Ideas are everywhere. Once you start building.
I get a lot of questions about how to come up with the perfect business idea and to be honest if I would have a perfect answer to this I would have cracked the holy grail. I do still have a few thoughts on it that hopefully should guide you into the right direction.
I validate my idea mostly by gut feeling, shipping fast and then observing what the market thinks. The faster you ship an MVP, the faster you can test if people value it.
The founder-idea chasm
In terms of finding ideas I think there's this sort of hidden founder-idea chasm:
In the beginning it feels extremely hard to come up with (unique) ideas and you end up at all the classic tarpit ideas but then suddenly you'll have way too many ideas to ever build.
A quick but important paragraph about tarpit ideas.
What are tarpit ideas?
TLDR; Stay away from consumer apps and do B2B.
Tarpit ideas are startup ideas that seem good, almost too good to be true!, but have been tried by many founders before with little to no success.
Tarpit ideas are often not hard in obvious ways.
They might seem so easy and good that it’s unbelievable that no one has done it but when you look a bit deeper, you realize that they have been tried.
Over, and over again. Most with no success.
However, eventually start you working on an idea and slowly you start realizing that in order to build this idea perhaps there's an even bigger problem to be solved.
These are the ideas you that you should bet on.
Most founders I know can't stop having enough ideas because they constantly need to solve problems. And some problems are not solved well yet.
All of this comes from experience, so you just need to break out of inertia and just start working on any idea really to come up with the better ones.
My thoughts on consumer B2C apps
Don’t get me wrong, I think that you can be very successful with a consumer app but it will require you to invest more capital upfront (think paid ads, UGC, etc.) than getting started with a B2B product.
Naturally your B2B product will have a much higher life time value because businesses are much more comfortable spending more money than consumers.
What gets you faster to ramen profitability?
A B2B product with a $49/m plan or a B2C app that you can charge $3.99/m for?
You can do the math yourself with this little tool
Finding a great idea is a numbers game
It's a numbers game. On average you likely need to work on five+ shitty ideas before hitting a somewhat good one. That's the price to pay.
Look at successful people like Levels who shipped more than 70 projects. Less than a handful became successful.
As for practical advice, it can help a lot reading stories of how other people came up with ideas.
🎧 Podcasts:
- Indiehackers.com (The early founder interview episodes)
- Rob Walling (Startups for the rest of us + micro conf lessons)
- Greg Isenberg (awesome podcast literally about new business ideas → don't build the ideas they talk about rather get inspired and apply it to your own world)
📝 Written Case Studies: Starter Stories (they have a blog but now also do great Youtube videos)
Now get started with an idea - any idea really! Start shipping and then good ones will eventually come 💪
