Startup Ideas

layout: post title: Where Startup Ideas come from description: Where Startup Ideas come from summary: Where Startup Ideas come from comments: true tags: [startups, entrepreneurship] —

When I was an EIR at MIT, one of the most common situations I found were students wanting to start companies but complaining they didn’t have any ideas. 

This is true of people everywhere, not just MIT. In our culture, we have the myth of the Eureka moment for startups/innovation. 

It is true that some companies have Eureka moment origins were the original idea = the company. However, most companies end up being = d(idea)/dt, that is, the first, second, third or nth derivative of the original idea, and some get started even without a concrete idea.

The point is that there are many approaches to starting a company and despite our admiration for mythical Aha! moment innovation, this is not the only (or necessarily the best) approach. In fact, if your idea is not tied with a real customer paint point, this approach could be fatal as you’ll fall in love with an idea without a market.

Below is a list of other approaches to starting a company. Some of these have overlaps and might be a bit repetitive, but hopefully one of these will resonate with you and you’ll get going.

Disciplined Entrepreneurship

This is MIT’s favorite approach, as it was conceived by Bill Aulet at Sloan. You start with either an idea, technology or passion and through Bill’s 24 steps (from market segmentation to product plan) you end up with a business.

Lean Startup.

In contrast with the disciplined entrepreneurship approach, the lean startup school advocates to building a minimum viable product instead of doing the market segmentation and validation that Bill’s 24 steps advocate. Simply build something fast, show it to the world, and iterate your way to a succesful product or pivot to a new one.

Scratch your own itch.

Create a product that solves a pain you have that many other people have and are willing to pay for. This is particularly a great strategy if you have insights about a particular industry, but it can also be an insight about a problem. There are a ton of examples, but one that comes to mind is Slack. The company started as a gaming company and built the chat as an internal tool, but ended up realizing the internal tool was more powerful and so they doubled down on it.

Make a better product (compete on the product)

This approach is to take an existing product and improve it. By product I mean the augmented product, which includes the core product but also the sales experience, marketing, success, etc. I heard David Cancel describe Drift’s founding story along these lines… Chatbots already existed, but he knew he could build a better one (and he did!).

Build a better company (compete on the operations)

Even if a company already has a great product/service out there, you can start a company to compete on operations. One example of this is Mercadona. Compete on operations.

Catch the tailwind

If you don’t have an idea of a product or service or even of a problem, but you do have a theme you believe on (for example, AI, Blockchain, etc) you can start a company on that space to figure out what to build. Of course, this is harder to pull off unless you have a track record, but there are examples of the strategy.

The Bus.

You don’t know what problem to solve or what to build or what technology bandwagon to ride but you are a bunch of smart friends who enjoy working with each other? You can get everyone on the bus and figure out where you are going together.

The Hobby.

Monetize your knowledge, skills, and passion.

Commercialize a technology.

Solution in search of problem. Many spinoffs, including Brontes.