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How to Get Startup Ideas

paulgraham.com

111–120 of 239 posts

Re: How to Get Startup Ideas

#111
post #14

Having exited earlier this year from the start up I co-founded, I've been thinking a lot about this lately as I weigh up what to do next. We arrived at our start-up idea 10 years ago in much the way pg says you should, which was more by accident and serendipity more than anything else. So, I can vouch for the veracity of his advice. I came across the following quote by William S. Burroughs recently: Happiness is a by…

With regard to serendipity, I like to point to the fact that you cannot win a game of chance if you are not playing.

Re: How to Get Startup Ideas

#112
post #3

"For example, a social network for pet owners. It doesn't sound obviously mistaken. Millions of people have pets." I once worked on a social network for dog owners. Not pet owners, dog owners. And not actually dog owners, but their dogs. A place for people to have a social network of ... dogs. But all the features made it an interesting enough project. The guy even came up with enough money to pay the web agency I wa…

Having heard this idea from multiple relatives over the years, I have to imagine that the trap of building the dog social network that everybody likes the idea but nobody would actually use has cost the economy several basis points of GDP.

Re: How to Get Startup Ideas

#113

Getting advice from an essay by PG is like reading a description of a stock market strategy - by the time you read and assimilate it, everyone else has too, and that particular inefficiency has been eliminated. There will now be a lot more HN readers keeping diaries of all the things that they noticed were inefficient in their day, and they will come up with good, competing startup ideas. However, the founder that is…

Except what you have here isn't analogous to a stock market strategy. When I think of a strategy I think of fairly specific things such as "use a portfolio optimizer each month and rebalance between stocks and bonds." PG's essays are more along the lines of Warren Buffet's: a framework for thinking about problems. But the value doesn't come from the essays per se, it comes from you taking them and integrating them into your own unique approach that is based upon their principles.

Re: How to Get Startup Ideas

#114

Free startup idea for the day. 3D design software for the masses. It seems to cover lots of the bases in the article. I feel the need for this right now (just this weekend I wanted to print out a plastic part to fix the broken piece on my lawn mower). 3D printing seems to be an up-and-coming area. The hardware for this is still being perfected, but the software seems further behind. There are lots of competitors maki…

Problem with 3d printing (and one blemish on this otherwise fantastic essay) is that 3d printing related stuff I think is too sexy to be a good startup idea. Much like video games or developer tools, it's too meta and every nerd on the Earth who has read any sci-fi would jump at the chance to work on these types of problems.

That's not to say that being an employee of a company working on these wouldn't be a lot of fun, if that's your thing. But founding a company around sexy technology is more about self-indulgence than trying to create a wealth generating enterprise.

Re: How to Get Startup Ideas

#115
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certain that the problem is me, and my poor communication skills, I never blame the audience. Describing what we're doing and illustrating the pain points aren't the same thing. How about this: Tinj is a rating system that lets people externalize opinions about movies in context so they can receive comprehensive recommendations. See? Told you I still suck at this. Here's a problem we're solving: Given that opini…

The goal of reading movie reviews is not to see what other people think about a movie. It's to decide what movie to see. Why not just say: "Quickly and easily decide which movie to see." Simple, to the point, and yes, it's still an unsolved problem.

Thanks, I'll give it a shot. I don't believe I've tried that particular wording yet.

Re: How to Get Startup Ideas

#116

After 20 years of entrepreneurship, of struggles and successes, of spending man years of that time thinking about startup ideas, and having learned so many lessons the hard way, I can say the following: pg's essays are so true and correct that I could practically cry. If enough people read these essays (especially this and the recent "growth" essay), it could materially boost the economy.

"pg's essays are so true and correct that I could practically cry." - like 100 times and agree 100%

Re: How to Get Startup Ideas

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certain that the problem is me, and my poor communication skills, I never blame the audience. Describing what we're doing and illustrating the pain points aren't the same thing. How about this: Tinj is a rating system that lets people externalize opinions about movies in context so they can receive comprehensive recommendations. See? Told you I still suck at this. Here's a problem we're solving: Given that opini…

That was a good pitch actually, convinced me to take a look at your site. My wife and I always have a very hard time deciding for movies, often because rating sites are worse than useless if you don't have mainstream tastes.

Awesome! The beta should start in the next few weeks.

Re: How to Get Startup Ideas

#119
post #74

Let me first talk about the elephant in the room about finding Startup Ideas which generate extra ordinary returns. YC assembles a Team of the Greatest Founders after extensive validation by the most qualified people in the planet to judge whether you have the qualities required to build a startup. (They may miss a good team, but the probability of them selecting a bad team is less than 10%) YC mentors these teams id…

You don't deserve downvotes since you're trying to make a point here but I would say that you shouldn't discount the notion that the idea you set out upon was doomed to failure. People generally say ideas don't matter execution is everything but there are just some ideas that are death traps: one of them is the pet social network and another is the cross-platform application development framework.

The bottom line is every developer sees the "waste" in developing the same functionality multiple times on different platforms every time there is a shift in the software sector. They're drawn in by the siren call of a potentially huge productivity gain by introducing new abstractions, but it almost always ends up in a death march and failure. You end up with bloat, inferior performance, inferior look and feel, and least-common-denominator of functionality. The history of computing is littered with these things and while there are a few spots of mixed success (like Java for example, which took more than a decade for people to realized sucked on the client but worked well for servers) the charred remains of surely thousands of other attempts sit on forgotten directories of hard drives everywhere.

Other ones: a better Craigslist, a drag-and-drop/novice-oriented/visual programming tool, a replacement for PHP, basically any import/export/sync tool between two major well-established enterprise services that do not have one already, and how could I forget a better to-do list. That's not to say there isn't a potential for making these things happen, but if you're going to throw 3-5 years of your life into something you probably want to avoid things that many heros have tried and failed doing.

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