Y Combinator Founder: 3 Tips for Coming Up With Start-up Ideas. You're burning to do a start-up and think you have what it takes to succeed. Only problem: First, you need a great idea. As a co-founder of wildly successful incubator Y Combinator, Paul Graham has had a hand in shaping some of the best start-up ideas of the past few years. Now, helpfully, he has shed his insights on where they usually come from. If you are the person described in the first paragraph, seriously, read it in full. But if you need to be convinced, here's the gist: "The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. Those are the first couple of sentences of Graham's post, so there's no confusion about his essential advice.
Go for Depth, Not Breadth To avoid bad but vaguely plausible start-up ideas--what the Y Combinator team calls sitcom ideas, i.e., the kind of ideas TV writers would make up if a character on a show had a start-up--choose something that some people want a lot rather than something lots of people might sort of want a little. How to get good ideas for startups. The majority of people in the US would like to be self-employed, according to Dartmouth economist, David Blanchflower.
This makes sense because people who work for themselves are happier than people who work at someone else’s company, according to research from Estaban Calvo at the Harvard School of Public Health. However the majority are not self-employed, and one of the most important reasons for this is that people do not know how to come up with an idea for a business. 1.
Read all the time, among broad sources and materials. In a study spanning sixty years of economically underprivileged Harvard graduates, psychiatrist George Valliant concluded (in a great article in the Atlantic) that the only consistent indicator of who will be happy later in life is who did chores as a child. This information should make almost everyone happy, since obviously just graduating from Harvard isn’t enough to guarantee happiness. 2. 3. 4. Another idea I had is to buy a herd of Waygu cattle. 5. “Oh. 6. Browse new business ideas. How To Get Startup Ideas. Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund. Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund Paul Graham July 2008 When we read Y Combinator applications there are always ideas we're hoping to see. In the past we've never said publicly what they are. If we say we're looking for x, we'll get applications proposing x, certainly.
But then it actually becomes harder to judge them: is this group proposing x because they were already thinking about it, or because they know that's what we want to hear? We don't like to sit on these ideas, though, because we really want people to work on them. Please don't feel that if you want to apply to Y Combinator, you have to work on one of these types of ideas. 1. The answer may be far afield. 2. 3. News will morph significantly in the more competitive environment of the web. 4. 5. One way to start is to make things for smaller companies, because they can't afford the overpriced stuff made for big ones. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. What we have now is basically print and TV advertising translated to the web. 13. 14. What Are The Best Ways To Think Of Ideas For A Startup? How to Validate Your Start-up Idea. At my marketing agency, Ciplex, I deal with a lot of clients who hire us to build a website for their business idea--based solely on their gut feeling that idea will be successful.
They skip the step of figuring out first if they're solving a real problem in the world. Big mistake. Before investing any time and money in a business, you need to validate your idea. I asked members of the Young Entrepreneur Council, an invite-only organization for young, successful entrepreneurs about the best ways to validate ideas. Check out their responses below: Use smoke tests. An easy way to gauge interest in an idea is to run some basic tests fist. Travis Steffan, a serial entrepreneur, says he generally places an idea on a site like LaunchRock, which helps people to quickly set up a "Launching Soon" page.
Assess yourself. This one sounds basic but it's worth remembering. Find a mentor or industry advisor. There are always going to be people who have expertise or experience you lack. Conduct a survey.