I recently have met a number of people who expressed how badly they wanted to do a startup but said they lacked any good ideas. I know that startup ideas are worthless, especially since I have lived through the dozens of iterations involved, first with EffectCheck and now with Curvio. Nevertheless, you need to start somewhere and that means you need an idea that sufficiently captivates you. Now, I could simply give these people a list of startup ideas, but for an idea to really stick in your mind enough that you’ll want to start a company around it, you need to come up with it yourself.
I’ve come up with a brief collection of strategies that you can use to generate new ideas for startups:
Take a service or approach applied to one market, and apply it to another.
Examples: Chill (Turntable.fm), Yammer (social networks for businesses)
Take content or functionality that exists only in a legacy form and put it online or in an app.
Examples: Dr. Chrono (medical records), Google Books
Take a task that seems tedious and currently requires humans and automate it away.
Examples: Google (search rankings), EffectCheck (emotional impact analysis)
Create a common platform that ties together proprietary solutions or providers.
Examples: Twilio (abstracts away carrier-specific APIs), Greplin (single search engine for lots of services)
Take a piece of functionality that people currently implement themselves and make it a reusable component.
Examples: Apigee (APIs), Get Satisfaction (support forums)
Transform a situation where people are isolated or lonely by connecting them in a novel way.
Examples: Facebook, Meetup, LetsLunch
Encourage people in a community to generate data that would otherwise be less structured or available.
Examples: StackOverflow (programming Q/A), reddit (social news), Curvio (IMDB for products and apparel)
One important thing to remember is that these are not meant to be options that you choose at the start. Rather, consider each of these strategies to be a background process that runs continuously in your mind. Every time you encounter a problem, if it may be solvable by one of these strategies, that’s a potential startup idea!
When you have such an idea, write it down. It doesn’t have to scale or be clear how you’ll monetize, it’s just important that you finish the thought. I typically send myself an email with the subject prefix “Startup Idea: ” and a brief synopsis of the idea. This process helps ensure your mind offloads the mental weight of the idea so it can move on, either to generating the next idea or exploring the current one further.
Also, don’t feel that these are discrete categories of startups. Most startups have some element of more than one strategy. For instance, I listed my startup Curvio in Catalzye, but it also has elements of Digitize, Repurpose, and Connect. The strategies are just there to give you a foothold to begin thinking about how to discover and attack a problem.
Hopefully after reading this, those of you with “startup block” may find some inspiration. Remember, though, the idea is just the very start. Each idea you have will likely be twisted, contorted, and maybe even discarded once you start gathering user metrics and getting customer feedback. So don’t over-analyze it: take the little idea you generated and just do it. If you need help launching your minimum viable product, here’s a list of tools I found helpful the first time. You’ll soon discover that finding and building your idea was the easy part.
By sheer chance, I received two solicitation emails this week. In both cases, I didn’t know the sender, I didn’t request information from them, and they are clearly trying to sell me their products. The approaches, however, were very different and as a result I would label one as a legitimate cold call via email, where as the other is just basically spam to me.
Yesterday I received a survey request from Lean Launch Lab. I didn’t bother to answer, and quite frankly I stopped using the tool about a month after signing up. The whole “lean startup” movement is interesting and I appreciate the idea behind LLL. They want to make building a startup easier by enabling entrepreneurs to better organize what they’ve learned, what they’re working on, and what their next steps will be. That’s all great, but there’s just one thing that startups in this field seem to forget: I’M BEING CHASED BY A GIANT FIRE-BREATHING DRAGON.
My co-founder and I briefly considered applying to YCombinator for the Winter 2012 session. We eventually decided to bootstrap Curvio initially, and raise a seed round on our own after we launch (so far so good!). But looking over the YC application, one question intrigued me:
Please tell us about the time you, tansey, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.
Now, there are a lot of ways to interpret this. A mechanical interpretation would be about how you used some physical object in an extraordinary way to solve a challenge. Shifting to a more human-focused interpretation, maybe it’s about how you navigated your way through some social hierarchy or organization, breaking down walls that should have kept you out. From a business perspective, it may be about making a market when you saw an opportunity that no one else did. One friend even referenced having a surgery that left him paralyzed and having to hack his own mind via Neuro-Linguistic Programming to learn to walk again– the possibilities are endless!
This all got me to thinking: what are the greatest hacks I’ve ever done? Computer and non-computer systems. So here they are, in chronological order, the 10 greatest hacks of my life.
I watched a very interesting Ted Talk today by Paul Bloom. In it, he touches on the fact that pleasure is directly tied to our knowledge of the history of events leading to the moment in question. For instance, we view an original work of art much higher than a forgery even though the forgery is nearly identical. The reason for the discrepancy is that the original artwork is connected to a history that involves a strongly creative act. This had me thinking about why I love machine learning so much.
If an investment banker were to look at the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, what opportunities might he see?
One thing he might notice is an excellent arbitrage opportunity. Each ticket is priced according to the distance you travel. If he setup a secondary market for tickets, travelers could purchase a one-stop ticket for only $1.75, board a train to their true destination, and upon arrival they would exchange tickets with another passenger who was heading in the opposite direction, paying us a small fee of $0.25 for facilitating the transaction. If there’s no matching passenger, the user pays an exit fare (at no extra penalty) and is finished.
Now, the banker sees this as a win-win. The two customers receive cheaper tickets and he gets paid for making it possible. The banker has provided essential liquidity to this secondary market, leading to better prices and a more efficient market. It’s a free lunch!
You quit your job, gave up a stable income, and started working non-stop on a startup. To do this you either must be insane, stupid, or truly in love with your startup. I’ll assume that the primary reason is that you really are in love with your company, product, and team. Yet, when you’re in love, aren’t you supposed to shout it from the mountain tops? I just don’t get it.
For those of you who may be entering the startup world for the first time, it may be helpful to have some knowledge of the kind of people you’re going to meet. In my short, eight-month journey in Silicon Valley, I’ve met thousands of people in the startup world and had tens of thousands of conversations with them. Yet when I sat down to write this post, I was amazed at how few categories I needed to come up with a decent guide book.
Now, it’s important to note that I am not singling anyone I know out. Everyone who knows me should understand that I have the utmost respect for their style, approach, and dedication. We are all out there trying to make it in Startup Land. I wish everyone I’ve met the greatest success in all their ventures.
It’s also important to mention that these are fuzzy classifications. Most people do not fit squarely into one category entirely or uniquely. Rather, we’re all a blend of different amounts of the categories, with one trait likely being the most dominant.
I had a few different people ask for clarification on the Global Rydex idea I posted. I debated whether to even include the idea in the list originally, because it’s an esoteric topic that may be confusing to people not familiar with the myriad financial instruments available today. I realized halfway through an explanation I was writing that it’s better to just make it an entirely new post.
The curious thing about doing a startup is that you start seeing potential startups in every problem you encounter. Since I’m trying to focus on my startup Curvio, I can’t go implementing every idea that comes into my head. The best remedy I’ve found is to simply write the ideas down so that they’re out of your mind. Thus, inspired by Jacques Mattheij, I’ve compiled a list of the startup ideas I’ve had recently.