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

This is the fourth part, which is also the final, translation of the article by Paul Graham, the founder of YCombinator - one of the most successful startup accelerators - on how to find your own idea for a startup. The first , second and third parts of the link.
I also want to modestly announce my small non-commercial project, 42Startups.ru , a blog where you can find other articles about start-ups translated from English. The best of those that come across to me and which, in my opinion, are worthy of the attention of the Russian-speaking audience. Subscribe! For now, let's continue:

Recipes

And although the best way to discover a startup idea is to become the type of people who have them, and then create everything with interest with interest, nevertheless, this is often a luxury that we cannot afford. Sometimes you need an idea right now. For example, you are working on a startup, and your initial idea fails.

The rest of the essay I will devote tricks that help find a startup idea on demand. And although, in my experience, it is better to use the organic way, this method can also lead you to success. You just need more self-control. When you use an organic approach, you don't even notice the idea, unless it says publicly that something is truly missing. But when you make a conscious attempt to think about an idea for a startup, you need to replace your natural limitations with self-control. Then you will see many more ideas; most of them are bad. Therefore, you should be able to filter them.
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Organic ideas are dangerous, they feel like inspiration. There are a lot of stories about successful startups that started when the founders had what seemed like a crazy idea, but they “just knew” that their idea was promising. When you have such a feeling in relation to an idea that you tried to invent, you are probably mistaken.

When looking for an idea, focus on the areas you understand. If you are a database expert, do not create a chat application for teens (unless you are a teenager). It may be a good idea, but you cannot trust your judgment on this, so ignore it. There should be other ideas with databases, the quality of which you can judge. Do you find it hard to find a good idea using a database? All because your experience and knowledge overstate the standards. But your judgments about the chat app are just as bad; you just allowed yourself to get into this area, using the Dunning-Kruger effect .

But the right place to start looking for ideas is the things you need. There are always things you need.

A good trick is to ask yourself if your previous job didn’t happen, what would you say: “Well, why won't nobody do X? If anyone had done this, we would have bought it the very next moment. ” If you can think of an X that people talked about like that, you may already have an idea. You know that there is a demand, and people would not be so killed about things that are impossible to create.

In general, try to ask yourself if you have anything unusual that makes your needs different from other people's needs. Perhaps you are not alone. Especially good if you are different in what people are inevitable, but gradually come.

If you changed the idea, then you already have one unusual thing - the idea that you worked on before. Did you find any need while working on it? Several well-known startups started like this. Hotmail started off as something that its founders wrote to communicate about their previous startup while on the main job.

A particularly promising way to be unusual is to be young. Some of the most valuable ideas are rooted in adolescence (13–20) and 20 years of age. And although the young founders have some flaws, they are the only ones who really understand their peers. It would be very difficult for someone who was not in college to come up with Facebook. If you are a young founder (up to 23), are there things that you and your friends would like to do, but which do not allow current technologies to do?

But better than your personal unmet need — an unmet need for someone else. Try to talk to everyone with whom you can, about the gaps that they found in this world. What is missing? What would they like to do, but they can't? What is tedious and annoying, and especially in their work? And let the conversation be fairly general; Do not be too zealous in search of start-up ideas. You are only looking for something that can spark an idea in you. It is possible that you will find a problem that they did not realize, because, unlike them, you know that it could be solved and how.

When you find an unmet need, someone else's need, it may seem very blurred at first. A person who needs something may not know what it is. In these cases, I recommend the founders to act as consultants: act as if they were invited to solve the problem of this user. The problems of people are quite similar, so the code written by you in this way can be used again for another person. And what is not useful will be a small price for the confidence that you have reached the bottom of the well.

One way to make sure that you really solve other people's problems is to make them your own. When Rajat Suri from E la Carte decided to write software for restaurants, he found a job as a waiter to find out how restaurants are organized. This may seem extreme, but the start-ups themselves are extreme. We love the founders doing things like this.

In fact, one of the strategies that I recommend to people who are looking for a new idea is not just to get rid of the filters of "unattractiveness" and "hemorrhoids", but to look for ideas that are unattractive and hemorrhoids. Do not try to create Twitter. These ideas are so rare that they cannot be found by searching. Do something "unattractive" for which people will pay you.

A good way to get around the filter "hemorrhoids" and to some extent "unattractiveness" - ask that you want someone else to create, and you could use. And how much would you be willing to pay for it?

Since start-ups often recycle bankrupt companies and industries, a good reception is to look at those who die or deserve it, and try to imagine what type of company could benefit from their death. For example, journalism is now in free fall. But it is possible to make a profit from something similar to journalism. What type of company can make people say in the future “this has replaced journalism” in some way?

But imagine asking in the future, not now. When one company or industry replaces another, it usually happens from an unexpected angle. Therefore, do not look for a substitute for something; look for something that people will then say that it turned out to be a substitute for X. And turn on the imagination regarding the dimensions in which these transformations will take place. Traditional journalism, for example, is a way for readers to get information and kill time, for journalists to earn money and attract attention, and above all, a mechanism for placing several types of advertising. And it could be modified in any of these dimensions (in fact, the process has already begun in all directions).

When startups eat giants, they usually start by serving a small but important market that big players ignore. It is especially good if there is some neglect in the position of a large player, as this often confuses them. For example, after Steve Wozniak created the computer that became the Apple I, he felt obliged to transfer the ability to produce it to his then-employer Hewlett-Packard. Fortunately for him, HP declined. And one of the reasons - the computer used TV as a monitor, which seemed an unacceptable reduction in class for a company that produces high-quality hardware, like HP at that time.

But are there groups of unkempt, but sophisticated users, like the early fans of microcomputers, which are now ignored by the big players? A startup with an eye on big things can often easily capture a small market by spending an effort that will come true at the expense of that market alone.

Since the most successful startups usually catch a wave that is larger than themselves, it can be a good trick to search for such waves and how to get the most out of them. The value of genome sequencing and 3D printing is slowly decreasing by analogy with Moore's law. What things can we do in the new world in which we will live in 5 years? What do we exclude subconsciously as impossible, but what will be possible soon?

Organics

But, if we talk about a straightforward search for these waves, I would like to clarify that such a recipe is a plan “B” in the search for start-up ideas. The search for waves is essentially an imitation of an organic approach. If you are on the edge of a rapidly changing sphere, then you do not need to look for waves; you are the wave.

The search for start-up ideas is a delicate matter, and therefore so many people who are trying to fail fail. It does not work out just to come up with a good startup idea. If you succeed, then you probably have a bad idea that looks plausible, but that’s only more dangerous. The best way is less direct: if you have the right background, good startup ideas will seem obvious to you. But even then - not immediately. It will take some time to face a situation where you will notice that something is missing. And often these spaces will not seem to be ideas capable of becoming companies, they will be just things that will be interesting to build. For this reason, it is good to have the time and inclination to build things simply because they are interesting.

Live in the future and build what seems interesting. No matter how strange it may sound: this is the real recipe.

That's all. Scheherazade Graham ends. The article was a long one, but I hope that you have found the strength to read all four parts. It is definitely worth it! I would be sincerely happy if she pushes you to think and help with the project. And besides: go to 42startups.ru and subscribe to new articles!

UPD: Alexey Kulagin did a good deed and consolidated all the Russian-language articles of Paul Graham in the ibooks format. iPad-gadfly - recommended for review)