(2012-11-30) Graham How To Get Startup Ideas

Paul Graham on How To Get Start Up Ideas. The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing...

If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing fast, when you have a hunch that something is worth doing, you're more likely to be right... The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not "think up" but "notice."..

You don't have to learn programming (Learning Programming) to be at the leading edge of a domain that's changing fast. Other domains change fast. But while learning to hack is not necessary, it is for the forseeable future sufficient. As Marc Andreessen put it, Software Is Eating The World, and this trend has decades left to run. Knowing how to hack also means that when you have ideas, you'll be able to implement them. It's even better when you're both a programmer and the target user, because then the cycle (Iterative) of generating new versions and testing them on users can happen inside one head...

If you're really at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field, there will be things that are obviously missing... And when these problems get solved, they will probably seem flamingly obvious in retrospect. What you need to do is turn off the filters that usually prevent you from seeing them. The most powerful is simply taking the current state of the world for granted... Pay particular attention to things that chafe you. The advantage of taking the status quo for granted is not just that it makes life (locally) more efficient, but also that it makes life more tolerable. If you knew about all the things we'll get in the next 50 years but don't have yet, you'd find present day life pretty constraining, just as someone from the present would if they were sent back 50 years in a time machine. When something annoys you, it could be because you're living in the future...

A good way to trick yourself into noticing ideas is to work on projects that seem like they'd be cool. If you do that, you'll naturally tend to build things that are missing. It wouldn't seem as interesting to build something that already existed... When something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love, it may matter more than outsiders think.

What you should be spending your time on in college (College Education) is ratcheting yourself into the future... The clash of domains is a particularly fruitful source of ideas. If you know a lot about programming and you start learning about some other field, you'll probably see problems that software could solve... 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...Or don't take any extra classes, and just build things. It's no coincidence that Microsoft and Facebook both got started in January... But don't feel like you have to build things that will become startups. That's premature optimization. Just build things. Preferably with other students.

Worrying that you're late is one of the signs of a good idea. Ten minutes of searching the web will usually settle the question... The question then is whether that beachhead is big enough. Or more importantly, who's in it: if the beachhead consists of people doing something lots more people will be doing in the future, then it's probably big enough no matter how small it is... Err on the side of doing things where you'll face competitors.

There are two more filters you'll need to turn off if you want to notice startup ideas: the unsexy filter and the Schlep Work filter... Turning off the schlep filter is more important than turning off the unsexy filter, because the schlep filter is more likely to be an illusion.

For the rest of this essay I'll talk about tricks for coming up with startup ideas on demand... When searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise... The place to start looking for ideas is things you need. There must be things you need... One good trick is to ask yourself whether in your previous DayJob you ever found yourself saying "Why doesn't someone make x? If someone made x we'd buy it in a second."

More generally, try asking yourself whether there's something unusual about you that makes your needs different from most other people's. You're probably not the only one. It's especially good if you're different in a way people will increasingly be... A particularly promising way to be unusual is to be young... The next best thing to an unmet need of your own is an unmet need of someone else.

Since startups often garbage-collect broken companies and industries, it can be a good trick to look for those that are dying, or deserve to, and try to imagine what kind of company would profit from their demise. For example, Journalism is in free fall at the moment. But there may still be money to be made from something like journalism. What sort of company might cause people in the future to say "this replaced journalism" on some axis?... And be imaginative about the axis along which the replacement occurs.

Similarly, since the most successful startups generally ride some wave bigger than themselves, it could be a good trick to look for waves and ask how one could benefit from them. The prices of gene sequencing and 3D printing (Desktop Fab) are both experiencing Moore's Law-like declines. What new things will we be able to do in the new world we'll have in a few years? What are we unconsciously ruling out as impossible that will soon be possible?