How to find start-up ideas

Agreed. I keep a journal of ideas, even for very rough ones, that I come across. Many times I read an article or deal with a certain subject at work and ideas for businesses start forming. Key for me is to write them down right away, so my mind is clear for new ideas.

When I have some time, I go back to my journal and start writing out those ideas, thinking through features, sketching. Then I might not touch it for a month and then do another round of refinement. After a while, you end up with a great archive of projects, and since you've been chewing on them for a while you have a good idea of what's worthwhile.

I agree. This is why outsourcing manufacturing to other parts of the world is a bad idea. Innovation occurs where the manufacturing takes place. Take batteries for example. Companies in the US thought the process was simple and there was nothing to gain from keeping the manufacturing in the US. Well, they outsourced it to other countries in order to cut costs and look what happened. Lithium Ion batteries came about.

On the same note, I have found that starting sentences out loud before I finish the complete sentence in my head yields much more content, wit, and many times even better points. (seriously, but I'm mainly forced to try this while talking to girls at the bar)

I have heard some musicians (mainly rappers) don't write down lyrics because the process of writing completely destroys the flow. Instead, they record themselves improvising, quickly realizing a better phrase should have been used, stopping, and improvising again. If they can't come up with a word or phrase to fit into the sentence, they make a sound that fits the flow and come back to it later.

In short, be involved with current material as closely as possible in order to create new material. I hope this makes sense

There are a lot of people, myself included, that want to build businesses (not necessarily just web2.0 startups) but don't have a constant stream of ideas. I don't think that makes people any less passionate or able to run successful businesses, just a difference in the way brains work.

A lot of people want to quit that day job. For some it's the flexibility that offers and for others, they just want some change.

Absolutely. If you hear the startup life glorified enough on sites like this, there's a chance you're going to want to start a startup, but you won't have an idea yet. Also, some people just naturally recognize ideas, whereas other people might have just dismissed annoyances as "the way the world is."

That's the way I work. I've known for a while I wanted a startup, now I'm at the stage of taking ideas and turning them into reality. I'm always thinking of new ideas and writing them down for later, but my mode of thinking is definitely "I'm now creating a startup, lets go find ideas" and not the other way around.

By the way, Paul Graham has mentioned that Viaweb started in much the same way: a conscious search for an idea to build a business around.

Definitely. I would classify myself as someone who desires the challenge, autonomy, and opportunity for growth of a startup, but I have a difficult time identifying viable ideas. I feel like I'm a creative problem solver, but not a creative problem identifier.

I am an engineer at heart - I love to build all kinds of things, from software to electronics, etc. If you give me an idea, I can run with it and prototype it without difficulty.

However, if you ask me to generate viable ideas from scratch it is as if I have writer's block. I've been working to improve by ingesting anything I can get my hands on - be it this post, talks (such as Tom Kelley's 'How to be an innovator for life' re: thinking like a traveler), books (such as 'Innovation and Entrepreneurship' and 'The Long Tail'), reading HN and PG's essays, and so forth.

I don't think finding viable ideas will ever be as intuitive to me as it is to some, but perhaps with practice and hard work I will start to recognize some opportunities.

Lots of well-known examples. In Jim Collin's Built to Last, he mentions how many large companies were started by founders without a specific idea, just a solid team (Hewlett-Packard being a major example).

I do realize the book gets some criticism for lack of scientific rigor or the performance of companies involved, but the example is still worth mentioning.

No. I think ideas are a dime a dozen. I used to have a huge list of ideas, they are worth nothing because they never saw the day of light.

Considering how much people overvalue ideas, that is one fine business idea :-)

I'm inclined to believe that the ability to identify an opportunity is a necessary hurdle. If someone can't get that far on their own, it's not very likely that they'll will have the drive to pursue the idea very far.

It would depend on the quality of the ideas. If you could list ideas with clear potential and which you backed up by research that might be something, especially if you did preliminary market validation by speaking with potential customers. I'd probably even pay for it. I'm an entrepreneur (and have a growing list of ideas), but there are things I'll never think of because I'm simply unaware the problem exists. For example, I often see semi-trucks for grocery stores or supplying other retail businesses and I wonder if the Internet can make some process in that system more efficient. I'm pretty sure there is, but I have no idea where a pain point might be because I've never been on the inside of that process. That's just one example, but there are tons of internal business processes that I'm simply unaware of because I'm not exposed to them. As a result most of my ideas are consumer focused which I can relate to, and this is a fun (e.g. facebook, myspace), but crowded and fickle market segment for Internet startups. Going after b2b is less sexy, but can be quite profitable, and in some cases I think easier to implement and gain traction.

People have been buying established businesses and improving them and profiting for a very long time, so whilst the "entrepreneurial spirit" doesn't sort of feel right with buying ideas, it is certainly a viable idea.

Delivering a basic upvoting type system for ideas would probably be interesting to a lot of people. Getting good ideas out of people (especially for free) could be difficult, and finding a way of getting only positive feedback (comments etc) on ideas also difficult (working on the assumption that you want ideas from the public rather than just from an internal team), but solving difficult problems is what it is all about!

I've passed on a lot of ideas that I have had because I don't believe they could make enough money to be viable for me (I live in an expensive country etc) but having an income of a couple of grand a month might appeal to a lot of people in other situations and those ideas could be useful for them.

facebook had thefacebook.com initially and I don't think it was very expensive. I actually found thefacebook.com to be equally satisfying for me.

(linky) http://highdeas.com/

Also Halfbakery - http://www.halfbakery.com/