How to Come Up With Startup Ideas
Everyone knows that the best startups are based on an amazing idea. . . right? Actually, no. The reality is that most successful startups started with a half-baked idea, and in a lot of cases actually a pretty rubbish idea.
Take Airbnb for example. They started as “Air Bed & Breakfast”. The original idea was to offer literally an air bed on the floor of the host’s house so that travellers who were attending conferences in peak times could have a cheap place to stay.
It was only later that the founders realised the potential for Airbnb to become the marketplace for accommodation in the form that we know it today.
What’s interesting about Airbnb is that the founders focused on a problem - which in this case was that hotel accommodation can be hard to book at peak times, and is very expensive, particularly in large cities. They were willing to pivot and come up with alternative solutions that would solve the problem. Airbnb now handles two million bookings every 24 hours.
If you're looking for really good startup ideas the best thing you can do is to not focus on ideas at all, but instead focus on problems. Only when you’ve found a problem worth solving should you move into idea-generating mode.
Try this simple exercise to come up with problems and ideas. It works really well on a whiteboard and can be done as an individual activity or with a team.
Start by creating a table with 3 columns. The first column is “things I know something about”. This can be topics in which you have a personal interest such as a hobby, or a field in which you have some professional experience. List as many areas as you can.
The second column is “things that really annoy me”. In this column list as many things as you can that you think are broken, inefficient, suboptimal, annoying or where you think there must be a better way. Chances are if something annoys you it will annoy a lot of other people too. Don't overthink it, just try to come up with as many problems as you can in a short space of time.
Then in the third column list possible solutions. Don’t get into detail – just one sentence is enough. For Airbnb it would be something like “An online marketplace to connect travellers with home owners who are willing to rent out space to pre-vetted guests”.
It's as simple is that. The objective here is focus your efforts on important problems. Problems that you feel passionate about solving. Building a company is most likely a 5 to 10 year proposition, so there is no point in setting out to solve a problem unless you are absolutely passionate about it.
Also ask yourself how deeply you understand the problem. If it is something that you have first-hand experience with, then you are much more likely to have a nuanced understanding of the needs of customers and to be able to create a compelling solution. Chances are you’ll also know some potential customers, which will be handy when it comes to getting customer feedback.
If you don’t have a deep understanding of the problem, do you have friends or colleagues who do? Try doing this ideation exercise with people you know, who have complementary skills to yours, and with whom you think you might like to start a company. You never know, it might be the start of a great co-founder relationship.
Consistently we find that the best startup founders are those who have “marinated” in the problem space for a long time. This might mean that they have spent a large part of their career working in an area relevant to the problem, or that they know a lot of people who experience the problem.
As we've seen with Airbnb, your initial idea doesn't need to be perfect and it can even be completely wrong - but by getting started you will be able to engage with customers, and that is the only way you will be able to iterate on your idea to get to something that's a real pain point for customers and the basis for a successful business.
Photo by Juan Marin on Unsplash
