adamzerner's Shortform

Biff Wiff

I've been in pursuit of a good startup idea lately. I went through a long list I had and deleted everything. None were good enough. Finding a good idea is really hard.

One way that I think about it is that a good idea has to be the intersection of a few things.

For me at least, I want to be able to fail fast. I want to be able to build and test it in a matter of weeks. I don't want to raise venture funding and spend 18 months testing an idea. This is pretty huge actually. If one idea takes 10 days to build and the other takes 10 weeks, well, the burden of proof for the 10 week one is way higher. You could start seven 10 day ideas in 10 weeks.
I want the demand to be real. It should ideally be a painkiller, not a vitamin. Something people are really itching for, not something that kinda sorta sounds interesting that they think they should consume but aren't super motivated to actually consume it. And I want to feel that way myself. I want to dogfood it. When I went through my list of ideas and really was honest with myself, there weren't any ideas that I actually felt that eager to dogfood.
There needs to be a plausible path towards acquiring customers. Word of mouth, virality, SEO, ads, influencer marketing, affiliates, TV commercials, whatever. It's possible that a product is quick to build and really satisfies a need, but there isn't a good way to actually get it in front of users. You need a way to get it in front of users.
Of course, the money part needs to make sense. After listening to a bunch of Indie Hackers episodes, I'm really leaning towards businesses that make money via charging people, not via selling ads or whatever. Hopefully charging high prices, and hopefully targeting businesses (with budgets!) instead of consumers. Unfortunately, unlike Jay Z, I'm not a business, so I don't understand the needs of businesses too well. I've always heard people give the advice of targeting businesses, but founders typically don't understand the needs of businesses well, and I've never heard a good resolution to that dilemma.
I need to have the skills to build it. Fortunately at this point I'm a pretty solid programmer so there's a lot of web app related things I'm able to build.
Hopefully there is a path towards expanding and being a big hit, not just a niche side income sort of thing. Although at this stage of my life I'd probably be ok with the latter.

When you add more and more things to the intersection, it actually gets quite small, quite rapidly.

Biff Wiff4y30

2ChristianKl4y

The solution is likely "talk to people". That could involve going to trade events or writing cold LinkedIn messages to ask people to eat lunch together. You might also do something like an internship where you are not paid but on the other hand, will also own the code that you are writing during that internship.

Biff Wiff4y20

Something like an internship would be a large investment of time that doesn't feel like it's worth the possibility of finding a startup idea.

I guess talking to people makes sense. I was thinking at first that it'd require more context than a lunch meeting, more like a dozen hours, but on second thought you could probably at least get a sense of where the paths worth exploring more deeply are (and aren't) in a lunch meeting.

adamzerner's Shortform

9

adamzerner's Shortform

9