Paul Graham: How to find an idea for a startup (part two)

This post is a continuation of the first part of the translation of one great article by Paul Graham on how to find your startup idea. This is not a step-by-step instruction, but rather Gram’s deep philosophical essay based on his wealth of experience as the founder of YCombinator, the most successful startup accelerator. We continue:

Consciousness

But how to determine if an idea has a way out? How to understand whether this is the germ of a large company or just a product that is doomed to a narrow niche? Often this is not possible to do. AirBnb founders did not realize at the beginning what size they were trying to market. Initially, they had a narrower idea. They were going to allow owners to rent their space during exhibitions and conferences. They did not foresee the expansion of this idea; she imposed herself gradually. All they knew at the beginning was that there was some kind of fish on the hook. Perhaps this is as much as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg originally knew.

It is rarely obvious from the very beginning that the idea has a way out of the primary niche. And sometimes I see a path that is not immediately obvious - this is one of our specializations here at YC. But still there are limits to how exactly this can be done. And no matter how much experience you have. The most important thing in understanding the way out is to recognize the fact that it is difficult to see.

But if you cannot predict whether an idea has this big way, how to choose between ideas? The truth is frustrating, but interesting: if you are a man of the right "breed", then you have the right type of intuition. If you are at the forefront of achievements in an area that is changing rapidly, and you have a premonition that something should be done, the likelihood that you are right is higher.
')
In the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Piercing writes:
“Do you want to know how to draw a perfect drawing? It's simple. Make yourself perfect, and then just draw completely naturally. "

I was surprised at this passage since I read it in the university. I'm not sure how much this advice is particularly useful for drawing, but it perfectly describes our situation. Empirically: the best way to a good startup idea is to become the type of person who has them.

Being at the pinnacle of achievement in any field does not mean that you need to be the one who moves it all forward. You can be just a user on the edge. Facebook seemed to Mark a good idea, not so much because he was a programmer, but because he used a computer a lot. If you asked most of the 40-year-olds in 2004 if they didn’t want to make their lives semi-public on the Internet, they would have been horrified by this idea. But Mark already lived online; for him it was natural.

Paul Buhite says that people at the cutting edge of a rapidly changing region "live in the future." If this phrase is combined with the Piercing phrase, we get:

Live in the future and create what is missing.

This perfectly describes the way in which many (if not all) big startups began their journey. Neither Apple, nor Yahoo, nor Google, nor Facebook planned to become companies at the beginning. They grew out of things that, it seemed to their founders, are missing in this world.

If you look at the way in which successful founders found their ideas, you will find that this is usually the result of some external stimulus affecting the “prepared” consciousness. Bill Gates and Paul Allen heard about Altair and thought "I bet we could write a basic interpreter for it." Drew Huston realized that he had forgotten his USB flash drive and thought, “I need to make my files live online.” Many people have heard of Altair, many have forgotten flash drives. The reason why these irritants forced their founders to start projects was that their experience taught them to notice the opportunities that they see.

The verb that should be used with respect to startup ideas is not to “invent”, but “notice”. We have YC, we call ideas that naturally grew out of the experience of their founders - organic start-up ideas. Most successful startups start this way.

Perhaps this is not what you wanted to hear. You probably expected to hear a recipe for how to come up with an idea, but instead I’m telling you that the key is to have a properly prepared mind. But this is also a type of recipe: just one that, following unfavorable circumstances, may take a year instead of a weekend.

If you are not on the edge of something fast-changing, you can get there. For example, any reasonably intelligent person can get to the pinnacle of programming (such as mobile application development) within a year. Since a successful startup will eat 3-5 years of your life, a year of preparation would be a reasonable investment. Especially if you are still looking for a co-founder.

But you do not need to learn programming to be on the cutting edge of a sphere that is changing rapidly. Other areas also change quickly. And although learning to program is not necessary, it is reasonable for the foreseeable future. As Macr Andressen says, software eats up the world, and this trend will continue over the coming decades.

The ability to program also means that when you have ideas, you will be able to implement them. This is not a matter of life and death (Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com - did not know how), but an advantage. A good advantage if you are considering the idea of ​​running Facebook. Instead of simple thinking like “This is an interesting idea,” you might think “This is an interesting idea. I will try to build the first version tonight. ” It is even better when you are a programmer and at the same time a target user, since then the cycle of developing a new version and testing it on users can occur in one head.

Notice

As soon as you start living in the future (in some respects), the way to notice a startup idea is to look at things that are missing. If you are really on the edge of a rapidly developing sphere, you will always find a bunch of things that are missing. What will not be obvious is that they are ideas for a startup. Therefore, if you want to find a startup idea, you need not just to turn on the filter “What is missing?” You also need to turn off any other filter, in particular, “Can it become a big company?” There will still be enough time to do this check later. But if you think about it initially, it will lead to the fact that you not only filter out a lot of good ideas, but also focus on a bad idea.

Most things that are missing will take some time to notice. You have to practically deceive yourself to see these ideas around us.

But we know - ideas surround us. And there is no such problem, which has no solution. The probability is negligible, that now is the moment when the process stops. You can be sure that in the next couple of years people will build things that will make you wonder: “How have I lived without it until now?”

And when these problems are resolved, they will probably look incredibly obvious in retrospect. Therefore, you need to turn off the filter, which prevents you from seeing them. The most powerful obstacle is to perceive the current state of the world as a given. Even the most open and receptive of us often suffer from this. You would not be able to get from your bed to the front door if you had not ceased to question everything and ask questions.

But if you are looking for a startup idea, you can sacrifice some effectiveness in taking everything as given and start asking questions. Why is our mail overflowing? Because we receive too many letters or because it is difficult to delete a letter from the incoming folder? Why do we get too many letters? What problems do people try to solve with letters? Are there any better ways to solve it? Why do not we delete letters after reading? Is the incoming folder the ideal solution for this?

Pay special attention to things that annoy you. The advantage of taking the current state of affairs as a given is not only that it makes life (locally) more efficient, but also that we are becoming more tolerant. If you knew about all those things that will appear in the next 50 years, but would not have now, you would have seemed very limited today, just as if you were sent back 50 years in a time machine. If something annoys you, perhaps this is because you live in the future.

If you find the right type of problem, you can probably describe it as obvious. At least for yourself. When we launched Viaweb, all online stores were created by hands: web designers created each page separately in HTML. For us, programmers, it was obvious that these sites should be generated automatically by software.

This means a rather strange thing that finding start-up ideas is a matter of seeing the obvious. This shows how odd the whole process is: you try to see things that are obvious, but nonetheless that have not yet been seen.

Since all you need to do is release your consciousness, it may be better not to try to attack the problem in the forehead, i.e. sit down and start thinking about her. The best solution is to simply start the process in the background and look at things that are still missing. Work on difficult issues, following your curiosity, but find a second to look at yourself over your shoulder, noting the flaws and "anomalies."

Give yourself some time. You have enough control over the speed with which you turn your consciousness into “prepared”, but you have much less control over external stimuli that ignite ideas when they — stimuli — affect consciousness. Drew Huston worked on a less promising idea before DropBox: a SAT preparation (exam) startup. But DropBox was a much better idea: both in an absolute sense, and in terms of matching its experience and skills.

One of the ways to fool yourself in order to catch an idea is to work on a project that seems to be cool. When you do something like this, you are inevitably, absolutely naturally inclined to build things that are not. Building something that already exists would not have seemed so interesting to you.

While trying to invent a start-up idea usually ends badly, working on a piece that might be rejected as a “toy” often leads to good ideas. When something is described as a toy, it means that it has everything that is inherent in the idea, except for significance. That's cool; users like it, just it does not matter. But if you live in the future, and you build something cool that users like, then it may be more important than it seems to others. Micro-computers seemed like toys when Apple and Microsoft started working on them. I am old enough to remember this era: people who owned their own computers were called “lovers”. BackRub seemed an inconsistent scientific project. Facebook was just a way for students to pry each other.

At YC, we are always intrigued to meet a startup working on something that, in our view, some know-it-all from the forum would call it a toy. For us, this is a good sign that the idea is good.

If you can afford to take a long-term perspective (and you cannot afford to allow it), the phrase: “Live in the future and create what is lacking” should be rephrased:

Live in the future and create what seems interesting.

Continuation (part three) - tomorrow. Successful digestion of new thoughts.