How to find start-up ideas
Chris Dixon had an interesting post a while ago about how to find start-up ideas. The advice boiled down to keeping a spreadsheet of ideas and talking to lots of smart people (entrepreneurs, potential customers, VCs, people at big companies). It’s good advice. Paul Graham also wrote in 2008 about startup ideas he’d like to fund.
Here’s another way to come up with startup ideas: walk around your house or apartment, and look for “hot spots.” A hotspot can be an area of high information density, clutter, stress, disorganization, or any place that has a suboptimal solution. Then think about a web or cloud solution to that hot spot. Let’s take a look at a few examples:
Music CDs -> iTunes, Amazon MP3 store, doubleTwist, MP3tunes, etc.
Bookshelf -> Amazon, Kindle, iBooks
Stereo system -> Sonos, Squeezebox, Rhapsody, Pandora, last.fm, Spotify, Grooveshark, MOG, Rdio, etc.
External hard drives -> Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Pogoplug
Okay, those all seem simple or obvious, right? Let’s go a little deeper. What would you do with this pile of business cards?
Pile of business cards -> CloudContacts
Here are a few more that come to mind:
Bank statements -> Mint
Photo Albums -> ScanCafe
Bathroom scale -> Withings
Pedometer -> Fitbit
Phone -> Google Voice, Twilio, Ribbit, Rebtel
Camera -> EyeFi
Stack of video games -> Steam, OnLive
DVD player -> Roku, Netflix Instant movies
Treadmill or Elliptical machine -> Nike+ shoe sensor, LoseIt! iPhone app, CardioTrainer app for Android, Fitbit
Pen -> Livescribe
All of these take a hotspot in your home and inject a cloud or web element to make life easier, more efficient or better. So what happens when you look at a pile of manuals, or receipts? Your alarm clock? Those “Learning Japanese” CDs? A stack of take-out menus? A stack of cookbooks? A hard drive full of MP3s that are disorganized? A hard drive that doesn’t have a back-up copy? An out-of-date programming book? A box full of videotapes? All those back issues of magazines? A blank wall, with no posters or other decoration? Stuff in your garage that you’ve been meaning to sell or give away? Your wallet?
Ideas are sitting all around where you live. If you have a small snag, irritation, or hotspot in your life, probably a lot of other people do too. You can make it easier to organize something (can you convert something physical to digital and store it in the cloud?). You can sell niche versions of a product (e.g. Threadless for T-shirts), you can let people make something that they couldn’t make before (CafePress for T-shirts, LuLu for books), you can pool people with similar interests (a blog like Craftzine, or a forum for book lovers or body builders), you can review products in a particular space, you can teach someone to do something. You can become a well-known expert in something and then sell your time or expertise as a consultant. You can make a free version of something useful or fun, then sell more features or consult on more involved cases. You can do meta versions of lots of these, e.g. Etsy is a marketplace for people who like to buy and sell custom crafted objects.
I’ll stop with a story. I have a friend at Google who is really good at noticing things that annoy him. While walking from his car to his desk in the morning, he can easily find six things that irritate him because they should be improved. I’m not recommending that you make yourself more irritable, but I am saying that if you notice all the times you run across something that can be improved, those are opportunities. And I think one of the easy methods of spotting start-up ideas is looking around where you live and how you spend your time. Find the hotspots in your own life and you might identify some great products or services to build.
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I like taking the grunt work that people don’t like to do and see if it’s something i could be proficient in doing and then try to excel at it. That way you will have an already established demand(people who need to have work done but would rather not)
it’s also the emotional sell of annoying, make some thing that’s annoying like the vuvuzela’s and fix it, Then you have a great head start,
Shawn
Yeah pain points are a starting place – but is what irritates you something that irritates enough people? Meaning is there a market – and if so, how much are they willing to pay and how much can you make? Lets face it a lot of the companies Matt cites are not making money. So, unless you’re in the charity business, the irritation needs to be a viable enough concept for people to pay up.
I say this because I found a pain point – Nepali and Indian kids growing up in the USA who don’t have an opportunity to learn to read and write the Nepali and Hindi script. I created Sabdamala.com. However, I’m finding that the market is not willing to pay the price needed to keep this idea operational. So, its good as a part time side hobby but not enough to make a living – and I poured a lot of of resources to make a world class product.
What am I missing?
Your friend isn’t a Virgo is he Matt?
Basically necessity is the mother of invention: Cable ties, cable tidies, cordless mouse, wireless keyboard, rechargeable batteries… I know your talking apps here but this does apply to real world practical applications too; it’s crossing over between physical and digital that is the challenge – and the clincher is whether it will it take off?
What an excellent post, Matt. I can’t stop thinking up great new ideas because of your one thought. Now all I need to do is write them all down, and pick just one. Thanks so much!
This is good advice for consumer-facing stuff, but terrible for B2B. I’ve found the best way to get startup ideas is to get out of my own narrow, techie, educated niche, and start talking to “normal” people about their problems.
It really isn’t that hard to find an idea to run with, the real challenge is finding people with a similar passion and ability to get the work done. I am 21 and my 2 best friends and I have each started our own businesses, mine is a marketing business, and both of theirs are business consultancies. It may not be the next Google, but we found a niche that isn’t filled and with a little effort we are all doing quite well for ourselves.
Think of what the world needs, how you can provide, and whether or not you would enjoy doing so.
-Jim
An idea I had 5 years ago was related to local (social networking, news, events,classifieds)…at that time local wasn’t the hot topic it is today (and Facebook was just for colleges).
How did I came up with that? I had a need…I was a fresh immigrant to US (coming from Eastern Europe)…didn’t know almost anybody…and I though would be nice to have a local site for each neighborhood (based of the zip code level) where people can interact, post local news, local events, local classifieds.
I even start coding and did a prototype in the free time I had, and I almost 1 year (which is still online at http://www.mirceagoia.com/local ) hoping that I may present that to an investor…well, I was too new here and I had to look for a job eventually, to survive. So, i abandoned the idea…but, who knows, that idea could be still viable, especially nowadays…
I find startup ideas by looking at the domain names which are expiring and are in the pendingDelete status. I acquired lots of these and for some I am writing down what can be done for it.
When you start a startup it’s good to have a good domain name right away – just ask Mint.com how much they had to give up for that good domain name (gave up some good equity)…or ask Facebook, which paid $200,000 for it after it became successful (money which could be used for the actual business)
“A blank wall, with no posters or other decoration?”
haha, yup, that was how Art.sy got started
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It is funny because yesterday I checked all kinds of CDs I burned in 1998 and I found multiple applications I coded but never finished them at that time. Majority of them are now my desktop they will be optimized to be included in my website
. It is a great feeling