Ideas for Startups -->
Want to start a startup? Get funded by<br>Y Combinator.
October 2005
(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005<br>Startup School.)
How do you get good ideas for<br>startups? That's probably the number<br>one question people ask me.
I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's<br>hard to come up with ideas for startups?
That might seem a stupid thing to ask. Why do they think<br>it's hard? If people can't do it, then it is hard, at least<br>for them. Right?
Well, maybe not. What people usually say is not that they can't<br>think of ideas, but that they don't have any. That's not quite the<br>same thing. It could be the reason they don't have any is that<br>they haven't tried to generate them.
I think this is often the case. I think people believe that coming<br>up with ideas for startups is very hard-- that it must be<br>very hard-- and so they don't try do to it. They assume ideas are<br>like miracles: they either pop into your head or they don't.
I also have a theory about why people think this. They overvalue<br>ideas. They think creating a startup is just a matter of implementing<br>some fabulous initial idea. And since a successful startup is worth<br>millions of dollars, a good idea is therefore a million dollar idea.
If coming up with an idea for a startup equals coming up with a<br>million dollar idea, then of course it's going to seem hard. Too<br>hard to bother trying. Our instincts tell us something so valuable<br>would not be just lying around for anyone to discover.
Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's<br>an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing<br>evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for<br>startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the<br>narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.
Questions
The fact is, most startups end up nothing like the initial idea.<br>It would be closer to the truth to say the main value of your initial<br>idea is that, in the process of discovering it's broken, you'll<br>come up with your real idea.
The initial idea is just a starting point-- not a blueprint, but a<br>question. It might help if they were expressed that way. Instead<br>of saying that your idea is to make a collaborative, web-based<br>spreadsheet, say: could one make a collaborative, web-based<br>spreadsheet? A few grammatical tweaks, and a woefully incomplete<br>idea becomes a promising question to explore.
There's a real difference, because an assertion provokes objections<br>in a way a question doesn't. If you say: I'm going to build a<br>web-based spreadsheet, then critics-- the most dangerous of which<br>are in your own head-- will immediately reply that you'd be competing<br>with Microsoft, that you couldn't give people the kind of UI they<br>expect, that users wouldn't want to have their data on your servers,<br>and so on.
A question doesn't seem so challenging. It becomes: let's try<br>making a web-based spreadsheet and see how far we get. And everyone<br>knows that if you tried this you'd be able to make something<br>useful. Maybe what you'd end up with wouldn't even be a spreadsheet.<br>Maybe it would be some kind of new spreadsheet-like collaboration<br>tool that doesn't even have a name yet. You wouldn't have thought<br>of something like that except by implementing your way toward it.
Treating a startup idea as a question changes what you're looking<br>for. If an idea is a blueprint, it has to be right. But if it's<br>a question, it can be wrong, so long as it's wrong in a way that<br>leads to more ideas.
One valuable way for an idea to be wrong is to be only a partial<br>solution. When someone's working on a problem that seems too<br>big, I always ask: is there some way to bite off some subset of the<br>problem, then gradually expand from there? That will generally<br>work unless you get trapped on a local maximum, like 1980s-style<br>AI, or C.
Upwind
So far, we've reduced the problem from thinking of a million dollar<br>idea to thinking of a mistaken question. That doesn't seem so hard,<br>does it?
To generate such questions you need two things: to be familiar with<br>promising new technologies, and to have the right kind of friends.<br>New technologies are the ingredients startup ideas are made of, and<br>conversations with friends are the kitchen they're cooked in.
Universities have both, and that's why so many startups grow out<br>of them. They're filled with new technologies, because they're<br>trying to produce research, and only things that are new count as<br>research. And they're full of exactly the right kind of people to<br>have ideas with: the other students, who will be not only smart but<br>elastic-minded to a fault.
The opposite extreme would be a well-paying but boring job at a big<br>company. Big companies are biased against new technologies, and<br>the people you'd meet there would be wrong too.
In an essay I wrote for high school students,<br>I said a good rule of thumb was to stay upwind-- to<br>work on things that maximize your future options. The principle<br>applies for adults too,...