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How to Get Startup Ideas

paulgraham.com

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Re: How to Get Startup Ideas

#151

Post by jfdimark »

As usual, an excellent and well articulated essay from pg.

Just a couple of thoughts on the paragraph about finding non-organic ideas.

If you're a developer and in need of an idea, I couldn't recommend highly enough to attend industry conferences (in any industry). Over the day or two you are there, you will hear speakers tell you the problems they face, hear which are the repeat questions asked from the audience, and have a chance to talk with delegates about their biggest problems and why they are attending (what are they trying to find out). I rarely leave a conference without several obvious pain points facing the industry jotted down. If one of them inspires you, sounds interesting, feels familiar etc. then that could be your start-up idea. Most of these could be 'eaten by software' I'm sure, so they would be ripe for a developer to tackle. You could even find your domain-specific co-founder there too - 2 birds, 1 stone!

Another place to look (and possibly cheaper and involving no travel) would be sites like twitter, quora, linkedin etc. where large numbers of users can ask each other questions or complain about some pain they have. You could look for trends and see if that sparks any interest.

Re: How to Get Startup Ideas

#152

Post by Spectral »

Right now I'm currently 21 years old and I've had quite a few organic ideas pop up before which I took the time to brainstorm a little about, sometimes even creating a little website for them. I've shown to many of my friends my aspiring entrepreneur-ish spirit and many of them support my ideas, but I'm still at a standstill over here. I personally feel that the main problem I'm going through is that the college I chose to go to is subpar, to the level where it does not produce many people with "dreams." Everyone around me are just lazy people who like to party, so unless I spend all day trying to go to other campuses to talk to people, I find that I rarely get to experience an intelligent conversation about tech, career goals, and whatnot. Has anyone ever encountered this and have any advice for me? I go to Cal Poly Pomona and have many smart friends (from highschool) but they go to schools like UC Berk, UCI, UCLA, etc.

Re: How to Get Startup Ideas

#153

Post by lmm »

emmett wrote: post #100
hiddenstage wrote: post #20

Twitter was built so people would be able to blog via SMS. That was the idea; that was the problem they were setting out to solve. That's not what made them big. They inadvertently solved the need of microblogging. No need to maintain blogs; no need to write long posts. Just a simple, short way to keep people informed with what you are doing. But that's not what made them big either. What made them big is celebrities…

Twitter was obviously a great idea, but it wasn't an obviously great idea. Just because no one (including the Twitter guys) could see the direction it would grow in doesn't mean that it wasn't a great place to start. In retrospect, clearly it was.

Are they profitable yet? I'm still not entirely convinced Twitter isn't just one big bubble.

Re: How to Get Startup Ideas

#154

Post by PanMan »

jbarham wrote: post #27
GregBuchholz wrote: post #25

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…

> 3D design software for the masses https://tinkercad.com/

This! I'm convinced 3D printing will become a lot cheaper, but until I played with tinkercad last weekend I thought the design of objects would be really complex. Here it's quite easy!

Re: How to Get Startup Ideas

#155

Post by [deleted] »

YuriNiyazov wrote: post #31

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…

[deleted]

Re: How to Get Startup Ideas

#156

Post by hiddenstage »

emmett wrote: post #100
hiddenstage wrote: post #20

Twitter was built so people would be able to blog via SMS. That was the idea; that was the problem they were setting out to solve. That's not what made them big. They inadvertently solved the need of microblogging. No need to maintain blogs; no need to write long posts. Just a simple, short way to keep people informed with what you are doing. But that's not what made them big either. What made them big is celebrities…

Twitter was obviously a great idea, but it wasn't an obviously great idea. Just because no one (including the Twitter guys) could see the direction it would grow in doesn't mean that it wasn't a great place to start. In retrospect, clearly it was.

I guess I don't think there is a 100% correlation between success and a great idea. I think that luck can be just as big a factor in success as the idea, especially in the mass consumer space.

If celebrities didn't take to Twitter I very much doubt they would have hundreds of millions of users now. You could argue the idea is what drove celebrities to use the service, but did it? If another service came out before or around the same time that celebrities used instead, would we say "Twitter is obviously a great idea that just didn't catch on?"

Re: How to Get Startup Ideas

#157

Post by tarice »

>So if you're a CS major and you want to start a startup, instead of taking a class on entrepreneurship you're better off taking a class on, say, genetics. Or better still, go work for a biotech company. CS majors normally get summer jobs at computer hardware or software companies. But if you want to find startup ideas, you might do better to get a summer job in some unrelated field.

THIS. The field of CS has so many people in it, it's difficult to find an idea that somebody hasn't already implemented in 4+ languages.

If you branch out into other fields, you become infinitely more valuable to said fields, plus the problems in other, not-as-programming-saavy fields become readily apparent.

I know it's been repeated elsewhere, but as a chemical engineer I feel obligated to spread the word.

Re: How to Get Startup Ideas

#158

Post by pg »

hiddenstage wrote: post #50
pg wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except unlike stock market investing, startups are not a zero sum game.

Stock market investing isn't a zero sum game anymore than VC investing or even Y Combinator. Edit: OK, YC adds much more hands on value to businesses, but the investment aspect is exactly the same as it would be if you bought shares over the market.

I should clarify: I meant the type of trading Yuri describes, where you're trying to make money by identifying stocks that are mispriced.

Re: How to Get Startup Ideas

#159

Post by ams6110 »

flipside wrote: post #105
emmett wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain, in one sentence, what it is that you're building that's different from existing movie ratings sites? Try this template: "it's like Rotten Tomatoes, except ..." It's like Rotten Tomatoes, except you rate on 3 axes instead of just 1. It's like Rotten Tomatoes, except you rate the movie by answering questions about what parts you liked. It's like Rotten Tomatoes, except your ratings are automatically po…

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…

...externalize opinions about movies in context...

I'm not even sure what that means. Target your pitch to an 8th grade reading level. Yours sounds like the abstract for a research paper. And these days, your core value proposition should be able to be expressed in a tweet.

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