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Ideas for Startups

(This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School.)

How do you get good ideas for startups? That's probably the number one question people ask me.

I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's hard to come up with ideas for startups?

That might seem a stupid thing to ask. Why do they think it's hard? If people can't do it, then it is hard, at least for them. Right?

Well, maybe not. What people usually say is not that they can't think of ideas, but that they don't have any. That's not quite the same thing. It could be the reason they don't have any is that they haven't tried to generate them.

I think this is often the case. I think people believe that coming up with ideas for startups is very hard-- that it must be very hard-- and so they don't try do to it. They assume ideas are like miracles: they either pop into your head or they don't.

I also have a theory about why people think this. They overvalue ideas. They think creating a startup is just a matter of implementing some fabulous initial idea. And since a successful startup is worth 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 million dollar idea, then of course it's going to seem hard. Too hard to bother trying. Our instincts tell us something so valuable would not be just lying around for anyone to discover.

Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.

Questions

The fact is, most startups end up nothing like the initial idea. It would be closer to the truth to say the main value of your initial idea is that, in the process of discovering it's broken, you'll come up with your real idea.

The initial idea is just a starting point-- not a blueprint, but a question. It might help if they were expressed that way. Instead of saying that your idea is to make a collaborative, web-based spreadsheet, say: could one make a collaborative, web-based spreadsheet? A few grammatical tweaks, and a woefully incomplete idea becomes a promising question to explore.

There's a real difference, because an assertion provokes objections in a way a question doesn't. If you say: I'm going to build a web-based spreadsheet, then critics-- the most dangerous of which are in your own head-- will immediately reply that you'd be competing with Microsoft, that you couldn't give people the kind of UI they expect, that users wouldn't want to have their data on your servers, and so on.

A question doesn't seem so challenging. It becomes: let's try making a web-based spreadsheet and see how far we get. And everyone knows that if you tried this you'd be able to make something useful. Maybe what you'd end up with wouldn't even be a spreadsheet. Maybe it would be some kind of new spreasheet-like collaboration tool that doesn't even have a name yet. You wouldn't have thought of something like that except by implementing your way toward it.

Treating a startup idea as a question changes what you're looking for. If an idea is a blueprint, it has to be right. But if it's a question, it can be wrong, so long as it's wrong in a way that leads to more ideas.

One valuable way for an idea to be wrong is to be only a partial solution. When someone's working on a problem that seems too big, I always ask: is there some way to bite off some subset of the problem, then gradually expand from there? That will generally work unless you get trapped on a local maximum, like 1980s-style AI, or C.

Upwind

So far, we've reduced the problem from thinking of a million dollar idea to thinking of a mistaken question. That doesn't seem so hard, does it?

To generate such questions you need two things: to be familiar with promising new technologies, and to have the right kind of friends. New technologies are the ingredients startup ideas are made of, and conversations with friends are the kitchen they're cooked in.

Universities have both, and that's why so many startups grow out of them. They're filled with new technologies, because they're trying to produce research, and only things that are new count as research. And they're full of exactly the right kind of people to have ideas with: the other students, who will be not only smart but elastic-minded to a fault.


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