Ask HN: How do you decide between startup ideas?

Talk to potential customers, and pursue whatever seems to have the most traction.

Don't want to hijack the thread, but even more basically, how do you get startup ideas? I've read what PG has to say and others, but nothing is clicking.

For my part, I think the partners are much more important than the idea. Good companies can pivot to find a good market. Bad partners will sink you, or never get off the ground to begin with.

Select for team, not for idea. The best idea is the one that can attract and motivate a great team, or one put forward by people you want to work with.

FWIW, I recall Paul Graham writing something that explains how he screens YC applicants. The upshot is that he doesn't devote consideration the idea unless he's first intrigued by the team. Whether you're a spectacularly successful investor in many startups or the potential co-founder of just one, that's probably a good place to start.

It's a good question. I received some advice about this young-- and it wasn't about startups, it was about careers generally. If you don't know what you want to do, but you know the general area, proximity is your solution. Get as close as you can, and watch carefully. The example cited was Cornelius Vanderbilt. He sailed goods around and dabbled in ship building for decades before he got into the railroad and steamship business that built his empire. He became deeply familiar with the skills and problem space: market economics, securitization, transportation, cost competition, steam engines. Eventually, he became the first person to use a limited liability corporation to accumulate private wealth by offering services that transported goods and people, at brutally competitive prices.

Go work in something that interests you, and watch for opportunities. Uber and Flexport are proving that Vanderbilt was right, and transportation is still sexy. For myself, I like finance. There's plenty of room in healthcare, especially senior care, education, security... I think for the best ideas, you have to know something. The lightning bolt out of the clear blue sky to twenty-year-olds with no life or work experience is probably played out.

Here's my issue: as a software engineer in the Bay Area that spends most of my day coding and then commuting for two hours, I am having this exact problem of watching and listening. Maybe I don't interact much with my environment, but nothing seems to jump out at me that could potentially resemble an idea.

I have had some ideas in the past that would have solved one of my problems, but they are very rare.