It's a good question. I received some advice about this young-- and it wasn't about startups, it was about careers generally. If you don't know what you want to do, but you know the general area, proximity is your solution. Get as close as you can, and watch carefully. The example cited was Cornelius Vanderbilt. He sailed goods around and dabbled in ship building for decades before he got into the railroad and steamship business that built his empire. He became deeply familiar with the skills and problem space: market economics, securitization, transportation, cost competition, steam engines. Eventually, he became the first person to use a limited liability corporation to accumulate private wealth by offering services that transported goods and people, at brutally competitive prices.

Go work in something that interests you, and watch for opportunities. Uber and Flexport are proving that Vanderbilt was right, and transportation is still sexy. For myself, I like finance. There's plenty of room in healthcare, especially senior care, education, security... I think for the best ideas, you have to know something. The lightning bolt out of the clear blue sky to twenty-year-olds with no life or work experience is probably played out.

I have the same problem! I'm quite good at thrashing ideas (both others' and my own). Currently happy as an early employee at a startup whose idea I don't find rubbish :)

Find a domain expert and ask them to walk you through their day or shadow them. Also, ask them what sucks. I could literally throw ten ideas at you right now of fixable things of various complexity in my domain (academic bioengineering).

Another strategy is to look for large problems in your industry that have been solved and then try to find analogous problems in other industries where the same or a similar solution could work.

For our startup, my co-founder and I went and talked to friends and contacts of mine in medicine and generated a list of 15 or so things we thought were everyday pain points for many individuals. We then shelled out some money and went to an industry conference to field test them. It turns out that all of them were being actively worked on, but while we were exploring them we stumbled upon another idea which is now the basis for our startup.

> how do you get startup ideas?

One fairly effective way is to focus on problems, nuisances, frustrations, or pain points. What do people/groups/companies dislike, hate, etc? What can be improved on? What wastes resources that could be made more efficient? Someone will usually pay for something that solves a problem.

You don't necessarily need an original idea, often it's just a matter of doing the same thing others are already doing, but better, or cheaper, or differently. Many people get stuck on coming up with some unique idea, when in reality most businesses are not doing anything particularly unique at all.

PG's advice is not try to think of startup ideas, but start noticing problems around you. It's hard being creative on demand and so that advice makes sense. Like I said below, I am having the problem of noticing problems, not even startup ideas. Maybe we are so used to the status quo? Should I question anything accepted as a common sense in the industry?

If people ever ask you for certain kinds of help or are baffled that you manage to easily do X when X is their worst nightmare, you may have a something to offer. But, it can still be a lot of work to figure out how to turn it into a thriving business.

I have started a number of blogs in response to apparent demand for information I know on various subjects. Even that has been very challenging in terms of trying to figure out how to best serve the needs of other people, turn it into a business model, etc. I have "pivoted" repeatedly in certain problem spaces. I might have a few things that don't completely suck at this point. ;-) But, I am still sorting out how this becomes some kind of meaningful income stream, etc.

Best.

These days I think of apps, then try and work backwards into a *startup that could grow out of it (and have the vision for x10 growth).

For example, an app for tracking expenses vs income => business owners tracking expenses => expenses in a business => selling tight integration into a POS (where the income happens) => startup about POS systems that integrate into your slick app (and yeah that exists)

Ages ago there was an Idea Board like site posted on here, where anyone was posting and you could browse for things

Edit: the Google now lists at least 6

Think of something that you need solved for you and others might need.