The Ideation Flywheel: A mental model for deciding which startup ideas to pursue
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I think an equally valid approach is to start building something that you think should exist in the world, and bypass the "solution in search of a problem" issue by making sure your product has plenty of contact with reality. E.g. if no one is interested in an early version of the product, then you're probably going down the wrong path.
I don’t really get the “want to start a business, don’t care about what” — I’m more in the “want to work on this problem; business seems to be the best way.”
But this kind of framework could perhaps be useful for operating businesses too.
> “want to work on this problem; business seems to be the best way.” This is the right attitude but I would ask - why limit yourself to a single problem?
Saying "I want to start a company, what should it do?" seems like putting the cart before the horse. I guess it matters if your primary goal is actually "I want to make a lot of money", but that's kind of lame for a primary goal IMHO.
That's not what the article is saying, although I appreciate the sentiment exists. The core idea was that, if you are someone that likes to solve problems, and you've noticed some in the world, how do you figure out a) which of them is a good idea to work on and b) if you find out your initial ideas are flawed, how should you improve them?
I don't mean to single your comment out but I see a common idea I disagree with throughout this comment section namely:
"You should only work on the 1 problem you have a burning desire to solve"
I get why people feel like this. There is a culture of people that just want to start companies because it seems cool. To that I say, so what? If they solve a problem for people, and are successful, it doesn't matter what their initial motivation was and if they fail they fail. Secondly, a problem is not an idea. A problem is a starting point for many ideas - what I think could be better understood is how to ideate from a problem as a starting point. Thirdly, curious people exist in the world and it would be a good thing if they were solving problems and maybe starting companies as a vehicle to distribute their solution. Curious people don't have a single thing they're curious about, they may have many problems they'd like to work on, Elon Musk had a list of at least 2 (humans aren't multi-planetary and we're running out of fossil fuels) but slotted in online ads & payments first because it was a better problem to solve for him at the time.
To that end, I would contend the examples you give are absolutely founders that wanted to solve a problem (or realised very acutely that they were solving a problem as they built something new)
Facebook's core problem was figuring out if that person you met at a party was single without being creepy. A problem that Instagram now solves much better (coincidental acquisition? I don't think so).
The 2 Steves initially met and solved the problem of long distance phone charges by building legally questionable "blue boxes" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box. They later united on the problem of bringing computers, which they had a passion for and knowledge of, into the homes of everyone.
Amazon is an interesting point - Bezos saw the clear trend of increasing internet usage and realised there needed to be commerce online. He was certainly smart about the type of things that could sell well on the early internet. I would argue it solved a problem - long tail commerce (i.e. bookstores can't stock books about any conceivable topic) - but I'd concede that perhaps wasn't the primary initial motivation.
There are well-intentioned voices that emphasize not building unless you know there is a market for what you are making. And I believe they’re mostly right, as lack of product/market fit is usually fatal to an idea.
However, for people like myself that crave certainty and end up sitting on things because nobody’s screaming about their pain in easily seen locations, or connecting it to potential fixes. So I opt to do nothing rather than small experiments seeing what will stick. And I lose out on potential experience and wins.
The issue isn’t the advice, it’s how the advice interacts with my disposition towards skepticism and needing proof that something will work out before it’s done. That’s not how any of this works. It’s always a risk.
That's the fun part, really.
If it's in the B2B space, it's often still about finding which parts are painful enough to pay for is fun.
The long and short of it is people will justify what they want to build what they want without making it customer or market focused.
Building the future is fun, but timing the market is what kills most of those attempts.
Building what's needed now and ready to adopt might grow into something far more, like the first version of Facebook was very simple, not what it grew into (with users in hand learning along the way) to the complex thing it is now.
The metric that matters is people who sign up, use it, and pay. The last one is usually not one that funded startups want to know much about because it actualizes potential and valuations. In that way self-funded startups (or with F2F) has to focus on default-alive economics sooner, which can be great for an idea to hang around until it's time comes.
Facebook was trying to make a better social network compared to hi5 and friendster before it.
Apple made a personal home computer that was accessible to anyone who wanted one or build it
Amazon started with book deliveries with a goal of distributing everything and doing it much better. There is a bezos interview out here.
It's OK to build something that exists in the world but to some degree it is a vanity exercise relative to your experience with that thing or domain. It's fine to build something you think should exist, but it should be seen for what it is - a project, and not a product until an addressable market and audience is found who pay to sign up and there's low churn.
Building some of what you want and including feedback from a market is something.
Otherwise (it's fine), it can be a lot of folks wanting to exercise their inner Steve Jobs visionary ways without remembering he had a few billion in backing to do as he wished with a track record.
Lean startup is more about betting more than on just one version of your idea that you think needs to be built today, it's about finding enough hypotheses to test before doubling down. It's more of a science than an art (that may or may not work out)
Having plenty of contact with reality is still kind of vague, if it's relative to what's important to you for a confirmation bias effect, so be it. But simply putting in the conversations constantly and including a part of your roadmap between what you want to build, what customers are saying, bug fixes, and long term dev (5-10%) can lower your risk much more.
The rub is there’s no value to build it until it’s verified a little (email addresses and LOI/CC pre auth) first.
People who are building what they want to see in the world don’t need this article and would likely not even read it. This is for the “entrepreneur as a lifestyle” folks who want more to be entrepreneurs than they want to see a better world.
These people are trying to maximize the chances they’re going to get to keep being entrepreneurs, which is a wholly different problem than what you’re talking about.
It's a crap shoot, pal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Certainly we overall benefit from people trying this.
I think it far, far less likely to work, but if you fully believe in your "thing", you aren't looking at it statistically anyway.
> think an equally valid approach is to start building something that you think should exist in the world
Does the thing you think that should exist in the world really not solve any problems?
For example:
- Facebook: "it is hard to connect to young people at my school" (what do you mean? I'll just go to the campus bar)
- Apple: "I want to get into home computers but I don't know how to solder" (ok, let's start a soldering school?)
- Amazon: "I don't want to leave the house to buy books" (???)
- Facebook: Connecting to others is a real human need at almost every age. "I feel like being social but I just want to lay on the couch" is an actual "problem" for products to solve.
- Apple: "I want to get into home computers but I just want to pay someone to give me a finished board" is totally a real problem in 1976.
- Amazon: "I'm feeling lazy but I want this book" is also 100% a real problem.
Customer: "Why should we use your product?"
Startup: "Errr, we were hoping you could tell us."
This (timing the market) is probably the most important aspect of building any hyper-growth business. Also explains why early-stage investors tend to jump from one hype to another like no tomorrow.
Jeff Bezos in June 1997 explaining why now and why books: https://youtu.be/rWRbTnE1PEM / mirror: https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/rWRbTnE1PEM
For example, Google's problem was non-controversial "Yahoo, but more accurate" and business model was "just sell ads", but the technology was ambitious and required insight. In contrast, Facebook had obvious tech "just make a website" that a team of dropouts were able to execute on, but the market desire for a new social network wasn't obvious. Uber is the clearest example of innovation in the business model space.
One implication of this is that the best way to pick a startup idea is to search for one of these components, then check that the other two are present. TFA argues for focusing on (searching for) the problem, but the other two approaches are valid as well, especially for highly technical founders or in rapidly-evolving technology domains.
Beyond lack of user interest, there was a consensus it was a fundamentally a bad business too. Advertising didn't monetize well back then. The ads came from generic DoubleClick banner ad inventory because ad networks and search weren't integrated, so users didn't click on them and rates were too low to justify investing. Especially because a search engine does a lot of expensive computation to show one page/ad impression but there's no way to earn enough from that one impression to pay for the servers (especially in the dotcom bubble when server class hardware was super expensive and scarce).
That's why when Google tried to sell itself to Yahoo for the princely sum of one million dollars Yahoo said no. It's also why DEC didn't invest in AltaVista's tech and why Google got a head start of six years before their IPO required financial disclosure and everyone suddenly realized all at once that wow, ok, search does matter actually. But by then it was too late to catch up.
From the perspective of entrepreneurs back then, Google was a terrible startup: a solution in search of a problem that lacked a workable business model. Fixing it required three insights:
1. Technical: PageRank served using cheap Linux PCs whilst designing for failure.
2. Problem: That users did actually care about result quality and it only seemed they didn't because everyone was at the same level of suck.
3. Business model: That you couldn't just build a search engine, you had to build an ad network too, and it had to sell text instead of images as otherwise you couldn't get relevance high enough to monetize.
So I think it doesn't fit well into the model espoused by this article. In particular there was no specific group of people declaring they had a problem. After all, there are plenty of search engines already, people aren't saying they want anything better because as far as they're concerned the market must have already converged on the best that can be done, and anyway the UGC long tail was small so why would you want to search it (no adsense=no targeting=poor monetization=no business model)
1) you talk to someone who tells you they have a problem, you fix it for them, then scale from there
2) you ship something you find useful or fun and other people find it too, then scale from there
The “ship an mvp” & “keep looking for problems” methods don’t seem to yield much, simply because mvps tend to be half-baked implementations & looking around for just any problem misses the point & leads to cognitive biases where you start seeing problems everywhere, even where there’s none
I much prefer the "jobs-to-be-done" framing: people and organizations desire certain things done, and they pay for products/services to get them done; some jobs are not being well done (and thus, a "problem"), but many jobs are being done fine, but, there may still be opportunities to do them much better. (aka "pains" and "gains")
Ex. Alice was fine with her extra bedroom but AirBnB allowed her to make an extra 2k per month? etc
Its often easier to find acute pains to address than great gain opportunities, but it is possible, and many startups do it. Ignoring gain-potential as an avenue of value creation is myopic.
It seems to me this ideation thing seems unique to people who are stuck in the ideology of “I just want to be a growth entrepreneur in startups”.
The world does not NEED startups, or entrepreneurs, or exponential growth software startups.
People need solutions to their problems, and there are very many worthy problems that will never generate exponential growth or billion dollar valuations - but the current startup culture ignores these.
Yes there are worthy instances of both but they seem to be a ever decreasing portion of the whole.
The biggest problems we collectively have are blindingly obvious once pointed out in hindsight, but seeing them for what they are is curiously difficult.
I’m not saying that I or anyone else but Jack should have a say in whether the problem was “worthy”.
However, on the margin, you should choose to solve the biggest problems for the most number of people. If you succeed in doing that you may be able to build a venture scale company (and arguably you should). Furthermore, it's hard to build a company either way, so you might as well try to solve the most ambitious problems you can.
On the Square point - I don't know Jack Dorsey but I would find it hard to believe that he chose the "street vendor" problem as it was the first thing worthy problem he saw after Twitter. Furthermore just the problem statement is not enough, making X easier is not an idea. *Ideation is was happens after you've noticed that initial problem.* A nuance that seems to be lost when people talk about startup ideas.
So, for one example, taxi services were complacent. And Uber and Lyft shook that up. Are Uber and Lyft perfect? No. But that's not the point. The point is that now even taxi services work better.
Ideas aren't everything but they are important. The crucial distinction is that the initial idea isn't that important, iteration to an idea you can scale (and the execution that follows) is.
I do 100% agree on this, but... I've never seen any discussion of the importance of ideas that wasn't exclusively referring to initial ideas.
So I don't think there's really any risk of overindexing; people who discuss this from a pure ideation perspective aren't talking about iteration - at least not in a way that's realistic. The op talks about "linear ideation" and "restarting flywheels" as what seems like esoteric metaphors for iteration but they're entirely focused on pre-build/pre-execution ideation.
I’ve spent a lot of time in my local startup community as well as attending bigger startup conferences. I’ve witness a lot of startups with fantastic execution and highly polished products fail because very few people wanted to pay for their product. Some times no amount of iterating, moving fast, and staying lean can make a business idea work if the demand can’t be conjured up.
Or better yet. What do I do next? I have an idea, I code an mvp, ????
Not meant offensively, but they're probably not that great. Just purely statistically speaking, they are probably not that great.
You make it sound like you have what you need, just one small problem, which could be solved by an article, is not knowing how to execute. Execution is the whole thing. Being able to quickly build and validate an idea and move forward efficiently is the whole game precisely because ideas are cheap and not worth much intrinsically.
Here's a thought experiment: would you be willing to share one of your great ideas with us?
That was literally the gp's point.
Sure why not. Here’s an idea that I had that I lost interest in because of required capital investment in a physical product.
I hate giving my phone to people but lately I have to do that frequently either because they need to scan it for whatever reason or they can’t read it or whatever. I wanted to make a credit card sized e-ink card that would mirror whatever barcode or QR code or whatever was required. You give them the card instead of handing over your device. I was thinking about $25 would be a great price point.
Sounds kind of useful, but imho I think most people dont want more devices to carry around, to charge, run updates, and whatnot, i also dont think many people would pay 25 bucks for that kind of device. So the market for this kind of device is probably very small. Maybe sell it as luxury item? Who knows…
Also, maybe a smart watch could be used to fullfil this feature already?
As driver’s licenses become digitized, not everyone would be comfortable handing their phone over to authorities, especially those from vulnerable groups.
I think it’s a product that has a lot of potential
From your example: I am from a vulnerable group and I am uncomfortable handing over my phone to authorities. If I am uncomfortable with handing over my phone, why would I digitize my license where I would then be forced to do so? If I was looking for an alternative solution to this problem, it would need to be more convenient than just carrying my existing ID, since the whole advantage of digitizing my ID is so that I don't have to risk losing it. If I have to carry a separate device, that advantage is lost.
Also I would actually talk to the people in the vulnerable groups to validate these assumptions before getting too invested in the narratives. They may not be as concerned as you think or may not have considered the risks.
Temporarily lock your screen to a specific app/view and selectively disable functionality like switching apps or typing.
There are plenty of software only solutions you could devise. Just send them the QR code, send them a link of screen share, etc. If the only real problem is they insist on holding and scanning a physical device, the real problem is their process and you should try to disrupt that. Airports have solved this in theory, they have QR code on boarding passes then have a DIY scanner when needed (when boarding and going through TSA). However, in practice I still see people handing over their devices to a human regularly for various reasons. My guess is you'll find the real issue is people just don't care enough to put up resistance. Ie. if you said "I'll hold it" or something, could they just scan it while it was in your hand? They probably could and would in a large number of cases.
The problem with that is that you're burning goodwill before you even launch.
People land on the page, click BUY, get told that it doesn't exist yet, and spread the word that you're selling vapourware. The next time you have an actual good idea, you'll have no takers.
I've never had to hand my phone to anyone for scanning, because I can simply hold it under the scanner myself.
Anyway, if you follow the steps in the linked article, you'll soon discover if this is a great idea or a poor idea.
[1] Of course, techies have long since missed out on profitable ideas because they saw how technically inferior the idea is and not how user-friendly it is - "Less space than a Nomad. No Wifi. Lame"
<--- You are here.
Will this problem still need solving in 10 years? At what price point can you provide this solution? Is the market for it large? Does it have a network or viral effect? Can you secure enough resources to develop, operate, and widely market it? Do you have 3-4 ideas on how to pivot if the mass market will need something materially different? Do you agree to work longer hours for less pay to pursue a very moderate chance to make it big? Do you realize that the chance to fail or fizzle is larger than the chance to make it big, even if you make zero mistakes?
<-- Congrats, you have a viable startup at this point.
Do something. Break that object at rest inertia. It's hard. And risky.
Start trying to make it real in real life.
Talk to others that have started similar things. Learn. Grow.
You might have to go way out of your comfort zone to do it, but that's ok. You'll learn a lot of really useful things on the journey. You won't know how to do everything, so you'll need to find people to help. You probably will need money and other resources you don't have, too, so you'll have to find people to help you.
You’ll get asked this by VCs as means to evaluate the likelihood of a big win, if doing a VC-backed business. You’ll also be asked this by customers because people simply want the best option that meets their requirements and situation.
Then, if you’re a founder, you’ll likely hear “no” constantly when trying sell your product. This could be energy-draining. Especially if you’re pre-product/market-fit, having that unique insight is a great tool to remind and motivate you that you should keep executing on your idea.
- work really hard on your own business
- create a new thing rather than work on an old one
- work with a small group of very motivated people
- low possibility of huge financial success
There are, of course, plenty of downsides. And I agree that at some point you need motivation other than these. But I don’t think it’s totally silly to look at the startup-founder life and think “I wanna try that”
A goal or a tangible win offers so much more. Problem-oriented solutions are one-to-many. Outcomes are many-to-many,leaving room for domain specific problem solving.
Give people fabric and sewing machines, not tailored clothes.
Big ideas may be 'disruptive' but can require a lot of VC investment to scale enough to be self supporting. Other ideas may be great businesses but not really suitable for VC. Some companies may be more sales oriented, others may be able to lean more on the product selling itself. It also depends on your motivation, is it to 'change the world' or just do something you find interesting with like minded people that can pay the bills and maybe eventually provide financial independence. You may not need to even start a company, with so many boomers retiring you might be able to take over an already established and profitable company.