How to Get Startup Ideas | Hacker News Reader

How to Get Startup Ideas

wilburlabs.com

77 pointsdavidkolodny34 comments

1. See the future and build what it needs

2. Do something that exists 10x better

3. Scratch your own itch

Maybe I'm just feeling cranky, but this feels pretty shallow to me. Mostly it seems like filler to pump their portfolio companies.

yep. nothing interesting here

I mean... It feels pretty accurate to me...? Am I missing something?

Accurate, obvious, hence not very useful.

It's not inaccurate, in the same way that "buy low, sell high" is not incorrect stock trading advice.

Missing: 4. Talk to people about their lives, their work, and their problems in both.

I mean it's correct, it's just so vague and/or obvious that it's not useful to say it.

that's what half the blog posts are anyways a shallow attempt to promote something

This might be a little off-topic, but I haven't seen many "Request for Startups, 2021 edition" posted on HN this year. For instance, last year there was a large discussion of Elad Gil's ideas (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21969774&p=2) and a similarly substantial discussion of Daniel Gross's ideas (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22076787). Did I just miss this year's posts? I'd appreciate links to relevant threads/blog posts.

Not off-topic! Agreed. I'm one of the Wilbur Labs Co-Founders – in the article it mentions that ecomm, employment, insurance, and mobile on-demand are a few of the industries where we are boosting investments as a result of new long-term trends. We're going to put together a more robust list of opportunities in the next few months.

Not to pick on these people specifically, but when they wrote, “technology companies, including VacationRenter, Vitabox, Joblist, Barkbus” I literally laughed out loud. I mean sure, there’s a lot of advanced technology involved in a dog groomer being in a van but it’s all the responsibility of the van manufacturer.

The word “technology” has been completely inflated out of any meaninful description at this point, in part because of its magical cargo-cult aura to a lot of people and in part because what was high tech and novel is often now commodity table stakes these days.

I believe and have suggested to friends and acquittances that we should stop using xyz-Tech. Technology is now used by almost everyone in one way or the other, just as Electricity is. So, instead of FinTech, only Finance, Agriculture instead of AgTech. The Tech part is now just syntactic sugar to jargon-witch the general masses that are not directly part of the Technology circle.

And I'm realizing as I'm finally playing through Cyberpunk 2077 that I would prefer to keep it as just a game. I'm all for tech becoming less encompassing like you suggest.

I believe you just defined "a bubble"

I think it's residue of two bubbles ago.

I have a huge list of "ideas" in a text file that I add to periodically... I'm filled with ideas.

If I had millions of dollars, I'd hire tons of people to work on most of them. Some could be profitable, some are just good for the world, others are just interesting to me or are an area for science I think needs more exploring.

I don't have time for them all sadly. I need more time to execute. If you're really struggling to find good ideas, and you want to trust an internets person like me (look me up if you want) then ping me and I'll sell or give you one I guess!

Do you have any that could be started by a non engineer and bootstrapped? I’m working on 2 at the moment but their potential is more side-hustle-like than it is meaningful

You don't need to necessarily be an engineer (I'm actually a physiologist) but some of them (not all) might require some sort of engineer somewhere in the process, whether that's a formally trained engineer or not.

Sent you a message by a form on your site.

The thought of someone actually buying an _idea_ that you have for a startup is hilarious.

Personally, I find Evan Williams' quote a lot more insightful to identify what a "problem" is: take a process that people/organization already do, and remove a step, or make it extremely easy.

How to really get good startup ideas: steal them, and do it better.

This is actually not bad. In Shenzhen they shit on copyright. It's an open secret that anybody steals your ideas and it is actually intentional. They say ideas come cheap, but execution is the hard part. It's joked about that in the bay area if you have a good idea somebody steals it within a year. In Shenzhen it's stolen within a month; four times.

So they compete by executing well, instead of blackboxing their ideas.

I feel like this isn't one of those things you shouldn't force. If an idea comes along it should be from prior experience, and more importantly if it's an idea you can't stop thinking about where your months and years down the line and if its still in your head, it's probably worth pursuing.

I've said this before, but one great source of ideas is to put yourself into different industries.

While it is difficult to become a management consultant, those guys get phenomenal exposure to most parts of a company. I've seen A LOT of B2B startups with founders that came from consulting, where they recognized some deficiency or need, somewhere down the production line.

Lots of "boring" ideas in "boring" fields of work that are worth big bucks.

The first approach sounds solid but it's the kind of thinking that very easily leads you towards building a solution looking for a problem.

See Peter Reinhardts talk about product/market fit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6pl5GG8RQ4

4. Combine existing products

Examples:

Videochat + 2D Game = workadventu.re

Tinder + workadventu.re = ?

Pokemon + Google Maps + Kamera + GPS = Pokemon Go

Related: Problems are Goldmines by Peter H. Diamandis

> https://www.diamandis.com/blog/problems-are-goldmines

Any information on Wilbur Labs? Seems like an interesting company

Hey Jacob, we're a startup studio. If you boil it down, everything we do falls in two buckets: starting new companies and supporting the portfolio. For new companies, we start a few companies per year when an idea is in our strike zone and meets our thesis. This post, at a high-level, hits on what that strike-zone is. We won't start a business unless we are uniquely positioned to solve a big, growing problem.

For existing companies in the portfolio, we provide funding, shared resources, and operational support.

We shared more on what a startup studio is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26004021

1. Solve a real problem.

2. In lieu of that, find someone else's money to burn

Haha! This is the way. Solving a real problem is the only way to build a lasting business.

1.Solve everyday problems

2.Find something you are passionate about and think of how you can make it better.

3.Create a need for something, or create a problem that people "don't know it exists".

"Build a better mousetrap" is one strategy I am trying to do. I guess the disadvantage is the market might be saturated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com