Stop Coming Up With Startup Ideas

I’ve recently gotten into the habit of recording random startup ideas on my iPhone. Good or (incredibly) bad, I now have dozens of concepts to explore.

This is the wrong approach.

What I’ve done is immediately jumped to a solution without clearly identifying and focusing on the problem it’s trying to solve. Jumping to solutions is incredibly difficult to avoid, especially for those entrepreneurial-minded, but doing so may hide the discovery of a better solution, or worse, direct you to a bad solution.

As Paul Graham said in his essay, How To Get Startup Ideas:

Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas. That m.o. is doubly dangerous: it doesn’t merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.

Record The Problem

Instead of recording startup ideas, record problems. Here are a few problems I’ve recently identified:

• Scheduling, rescheduling, and re-rescheduling meetings is a b*tch, especially when coordinating with people that don’t have mutual access to shared calendars.
• Booking appointments is time-consuming. Most service providers such as barbers, optometrists, and mechanics (still!) only take appointments over the phone during business hours.
• Collecting, organizing, and prioritizing large amounts of product feedback is difficult. Often times this feedback is lost in email or communicated poorly.

Be Specific But Broad Is OK

The more specific you define the problem and characteristics of people that experience this pain, the better.

Although recording broad problems isn’t necessarily bad either. These problem statements can always be further defined or grouped to identify patterns.

• Mobile game developers have a very difficult time getting discovered.
• Mobile game developers often unknowingly purchase users through ad campaigns at a negative ROI.
• Mobile game developers have a hard time keeping their users playing - most leave after the first game session.

Notice a trend?


Be Observant

Whether we recognize it or not, we see problems, friction points, inefficiencies every day. Identifying problems organically through ones own experiences is often the best way to discover true pain.