How To Get Ideas (Guide)

I compiled advice from various founders on how to generate startup ideas. Hope you all find it useful! Also, you can find a nicely formatted version of this content with a few extra sections here - https://startupadvice.xyz

Ryan Hoover - How to come up with side project ideas 💡
Founder, ProductHunt

• Reflect on your day-to-day.
• Ask your friends.
• Explore emerging platforms.
• Browse Product Hunt.
• Explore GitHub.
• Turn a feature into a standalone product.
• Go to a hackathon.
• Read the internet.

Sam Altman - How to Succeed with a Startup
CEO, OpenAI / Former President, Y Combinator

• If you can build a product that is so good, people spontaneously tell their friends about it, you have done 80% of the work that you need to be a really successful startup.
• Another thing that startups need to look for is, a market that is either started to undergo, or is soon gonna undergo exponential growth. What you really want to do is identify a market that's gonna grow every year, and be able to ride that up elevator.
• Real trends are ones where a new technology platform comes along, and the early adopters use it obsessively, and tell their friends how much they love it. A fake trend is one where, people may buy the product but don't use it, or at least not enough.

Tyler Tringas - Finding Micro-SaaS Business Ideas
Founder, Earnest Capital / Founder, StoreMapper

• Scratch your own itch
• Niche versions of existing SaaS
• Repeatable freelance and consulting work
• Automate manual tasks
• Build upon growing platforms

Mike Taber - Episode 264 | How to Identify New Product Ideas
Founder, Bluetick / Founder, MicroConf
"You can also start taking a look at products that are out there that you like or admire. Or dislike, or don’t like for whatever reason, and you want to create a new version of it that performs in a different way. So you start taking those ideas and as you’re putting them down, typically you can think of variations of those ideas. So for example, if you start thinking about, let’s say, accounting software for example. Accounting software is a very broad idea, but how can you slice up that idea into smaller pieces of it. You can think about it in terms of sending invoices, sending receipts for things that people are purchasing. You can also think of it in terms of just capturing payment information, for example. There’s a lot of different ways to slice up that invoicing thing."

Paul Graham - How to get startup ideas
Founder, Y Combinator

• Live in the future, then build what's missing. That describes the way many if not most of the biggest startups got started. Neither Apple nor Yahoo nor Google nor Facebook were even supposed to be companies at first. They grew out of things their founders built because there seemed a gap in the world.
• 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 job you ever found yourself saying "Why doesn't someone make x? If someone made x we'd buy it in a second." If you can think of any x people said that about, you probably have an idea. You know there's demand, and people don't say that about things that are impossible to build.

Pieter Levels - MAKE: Bootstrapper's Handbook
Founder, NomadList
"To get ideas, try to find problems in your daily life. You're the foremost expert at problems you have, more than anyone else who doesn't have them. If you keep coming up with the same ideas as everyone else: try to make yourself a more original person by actively experiencing different things. Don't shy away from taboos and fringe ideas, that just mean you're ahead of the curve, they might become the next big thing. Don't think big, start thinking small first, then take it one step at a time, you'll become big by starting small. To avoid groupthink and drama: work alone, especially early on. Share your ideas freely to get other people's input on them. Log every idea you have, filter them, and see which ones you can execute upon."

Amy Hoy - How do you create a product people want to buy?
Founder, 30x500

• You don’t ask, “Who would buy this?”. You ask, “Who wants to buy something, and what is it?”. You start with the customer first.
• Who are you serving? You can’t ask “What do they want?” without having a “they” in mind. But, while there’s all kinds of startup chatter about “niche selection” and how critical it is, this step is not a big deal.
• What do they need/want, and are ready to buy? And here is where the real value starts to happen. Let’s say you’re a Ruby developer so (shakes finger) you’re going to serve Ruby developers. Now you need to research them, to find out what Ruby developers need, want, and are ready to buy.
• How can I reach my potential customers and persuade them to buy? Fact: If you can market effectively, you can make sales before you build the product (pre-sales). But if you ship a product and have no way to market it, you can’t make any sales at all.

Dane Maxwell - Intro to Idea Extraction
Founder, The Foundation
Seven criteria you should be looking for when searching for a lucrative market:
1 - The business currently pays for software of some kind
2 - Lucrative (highly profitably) industries are preferred
3 - Has a profit driven business mindset
4 - Roughly 5,000 to 10,000 businesses (or more) in the market
5 - Reachable by phone, email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or message boards
6 - Can get person with pain point on the phone
7 - The average successful business earns at least $100k per year in revenue, and ideally profit (guesstimate this)

Michael Seibel - How to Get and Test Startup Ideas
CEO, Y Combinator / Founder, Justin.tv
When you think about a problem, you should be asking yourself do I have any relationship with this problem personally. Is this a problem that I have, is this a problem my friends have, is this a problem my family has, is this a problem that exists with work, is it a problem that’s in my community. Oftentimes having a personal connection to the problem is helpful for 2 reasons.
1 - You can tell whether the solution is even within the ballpark of solving the problem
2 - When you’re feeling discouraged and the solutions you’re building aren’t working, you still have some personal connection to the problem that sees you through until you find a solution that does work.

Peter Thiel - Zero to One, Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup Notes
Founder, Paypal/ Founder, Palantir

• The business version of our contrarian question is: what valuable company is nobody building? This question is harder than it looks, because your company could create a lot of value without becoming very valuable itself. Creating value is not enough—you also need to capture some of the value you create.
• There are secrets of nature and then there are secrets about people. Natural secrets involve science and the world around us. The process of finding them involves going out and getting the universe to yield its secrets to us. Secrets about people are different. These are things that people hide because they don’t want other people to know about them. So two distinct questions to ask are: What secrets is nature not telling you? What secrets are people not telling you?
• We know that important secrets are neither small nor silly nor esoteric. The important ones are the big ones that are true. So those are the first two criteria to build into your model. You can safely discard anything that is small or false.