Ask HN: How do I find a good startup idea?

If you're like me, you've wasted hours searching online for startup ideas. You've read dozens of 'Top 30 startup ideas for 2021' articles which all say vaguely that 'crypto' and 'fintech' are ideas you should pursue. Maybe you've perused r/Startup_Ideas but were overwhelmed by random people's musings about dog social networks. You've likely read pg's essays on the topic, but trying to be open-minded while observing the world around you so far hasn't led you to any amazing breakthroughs. And maybe you've bought some domain names and half-built an idea or two, only to realize it wasn't a good enough idea to be worth spending more time on.

Building something for your own use and then realizing its broader commercial opportunity worked well for Slack, Plaid and I'm sure many others. But I haven't had that luck yet (call it what you will).

Another way I've seen work -- at least for building relatively successful companies, if not industry-shattering unicorns -- is to start by solving 1 specific problem for 1 person willing to pay for it. I believe corporate America has thousands of problems that new tech startups could solve well, but there's a big information gap. Today, you don't just have to have the skills to solve a problem -- which many of us do -- you also have to be lucky enough to be in a position to know the problem even exists.

I don't know what to do, and it's frustrating. I'd love people's thoughts on this.

Ultimately it sounds like you're trying to find a gold nugget that's just lying around online that you can start coding up. Even if you could find such a nugget, you'll probably find that 10K people are already executing on it, have traction, VC money and you'd give up. It's what I do and it's an endless loop of teeth grinding.

An alternative is to go out and meet people (obviously the last year has been hard), who are NOT like you. I would even say not online, but face to face and try and talk to people and get them to open up. Don't interrogate them (I have this bad habit), but get to know them and generally be interested in their problem space. Don't try and sell!

Go to EVERY social event that you are invited to and think will be boring (they will be but it's exposure). Meetups in domains you might be interested in (not tech) but don't know much about. Places where you'd never hang out.

Next build something small, that's useful to these people. Don't think that you're going to be a gazillionaire and you have to pick something worthwhile (go big or go home attitude). Expect that you wont make any money or much traction. What it does is expose you to people who will give you suggestion on direction. This is valuable. Learn about the problem domains and why people are operating the way they do.

I think you've got it right in your last paragraph, put yourself in a position where you can start learning about other peoples problem. Get out of the building! Cue:

You might like this video: (Steve Blank is the father of Customer Discover)

Steve Blank: Want Your Startup to Succeed? 'Get Out of the Building' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-J_SwmMJyo

Next stop reading "Top X for Y". As you said it's all vague rubbish just to drive ad-revenue. It causes the illusion of action without movement.

Start today and good luck!

The stuff you mentioned should work, if given enough time and a lot of luck.

I know it's frustrating, but you can't force it. The frustration can hold you back. Even if you are doing this stuff to come up with an idea, you have to get lucky in a lot of ways to have it really work out.

I've come up with a bunch of ideas (mostly physical tools/products), but most of them are not very marketable or have something similar already. I have seen one idea from when I was a kid that was commercialized years later by someone else. I also created an app that was first to market. The user experience was probably too clinical and I didn't market it to the right niche. This is all stuff that I came up with because I was curious, not because I was forcing it.

Personally, I don't really get why people are so obsessed with startups. They're rife with failure, bad contracts, and other pit falls. I guess it's like a lottery ticket mentality. I think the people that are successful don't force it and don't see it as a lottery, they leave their regular job to work on an idea they're passionate about that also seems to fit a good business plan.

for me it always worked well to just solve a problem at hand. There are lots, and you will most likely encounter them on a daily or weekly basis. You just don't recognice then.

I have some ideas I believe that, if done well, will be transformative:

Problem 1: Architecture/Engineering is still very much traditional. Various distributed teams across cities/countries email CAD (mostly autocad) files back and forth or host it in cloud, with changes highlighted in revision clouds. The delivery of final design involved the interplay of specialisted teams, architecture/structure/M&E/QS/Civl/Onsite etc. Lack of proper tools cause problems in synchronising and keeping everyone uptodate with all the changes, error prone and its extremely manual. This becomes evenmore important when the actual construction is going on and you need to keep track of ammendments etc. A simple architectural change (eg moving a door), need to be reflected in structure/m&e all drawings, possiblly reworking internal wiring etc.

They (I dont mean everyone, but most of the industry) have never seen how distributed teams of programmers use version control software to sync/branch/diff/merge work from multiple teams.

Solution: A tool that can seemlessly do diff/merge/branch of CAD drawings (perhaps integrated into AutoCAD or other CADs itself) will bring a lot of efficiency into architecture/engineering field. Lead Architect could have his team working on various parts of the design/experimental ideas (think feature branches), which he merges to his tree. Engineering team will pull from Lead Architect. M&E team can pull from both these teams etc (this is similar to Linus trusted leutinent model). The idea is NOT to change how they organise their team or automate everything, but provide tools to help the human to make things more efficient.

As far as I know OnShape are the only people working on such a thing and that is 3D. Most arch/eng is still 2D. Autodesk themselves have Revit but I am not sure of to what extent it does all these.