Newsletter #13: Where good ideas come from?
8 minutes reading time. Thoughts on startups, growth, and technology 🚀
Hey there,
It often strikes me how people who are not involved in a startup think about starting companies and, in particular, where good ideas come from. In my experience, a lot of people tend to believe that you either have a natural ability to come up with good business ideas or you experience a sudden, magical moment where the idea is shaped in your mind.
As a result, if you do not perceive yourself as a) a person who churns new business ideas quickly, b) a person who gets the occasional genius idea, you won't pursue the path of opening a startup.
On the one hand, I understand that line of thinking as I used to share such beliefs for a long time myself. On the other, my startup experience taught me how this couldn't be further from the truth.
People have it reversed. You do not need to think of startup ideas to come up with startup ideas. The way to get startup ideas is to look for problems, preferably problems you have experienced yourself.
Why problems over ideas?
If you study any success case, you will find out how the founders threw several, quite different business models and products against the problem until they discovered product-market-fit. Building a company is a long process; it can take 3 to 5 years, but more often than not, it's about 10. At that time, if you are doing a good job, your understanding of the problem will be growing, consequentially the solution you are building will be changing as well.
Once you identify a problem and you are not satisfied with the existing solutions, your next step is to understand why is it so essential to work on a problem you have? Meaning, how do you ensure that problem exists, and it's the right time to address it?
Not all problems are worth pursuing. It's common for founders to build things no one wants.
Your ability to validate a concept early on is essential; there have to be at least some users who urgently want a solution to that problem. Next, you need to be able to answer the question, "why now?". Timing matters and every good investor will challenge you on that, after all, Google was not the first search engine, Youtube wasn't the first platform for videos, Facebook was not the first social media, and the list goes on and on. Those platforms got the timing right.
As Paul Graham argues:
“The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not "think up" but "notice." At YC, we call ideas that grow naturally out of the founders' own experiences "organic" startup ideas. The most successful startups almost all begin this way.”
Most probably, that's not what you expected to hear when you read the subject of this email. Perhaps you expected recipes for coming up with great startup ideas, and instead, I am urging you to "notice" problems in your life. The more related the problem is to your field of expertise, the higher your chances of implementing a solution. It's a significant advantage when you are both programmer and the target user because you will be able to go through multiple iterations on your own before taking the concept to market.
Finding a startup idea is a subtle process. As counterintuitive as it is, thinking of startup ideas does not work well. One thing I learned from my startup experience is that the more problems you solve, the more good startup ideas will seem obvious to you. But it takes time, to come across situations where you notice something is off.
Articles/podcasts worth checking out:
📝How to Choose Your Startup Idea | Greg Mcadoo | Sequoia Blog - Investors always tell you to pursue big ideas, find your passion and iterate rapidly. That’s valuable advice, but there are some other important considerations that you don’t hear very often: tackle a small market, look for bizarre behavior, don’t make waves, and be unwilling to do anything else.
📝Hunting What’s Next in High Tech | Saku Panditharatne | a16z Blog | March 11, 2016 - There are countless reasons why you’d want to know about the next big idea in technology, and as early as possible. Whether you’re finding them, inventing them, or building businesses based on them, ideas matter, as does “the idea maze” one travels to get to them. But is there a way to catch these ideas as they emerge, in their very early stages?
📝The Dumb Idea Paradox: Why great ideas often start out by sounding dumb | Andrew Chen |Andrew Chen’s blog - Ideas seem pretty random because, in the past few years, some of the biggest wins were: An app that lets you get into strangers’ cars. An app that lets you stay at random peoples’ houses. Disappearing photos. A site that doesn’t let you play video games, but you can watch other people play. Seriously?
A quote worth remembering:
Entrepreneur and investor Sam Altman on the importance of focus:
“Focus is a force multiplier on work. Almost everyone I’ve ever met would be well-served by spending more time thinking about what to focus on. It is much more important to work on the right thing than it is to work many hours. Most people waste most of their time on stuff that doesn’t matter.
"Once you have figured out what to do, be unstoppable about getting your small handful of priorities accomplished quickly. I have yet to meet a slow-moving person who is very successful.”
A book recommendation:
How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, Karen Dillon - This book made me think about how I "manage" my career and in general my own life and has made me reflect on what is my purpose. In Clay Christensen’s own words: “Purpose is not something to be found, it's something to be developed.”
Available as an audiobook as well, check it out.
Positive news worth sharing:
Improved healthcare. Cheaper drugs. Better food security. Advances in the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Rising GDP per capita. They’ve all helped Africans live longer.
Since 2000, life expectancy at birth is up by more than 20% in Uganda, Ethiopia, and Kenya. More than 30% in Rwanda, Botswana and Sierra Leone.
Check out the source here.
Onward and upward 🚀