Ask HN: How do you come with a startup idea? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you come with a startup idea?

#11

Post by andrewfromx » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

cristiioan wrote: post #3

andrewfromx wrote: post #2

Read https://www.reddit.com/r/Startup_Ideas/ and post your own to get feedback there.

I'm trying to find startup ideas first, not to verify if my startup idea is worth. And I wouldn't verify it in such a way. I have read books already on the subject and this seems like a bad idea.

there is also https://www.reddit.com/r/SomebodyMakeThis/

Re: Ask HN: How do you come with a startup idea?

#12

Post by surprisetalk » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 3:44 PM UTC

You can generate ideas with a combinatorial approach:

[1] https://taylor.town/an-algorithm-for-generating-ideas

To validate ideas, I try building them for 1 month to find my "real-world" blindspots.

Re: Ask HN: How do you come with a startup idea?

#13

Post by mindcrime » Mon, Mar 13, 2023, 5:32 PM UTC

cristiioan wrote: post #8

scastiel wrote: post #7

I often go to https://www.indiehackers.com/products . Sometimes I feel inspired by new projects. Note that it’s just a way to find ideas, not one to know if this idea will work or not :)

Ok, so you find an idea this way. But guess what, it is already taken by most probably another startup/small company.

There's no such thing as "taken" like that. That is to say, just because somebody else is working on an idea, that doesn't mean you can't (or shouldn't) work on the same idea, or a closely related idea. If anything, if you're working on an idea and nobody else is, you should be asking some really hard questions of yourself, like "why is nobody else working on this if it's such a good idea. Am I really that much smarter than EVERYBODY ELSE IN THE WHOLE WORLD??" and so on.[1] If somebody else is working on the idea, then that's at least small amount of validation that it might be a good idea. If they have paying customers, so much the better.

There's a quote I read once, and I wish I could find the original source so I could provide a proper citation, that I think was from Bob Parsons that goes "Never be afraid to enter a crowded market. Just be better than everybody else." That might be a little bit hyperbolic, but I think the general attitude is sound. Don't be afraid to get in there and mix it up and compete.

As the old saying goes "Startups don't die by murder, they die by suicide." Most likely, the other startup you're think about is going to die by suicide anyway. They're going to fail to execute, choose a bad market segment, screw up their marketing, screw up sales, choose SVB as their bank, or any of 1000 other things that are going to send them to the Great Accelerator In The Sky. Just don't make those mistakes, outlast them, and the market is yours!

Steve Blank[2][3] also has a lot of salient advice on these topics.

[1]: That said, somebody has to go first. So if you have an idea and you have real conviction that it's a Good Idea, then maybe you just have to go for it, even if nobody else has gone down that path. But that does, IMO, imply the need to aggressively try to invalidate your idea so you can pivot as early as possible (before wasting a lot of resources) if it does prove to be a Bad Idea. This whole topic is a lot of what @sgblank talks about in TFSTTE.

[2]: https://steveblank.com/

[3]: https://books.google.com/books?id=CUZsmgEACAAJ

Re: Ask HN: How do you come with a startup idea?

#14

Post by Krollifi » Wed, Mar 15, 2023, 2:28 AM UTC

Whenever you have an idea put it in a file or notebook vault. Prioritize them by putting the most interesting ideas at the top. Build and update the list of ideas for life and you will never have to start from zero when coming up with ideas.