealing of PASPA in the US is a big one in the US. This happened in 2018 and has caused the gambling and paid gaming industries to start to blossom.
rodolphoarruda 4y ago
> an unmet need of someone else. I found this to be very productive, especially when I'm able to speak to senior managers who know exactly what the problem is; what is holding their performance at a lower level. Their reaction is always pragmatic saying what they need and, believe me, at what cost.
Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
Niche startup idea. Have some app that would initiate a voice call with you, and have some GPT-3 ish intelligence that it hold a reasonable conversation for a few minutes. Instantly get out of having to talk to complete cretins and bores.
Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
While innovation and trying to find start-up ideas is very praiseworthy, why not just trawl through the last YC Startup Directory list and figure out what might fit your particular favorite domain, with some modification? I guess that if you came up with some completely novel idea, say facetiously, some cyrpto-subscription knock-off of flappy bird where you play against others. I can almost guarantee that if it showed any kind of traction, somebody out there would copy it either directly, or similarly enough. Then, if they get the execution down better than you, that's their start-up company taking off. It's the whole red ocean/blue ocean analogy - there's more good ideas out there already, badly executed, that are just waiting for you to pick up and do better.
- nerpderp82 4y ago
  Great ideas are everywhere! But you don't need good or even great ideas to make a startup, you need something that a VC will fund and that a big corp will acquire. Analyze that field and surf the gradient. Find whatever huge entity with lots of cash is throwing that cash around and figure out how to make something that the cash will stick to. Over the years it has been Autodesk, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Softbank, etc.
- nthacker 4y ago
  At first glance this sounds like genius but its not YC or any successful VC doesn't fund ideas. There is something else the founders have figured out which is key to success and funding. This could be a distribution trick, a key insight, a user growth metric. Its not hard to imagine YC or a VC coming across the same idea pitched by different founders. Why they picked the team they picked cannot be obvious from trawling the startup directory, that insight is hidden, its literally a secret that should be guarded
  - grantsch 4y ago
    Only the ones that will succeed (very few, maybe 1%?) have a secret tho
    - nthacker 4y ago
_pete_ 4y ago
My startup idea is a browser extension that corrects "learnings" to "lessons".
- tabtab 4y ago
  It's "learnificationism", -George W. Bush
- finneganscat 4y ago
tabtab 4y ago
In the past few years when ideas are requested on Hacker News, plenty are provided. I'll link them if I can find them again. There's a lot of itches to be scratched in tech. "Dynamic Relational" would be nice, for example. Many want dynamism without having to throw out all their existing RDBMS/SQL knowledge to switch to NoSql (to get dynamism). We also need a stateful GUI markup standard/browser/pluggin to reduce reinventing GUI engines via JavaScript + DOM. (Best to open source it, but charge for logo usage, certification, etc. Your site would be the de-facto reference documentation, and you can put ads on it.)
jjk166 4y ago
Trying to come up with an innovative idea out of the blue is a fools errand - the odds of you being the first person to ever think of something are low to begin with, the odds that you will do so in a field you have no experience in and that this unique idea will also be a good one are astronomically low. That the idea is both good in its own right and also something you have the passion and skill to tackle is substantially less likely still. I think the best strategy is to just pick an area you know you generally enjoy working in, and start building a copy of something that already exists in that space. As you go along you will inevitably run into the same problems that others previously faced, and at some point you're going to find some fork in the road where everyone went one way but you think it's worth trying the other, or you will find some problem that everyone in the space has been dealing with that you could fix. Unlike high level ideation, in this scenario when you find an idea it will be something that you are already an expert on and passionate about solving, and the value of such a solution would be immediately clear.
- achillesheels 4y ago
  I would further mentioned that by being a late comer, one can actually gain in what others have learned form their mistakes, to enter at a better than conceivable market position. This is the principal doubt an investor ought to consider when beginning a new venture: will the motion I put into the markets grow or decay? And certainly, it is simplified to invest in a market where there is actually demonstrated value in there being n>1 competitors.
- asdadsdad 4y ago
  Exactly. This essay [0] was going around for a bit some time ago, and it's what the guy calls "law of having an idea" or something. The media and Hollywood often make it look like ideas just come to people that weren't involved in that field before, but in fact almost nothing was invented like that. [0] https://danielfonsecayarochewsky.medium.com/can-we-stop-the-startup-bullshit-once-and-for-all-a756faf1bb03 https://danielfonsecayarochewsky.medium.com/can-we-stop-the-...
- Daub 4y ago
  > Trying to come up with an innovative idea out of the blue is a fool's errand Though I agree that all ideas come from somewhere, some of the best ideas come from places completely tangential to the final outcome. Examples: - Richard Feynman's diagrams (which won him a Nobel Prize) came from watching students 'piddle around with plates in the cafeteria; (his words). - The invention of Teflon was invented by Roy Plunkett whilst he was trying to develop a new kind of refrigerant. - The invention of the cloud chamber (actually to synthesize clouds, but only by accident discovered to be good at tracking particles). To quote Einstein: “This combinatory or associative play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought” The fact is that this process of accidental discovery can be developed, trained and taught (I teach creativity to art students). It can also be instituted within an organization (e.g. Xerox PARC and Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works). Its main ingredient is a mental one, a hyperfunction of one's associative apparatus. Key to getting it to work is a lack of premature judgment at the early stages of the creative process.
hardwaresofton 4y ago
You could also just let me send them to you: https://unvalidatedideas.com https://unvalidatedideas.com I think the regulatory changes area is quite under-explored. In the end though, a clear visualization of the customer is key —- how can you actually find the person that will buy your product?
forgotmypw17 4y ago
https://archive.ph/CnfYi https://archive.ph/CnfYi
ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago
Steal steal steal. Then add taste. Then add innovation at bottlenecks.
peterdunn1 4y ago
[dead]
rswail 4y ago
I might sound like an old fart, but what is wrong with the word "lessons" that we need to replace it as a noun with a noun-ed verb like "learnings"?
- thorncorona 4y ago
  Learnings is the corporatized version of lessons and is used to remove the possible negative implication that something possibly failed.
  - rswail 4y ago
    It's corporate nonsense-speak. Not sure how it removes the negative connotation though.
onagengast 4y ago
I spent about a year and a half building a product that was impressive in many ways but ultimately got almost no users. The mistake we made was that we didn’t understand our target users well enough. I realized that we needed to spend a lot more time as “journalists” and “anthropologists” working to understand a certain group of people and their problems than as software developers building solutions. As I’m trying to find startup ideas these days, I find myself asking, “Which groups of users and which communities do I actually care about?” For me at least, that seems to be the engine that will sustain me over years of trying to build a company.

128 points by Lior539 4y ago

Hi folks! I’ve been searching for new startup ideas and problem areas to tackle. Here's a summary of my learnings on how to do it. I’m sharing it with you in the hopes that you’ll be able to point out what’s missing and help me fill in any gaps

dr-neptune 4y ago

Another useful idea in this same quest is to keep an ideas file that is easy to update. Then hold yourself accountable to add at least 1 idea a day, no matter how silly. Over time you will find yourself dredging up all kinds of ideas without meaning to (while doing other things) and before you know it you will have a long list that can then be prioritized and explored

acuozzo 4y ago
I like this, but my issue is that the ideas I have are exceptionally hard to vet since I'm such a weirdo¹. My dream would be to start a so-called "micro-startup" selling B2B software for $10+K/month in revenue. I have the technical skills and, even though I'm rather far removed from the business unit of my company, I have some decent ideas (I think…). How do I figure out if HR/recruiting would want/need my idea(s)? [1] I spend my free time archiving Laserdiscs and writing software for improved NTSC post-processing.
- jeffclark 4y ago
  > How do I figure out if HR/recruiting would want/need my idea(s)? My best advice is to try to make the sale, even before you have something ready. You'll learn what parts of your pitch are connecting with them, and which are confusing to them. But more importantly, you're going to understand if you get the problem as well as you think you do. And you're going to understand if they like your solution to that problem as much as you hope they do. So, email a few of these potential customers. See if they'll take a call with you. If none do, you're not there yet. But if even one does, you're about to get a ton of information in 30 minutes. Good luck!
- makestuff 4y ago
  Yeah I have no desire to build the next stripe, but if I could have a nice one person SAAS company that replaced my salary that would be the dream. However, it seems like the issue is if you do not keep scaling someone else will come along and do it at a larger scale to beat you on price forcing you out of business.
  - finneganscat 4y ago
- dr-neptune 4y ago
  One way could be to time cap something and put it out there. Many may fail, but perhaps one will take off. Here is a blog where a dev makes many small startups and sees how they do: https://tinyprojects.dev/ https://tinyprojects.dev/

nate 4y ago

Another way I like to look at this is to define Innovation in a bit of a different way then most people think about it. If you think about Innovation as simply "removing steps from a process", it's a playground for all sorts of ideas. In a nutshell, take any process at all. Maybe something you do a lot. Or something you have some vested interest in. Or something that you aspire to learn. Really break it out into its nitty gritty step by step details. Now mull over where you see steps that can be removed or combined. That's what most of the time people get really excited about. E.g. "They used to have to do these 7 things to order a cab, and now its just these 3 things" Concept is described really well in this book: https://www.amazon.com/Something-Really-New-Creating-Innovative/dp/0814400329 https://www.amazon.com/Something-Really-New-Creating-Innovat...

LouisSayers 4y ago
I'd define it a bit more generally as a reallocation of resources that results in a higher yield. You may not exactly remove a step, but simply adapt it - e.g. self-checkout. I'm sure there must be some examples where an innovation added steps - e.g. the takeoff checklist for pilots.
- achillesheels 4y ago
  I’d define it as necessarily causing greater physical efficiencies of human motion or human action per circadian periodical cycle, where high-tech causes necessarily >10 efficiencies in coordinating human action for achieving the same goal.
Lior539 4y ago
That's a great tip! Thanks for sharing nate. I'll have a look at the book too
nicbou 4y ago
I'm sometimes surprised that no one thinks about doing this at all. You can watch thousands of people do something and think "if only we..." It's particularly maddening if the rest of the sentence is "put that information online" or "shared those updates somewhere", because the solution is dirt cheap to build. Hunting information is an expensive waste of time. The flip side is that sometimes, things are done a certain way for a reason that's not immediately obvious.

fisian 4y ago

This reminds me of innovation management [1], but done by individuals (founders) instead of existing organisations. The wikipedia article links some more techniques, including some of which are in the post like brainstorming. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation_management

contingencies 4y ago
IMHO the last thing innovation needs is management. Commercialization needs management, whereas innovation needs exploration and intuition. Methods can be deployed, but not by managers.

BWStearns 4y ago

I giggled a bit at "war" being a new thing instead of basically the oldest thing (yeah I get what they meant but still). I think regulatory opportunity is often under-appreciated. Very subtle, boring things can move a business model or technology from impossible to insanely valuable.

s1k3 4y ago
Repealing of PASPA in the US is a big one in the US. This happened in 2018 and has caused the gambling and paid gaming industries to start to blossom.

rodolphoarruda 4y ago

> an unmet need of someone else. I found this to be very productive, especially when I'm able to speak to senior managers who know exactly what the problem is; what is holding their performance at a lower level. Their reaction is always pragmatic saying what they need and, believe me, at what cost.

Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago

Niche startup idea. Have some app that would initiate a voice call with you, and have some GPT-3 ish intelligence that it hold a reasonable conversation for a few minutes. Instantly get out of having to talk to complete cretins and bores.

Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago

While innovation and trying to find start-up ideas is very praiseworthy, why not just trawl through the last YC Startup Directory list and figure out what might fit your particular favorite domain, with some modification? I guess that if you came up with some completely novel idea, say facetiously, some cyrpto-subscription knock-off of flappy bird where you play against others. I can almost guarantee that if it showed any kind of traction, somebody out there would copy it either directly, or similarly enough. Then, if they get the execution down better than you, that's their start-up company taking off. It's the whole red ocean/blue ocean analogy - there's more good ideas out there already, badly executed, that are just waiting for you to pick up and do better.

nerpderp82 4y ago
Great ideas are everywhere! But you don't need good or even great ideas to make a startup, you need something that a VC will fund and that a big corp will acquire. Analyze that field and surf the gradient. Find whatever huge entity with lots of cash is throwing that cash around and figure out how to make something that the cash will stick to. Over the years it has been Autodesk, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, Softbank, etc.
nthacker 4y ago
At first glance this sounds like genius but its not YC or any successful VC doesn't fund ideas. There is something else the founders have figured out which is key to success and funding. This could be a distribution trick, a key insight, a user growth metric. Its not hard to imagine YC or a VC coming across the same idea pitched by different founders. Why they picked the team they picked cannot be obvious from trawling the startup directory, that insight is hidden, its literally a secret that should be guarded
- grantsch 4y ago
  Only the ones that will succeed (very few, maybe 1%?) have a secret tho
  - nthacker 4y ago

_pete_ 4y ago

My startup idea is a browser extension that corrects "learnings" to "lessons".

tabtab 4y ago
It's "learnificationism", -George W. Bush
finneganscat 4y ago

tabtab 4y ago

In the past few years when ideas are requested on Hacker News, plenty are provided. I'll link them if I can find them again. There's a lot of itches to be scratched in tech. "Dynamic Relational" would be nice, for example. Many want dynamism without having to throw out all their existing RDBMS/SQL knowledge to switch to NoSql (to get dynamism). We also need a stateful GUI markup standard/browser/pluggin to reduce reinventing GUI engines via JavaScript + DOM. (Best to open source it, but charge for logo usage, certification, etc. Your site would be the de-facto reference documentation, and you can put ads on it.)

jjk166 4y ago

Trying to come up with an innovative idea out of the blue is a fools errand - the odds of you being the first person to ever think of something are low to begin with, the odds that you will do so in a field you have no experience in and that this unique idea will also be a good one are astronomically low. That the idea is both good in its own right and also something you have the passion and skill to tackle is substantially less likely still. I think the best strategy is to just pick an area you know you generally enjoy working in, and start building a copy of something that already exists in that space. As you go along you will inevitably run into the same problems that others previously faced, and at some point you're going to find some fork in the road where everyone went one way but you think it's worth trying the other, or you will find some problem that everyone in the space has been dealing with that you could fix. Unlike high level ideation, in this scenario when you find an idea it will be something that you are already an expert on and passionate about solving, and the value of such a solution would be immediately clear.

achillesheels 4y ago
I would further mentioned that by being a late comer, one can actually gain in what others have learned form their mistakes, to enter at a better than conceivable market position. This is the principal doubt an investor ought to consider when beginning a new venture: will the motion I put into the markets grow or decay? And certainly, it is simplified to invest in a market where there is actually demonstrated value in there being n>1 competitors.
asdadsdad 4y ago
Exactly. This essay [0] was going around for a bit some time ago, and it's what the guy calls "law of having an idea" or something. The media and Hollywood often make it look like ideas just come to people that weren't involved in that field before, but in fact almost nothing was invented like that. [0] https://danielfonsecayarochewsky.medium.com/can-we-stop-the-startup-bullshit-once-and-for-all-a756faf1bb03 https://danielfonsecayarochewsky.medium.com/can-we-stop-the-...
Daub 4y ago
> Trying to come up with an innovative idea out of the blue is a fool's errand Though I agree that all ideas come from somewhere, some of the best ideas come from places completely tangential to the final outcome. Examples: - Richard Feynman's diagrams (which won him a Nobel Prize) came from watching students 'piddle around with plates in the cafeteria; (his words). - The invention of Teflon was invented by Roy Plunkett whilst he was trying to develop a new kind of refrigerant. - The invention of the cloud chamber (actually to synthesize clouds, but only by accident discovered to be good at tracking particles). To quote Einstein: “This combinatory or associative play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought” The fact is that this process of accidental discovery can be developed, trained and taught (I teach creativity to art students). It can also be instituted within an organization (e.g. Xerox PARC and Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works). Its main ingredient is a mental one, a hyperfunction of one's associative apparatus. Key to getting it to work is a lack of premature judgment at the early stages of the creative process.

hardwaresofton 4y ago

You could also just let me send them to you: https://unvalidatedideas.com https://unvalidatedideas.com I think the regulatory changes area is quite under-explored. In the end though, a clear visualization of the customer is key —- how can you actually find the person that will buy your product?

forgotmypw17 4y ago

https://archive.ph/CnfYi https://archive.ph/CnfYi

ilrwbwrkhv 4y ago

Steal steal steal. Then add taste. Then add innovation at bottlenecks.

peterdunn1 4y ago

[dead]

rswail 4y ago

I might sound like an old fart, but what is wrong with the word "lessons" that we need to replace it as a noun with a noun-ed verb like "learnings"?

thorncorona 4y ago
Learnings is the corporatized version of lessons and is used to remove the possible negative implication that something possibly failed.
- rswail 4y ago
  It's corporate nonsense-speak. Not sure how it removes the negative connotation though.

onagengast 4y ago

I spent about a year and a half building a product that was impressive in many ways but ultimately got almost no users. The mistake we made was that we didn’t understand our target users well enough. I realized that we needed to spend a lot more time as “journalists” and “anthropologists” working to understand a certain group of people and their problems than as software developers building solutions. As I’m trying to find startup ideas these days, I find myself asking, “Which groups of users and which communities do I actually care about?” For me at least, that seems to be the engine that will sustain me over years of trying to build a company.