How To Find An Idea For A New Startup

1) search in your needs that no one is addressing well enough currently.

2) search in some business needs that is already addressed but in an old way (and turn this into a web service where the company don't need to care about backups and broken window systems)

3) Niches are good but there are very different kind of niches. Some are good, some bad. For example my new product is about women and their menstrual flow, this is a niche "product" but not a niche "traget", and in the Italian version is working very well (we are launching in english, it's a matter of days).

Instead a new very powerful feed reader is a wrong niche. It's about very few skilled guys. It's very hard to make money and grow fast with this kind of stuff IMHO.

4) Provide a decent simple graphics from the start. We saw services that started to get users only after the graphical design stage was done. Not all the people are able to think as a simple clean site as good, like not all the people are able to buy fruit by taste and not by appearance. You need both...

5) Try to find a business model early. It's not needed to write a business plan or this kind of nonsensical numbers, but just, think "ok, eventually if/when I'll have a lot of users I can do some money selling this PRO feature, or attaching an ecommerce to this, or with this kind of service google indexing and advertising is going to work great".

6) Don't ruin your site just because of SEO. First user experience, than everything can help with Google not conflicting with user experience.

I tried for months to try to find a technical co-founder and couldn't. I gave up and hired a consulting firm to build the initial version of Dawdle because I wanted to get started now now now. They did a fine job, but it would have been much more cost efficient - and we could have iterated much sooner - if I had been able to find a technical co-founder.

Look, I get that hackers have people with supposedly great ideas all the time, but there are hundreds of people with actual insight and seed capital who would kill to find someone they could trust. But both sides don't trust each other - hackers are scared of getting screwed over (which happens, but rarely) and biz types are scared the hacker will walk away (what usually happens; hackers have actual skills that people will pay large sums of cash money for, even in a downturn).

How to solve? Seriously, best way is to put it in your HN profile. "Looking for a biz co-founder; looking for a tech co-founder". The signal/noise ratio is high enough and any idiot can read my comments/posts to realize I'm worth an e-mail conversation. People like Dan (fallentimes) and others are here, too.

The fundamental advantage of a startup is that you can move faster than most big companies, and you need to use that to your advantage where it matters.

Here is a tip: if you can, try ideas that stay away from "advertising" as the main source of revenue, companies like that rarely become profitable quickly.