I want to start a startup, but have no ideas. What should I do?

I really want to quit my big corporation job and start a startup. Problem is, I don't have any viable ideas. I tried a startups before (while still working my main job), but didn't get far. Should I join someone else's startup? Should I start a consulting business? Or keep plugging away at BigCo, biding my time until ideas appear?

Read this and see if you get any ideas:

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

It's important to be passionate about whatever it is you decide to do. If you don't really care about whatever it is you're working on, it's not going to be successful.

I do want to be careful about the definition of passionate. It doesn't have to be some world-changing thing; just something you enjoy working on or something you feel is very important.

Here are some ideas you can have for free as well:

* A website builder specialized to a specific industry. Real estate agents for example. Build widgets that they can drag onto their own pages that provide things like MLS searching. Or appointments for a doctors office, etc etc.

* Yet another polling site. Except let people login to track their polls. Later you can use the data to give them suggestions about potential matches, or build a personality profile for them, or whatever. People seem to like hearing things about themselves.

* A health tracking site that lets people keep track of diet, various health biometrics, drugs / vitamins they have taken. This one would require some serious UI-fu, as I think it would only be really successful with a shitload of really beautiful graphs that allow people to track their progress / amount of money spent on supplements / whatever.

while ($ideas do dayjob;

}

Start building things you are creatively and emotionally invested in. Even if they are very small things.

- work creates ideas

- you need to hone your skills; how to make decisions, how to negotiate constraints, how to balance tradeoffs. you can't do this until you've got really thorny problems. and the best problems (that is, profitable) problems to solve are all thorny ones.

do you have 'non-viable' ideas? can you refine them to be viable? do you not have many ideas? or do you just think they are not that good.

Though i agree with the whole passion thing, their are lots of people who are successful because they are passionate about creating or passionate about business rather than just their ideas.

two ideas on finding ideas 1) get dissatisfied. find something things you don't like and figure out how to make them better 2) get playful. try new things. have you written a mobile app? build one. have you seen the new mozilla video stuff? try writing tools for stuff like that, or business surrounding the newly created technologies. as you play, you learn, and may discover new opportunities.