I want to start a startup, but have no ideas. What should I do?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=653655

by zavulon • 17 years ago

33 45 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I really want to quit my big corporation job and start a startup. Problem is, I don't have any viable ideas. I tried a startups before (while still working my main job), but didn't get far. Should I join someone else's startup? Should I start a consulting business? Or keep plugging away at BigCo, biding my time until ideas appear?

warwick• 17 years ago

What do you love doing?

CyberFonic3• 17 years ago

From the tone of your question, it seems that you are attracted to the idea of a startup but haven't identified your passion yet. Toiling away in BigCo means that you should be able to build up considerable cash reserves for when you go full-time in your new venture. The prudent course of action goes something like :

1. Find your passion

2. Develop the business around your passion in your spare time

3. When you predict that you can be ramen profitable, and only then, quit your BigCo job

4. Work harder than ever before

As someone on HN commented, "mega-successful entrepreneurs are the statistical outliers". But that shouldn't stop you from having a go.

wlievens2• 17 years ago

And the objective doesn't have to be "mega-successful" anyway. Makin-a-decent-livin' would be enough to most geeks who yearn for independence I think.

petercooper• 17 years ago

And I'll suggest the opposite approach: what do you hate doing? Now, what can you build that removes that task or makes it easier?

icey2• 17 years ago

Read this and see if you get any ideas:

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

It's important to be passionate about whatever it is you decide to do. If you don't really care about whatever it is you're working on, it's not going to be successful.

I do want to be careful about the definition of passionate. It doesn't have to be some world-changing thing; just something you enjoy working on or something you feel is very important.

Here are some ideas you can have for free as well:

* A website builder specialized to a specific industry. Real estate agents for example. Build widgets that they can drag onto their own pages that provide things like MLS searching. Or appointments for a doctors office, etc etc.

* Yet another polling site. Except let people login to track their polls. Later you can use the data to give them suggestions about potential matches, or build a personality profile for them, or whatever. People seem to like hearing things about themselves.

* A health tracking site that lets people keep track of diet, various health biometrics, drugs / vitamins they have taken. This one would require some serious UI-fu, as I think it would only be really successful with a shitload of really beautiful graphs that allow people to track their progress / amount of money spent on supplements / whatever.

paralogical• 17 years ago

The health tracking site that I use to track my diet and exercise is http://www.fitclick.com - needs some work with the graphs, and UI, but the idea's there.

icey2• 17 years ago

See? Market validation :D

NonEUCitizen• 17 years ago

don't quit your day job yet... at night, figure out what you want your startup to do (preferably in a field not related to what your employer does).

brk• 17 years ago

while ($ideas < 1) {

do dayjob;

}

spydez• 17 years ago

That's an infinite loop.

Or, that's what it feels like to me, anyways. :/

CyberFonic3• 17 years ago

Break out of the loop by exploring lots of areas of interest, sooner or later something will grab you and once you have found your passion, you will be unstoppable.

caffeine• 17 years ago

  def trying
    yield day_job.problem.to_idea if day_job.has_problem?
    trying do |idea|
      idea.attack!
    end
  end

davidw• 17 years ago

I think joining someone else's startup is a good place to start, especially if you're young and have lots of time ahead of you.

joshu• 17 years ago

Start building things you are creatively and emotionally invested in. Even if they are very small things.

- work creates ideas

- you need to hone your skills; how to make decisions, how to negotiate constraints, how to balance tradeoffs. you can't do this until you've got really thorny problems. and the best problems (that is, profitable) problems to solve are all thorny ones.

TallGuyShort• 17 years ago

I often see people suggest things in comments on HN, and say, "that would make a great startup!" but no one ever does it. Keep an eye out for comments like that.

wlievens2• 17 years ago

Maybe make a crawler that finds those.

pedalpete• 17 years ago

do you have 'non-viable' ideas? can you refine them to be viable? do you not have many ideas? or do you just think they are not that good.

Though i agree with the whole passion thing, their are lots of people who are successful because they are passionate about creating or passionate about business rather than just their ideas.

two ideas on finding ideas 1) get dissatisfied. find something things you don't like and figure out how to make them better 2) get playful. try new things. have you written a mobile app? build one. have you seen the new mozilla video stuff? try writing tools for stuff like that, or business surrounding the newly created technologies. as you play, you learn, and may discover new opportunities.

bemmu• 17 years ago

If you know some other people who might be interested in doing a startup, maybe you could get together and have a brainstorming session.

aditya• 17 years ago

yeah, go work for another startup. you'll learn a lot more than your bigco job and you'll figure out if you're ready to do your own thing, also you'll meet people that you can start startups with.

on the other hand, start building something, anything on the side with your bigco job, release-iterate-repeat from there.

mixmax• 17 years ago

I would start by putting an e-mail address in your profile so that others can contact you. Who knows, maybe there's someone reading this thread with a great idea but noone to partner up with.

just press this link: http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=zavulon

agrinshtein• 17 years ago

I have plenty of ideas as well. @arongrinshtein

tptacek2• 17 years ago

Start a two-person consulting practice, making sure to bill corp-to-corp and, if you can, avoid staff-aug projects that will simply stick you in one place for months at a time. Two people. Solo consultants get screwed by clients, have less time to manage and grow the business, and aren't learning how to operate as a company.

You'll learn how to market yourself, how to manage a sales pipeline, how to keep a set of books, how to track utilization and how to set up triggers for hiring new people.

If you're successful, you'll build a revenue stream that you can divert from to build a full-time product development team, at which point you'll have bootstrapped yourself and be at cash-flow-positive.

The ideas will come.

Working for a startup is fun. It will definitely teach you how to develop under hair-on-fire circumstances, and probably expose you to current technology (Rails instead of J2EE, Erlang instead of C++, etc).

But I was --- am --- shocked by how much 10+ years of dev work for startups did not prepare me to start a company from scratch. I got very lucky picking my partners; had I been even a little less lucky, I'd have failed in the first six months.

CyberFonic3• 17 years ago

Consulting has both pros and cons

Pro: Being exposed to many clients may help identify a need that you can develop into a product/service.

Con: Having clients is a distraction when you are trying to develop and launch a product/service.

In the given situation, hanging in at BigCo provides for steady income and the freedom to pursue ideas in free time.

tptacek2• 17 years ago

Respectfully, this doesn't make any sense to me at all. Being beholden to a BigCo gives you more opportunity to develop ideas than having control over a sales and delivery pipeline?

So, no. But I think you have a kernel of a valid caveat there, which is that as long as you're bringing money in that isn't coming from your product, you're going to be distracted. My proposed solution for that --- one that's working well for us --- is to get to a point where you can simply hire people to do one or the other. Hard to argue that a full-time product person is "distracted" because his paycheck is coming from a consulting practice instead of a VC fund.

This is also why I recommended starting a two-person company, and not simply becoming a freelancer. Freelancers do get sucked into "temporary W2" consulting hell.

Tichy• 17 years ago

Think about stuff that bothers you and ways you could improve it.

olefoo• 17 years ago

First figure out why you want to do a startup. Then figure out if a startup will actually meet the needs and expectations you have of it.

If it will; and you don't have an obvious business that you should be getting into, then do some research and look for problems that you are uniquely situated to solve better than anyone else.

Don't just pick an idea and run with it, be critical of your ideas, and of yourself. A startup is hard work with relatively small chance of reward; and if you don't have a sense of why you are doing it that is strong enough to carry you through you won't last the distance.

See this wiki page for inspiration as to what your idea should look like though http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Hairy_Audacious_Goal

jerryji• 17 years ago

You should find Steve Blank's post today helpful -- "Am I a Founder? The Adventure of a Lifetime" ( http://steveblank.com/2009/06/11/am-i-founder-the-adventure-... )

Kaizyn• 17 years ago

Start out simply. What sorts of things are you doing in your day job? What technologies do you use in your day-to-day work? At a more conceptual level, what sorts of problems does your work attempt to solve for its customers? From there, ask yourself what other problems could be solved for the customers? Were any potentially profitable ones overlooked? What other existing technologies that you are not presently working with can be used to solve those same problems more cost effectively? Looking at the technology set, what other related problems can you solve that either no business is currently working on or that you could solve cheaper/better/faster, etc?

The intent behind this questioning is the important thing. In an evolutionary context, the work you're doing is like an organism that is adapted to some degree to its business niche. You may be able to strike out on your own by making a business 'better adapted' to the same economic niche through changes in the technology/skills used. Alternately, you may be able to find a niche that better supports the toolkit you presently have to work with. This is the simplest way to generate innovation but it will likely not produce results that are the best for your overall happiness.

For that, you'll have to determine what kind of niche can support you financially and which you personally are well suited for. From there, it's a matter of figuring out what adaptations in your personal skill and technology set are necessary to transition you over to that niche from your existing job.

ziadbc• 17 years ago

I think having no ideas is almost better than having tons of ideas. I would get on crunchbase, look at the hundreds of startups on there, and see if there are ones that you find interesting. More than likely that company failed, and you can improve on the idea it was going after.

thingsilearned• 17 years ago

Start positioning yourself in a setting where you are more likely to gain ideas, find a great co-founder, and build up some capital and connections.

A startup is a long haul. The idea part is a minor portion, start working on the rest and the idea will come.

tjic• 17 years ago

The problem that most people (including myself) have is that they jump at the first halfway decent idea they come across.

Don't do that!

Sit down with a piece of blank piece of paper (metaphorically - you'll want to use a text editor) and start writing down ideas. Make them crazy. Zero negative feedback. Get the creative juices flowing.

What do people pay for?

Services. Information. Money saving. Social opportunities. Access to money.

So, let me get the list going for you with some bizzare / useless ideas, based off of one random concept - "sneakers".

* software to manage collections of high end sneakers * software / service that lets you design and produce your own custom sneaker * social networking for fans of sneakers * sneakers that verbally encourage you to take the stairs * sneakers with GPS that issue you different reminders at different locations ("you're in the lobby of the office, on the way out - don't forget to pick up chicken on the way home")

All idiot ideas. But maybe buried in there you come up with "software that lets small shoe stores manage their inventory", or something.

The point is this: until you've generated 100 ideas, you'd be foolish to leap at the first one.

...and the second point is this: once you've generated 100 ideas, you'll be more practiced and fluid, and you'll find it easier to generate the next 100.

Run the ideas past a few friends, and ask them each to pick 10 that are interesting.

Chances are, there'll be a point of overlap. And maybe it's even something that was already tugging at you.

It's an interesting exercise.

Go do it.

arohner• 17 years ago

This is an excellent idea. I would make just one small addition, which is do it with your co-founder. Make your list. Have them make their own list, and then compare notes over dinner/beer.

Doing it with a friend will cause you to come up with ideas that you wouldn't have alone, and it's good to make sure you're both on the same page.

mkjame• 17 years ago

Whenever you find your idea and whatever you end up doing: Do it with passion, Focus on value.

snowstorm• 17 years ago

stop dreaming about killer ideas. start looking for problems. If you find a problem that's big enough and people are willing to pay for a solution, you can start bootstrapping.

Joining a startup should be a good experience for you. You'd find out whether you'd really enjoy startup life or not.

macco• 17 years ago

Work on Ideas! Look out for problems that have to be solved. For example "Why is tea sold in smaller packages than coffee? Although you need more tea per cup." I don't think that ideas pop out of nowher suddenly.

TweedHeads• 17 years ago

I'll give you 100 ideas:

Pick the top 100 web business in US and port them to spanish to cater users from Mexico to Argentina, or portuguese for brazil.

There are three huge markets this side of the pond, in english, spanish and portuguese, each one with 300M potential users.

trapper• 17 years ago

What's your email, I've got plenty and no time.

buholzer• 17 years ago

I have plenty too and have to prioritize them! Can only follow less than a hand full and see how they grow ...

rogercosseboom• 17 years ago

I don't mean to piggyback but I find myself in a similar position as the origin-poster and would love to chat with either of you- rogercosseboom@gmail.com

barnaby• 17 years ago

Find somebody who already has a startup. join theirs.

You don't want to have to go through the hassle of starting one your own. trust me.

omarish• 17 years ago

Invest in a whiteboard. Write down a random idea everyday.

AndrewWarner• 17 years ago

Great question. I answered it by putting together a list of what entrepreneurs I interviewed did.

http://mixergy.com/how-to-find-an-idea-for-a-new-startup

ieatpaste• 17 years ago

I have tons of ideas. Shoot me an email and we can chat.

petervandijck• 17 years ago

while (prove_market($idea) < 1) { do dayjob; $idea = generate_idea(); }

DirtyAndy• 17 years ago

Personally I'm in the process of starting something and trying to focus on that as much as possible, but I still have lots of ideas. So I have a whiteboard in my office and when I get an idea it goes on the whiteboard. The whiteboard is divided into two sides - ideas that are fun but will never make a penny, and ideas that need further investigation to see if they are commercially viable.

Up until recently I have done contract development work. Nearly all of the ideas that I have that are on the potential money making list come from my work interactions. Either systems I have developed where 90% of the system would work for loads of other companies, or systems that the company wont develop but that the users want, that I think other companies would want.

I am assuming you are a programmer of some description (I assume most people on here are) in which case I think you are in the best position. Look at the systems you work on, Can they be improved, can they be generalised so that other companies may pay for them. It is amazing how many companies will take the $200 a month option where you cannot change the background colour to cyan over the fully customised internally built $20,000 option.Obviously be slightly careful that your company does not have rules where if you invent stuff whilst in their employment then they own it etc - but most companies don't seem to bother too much.

Your startup can accomplish boring business jobs and make money, it doesn't have to be a rip off of Facebook or aggregate Twitter data for you to have a happy life.

Good luck

I want to start a startup, but have no ideas. What should I do?

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