I collected startup ideas. It changed how I think about ideas completely | Hacker News Reader

I collected startup ideas. It changed how I think about ideas completely

11 pointsvibecoder2111 comments

For the longest time I thought I just hadn’t found the idea yet. I’d get excited about something, go a few layers deep, maybe even start planning it out… and then a week or two later I’d lose conviction. Then repeat the same thing with a different idea. It felt productive in the moment, but looking back it was just a loop.

At some point I got tired of that and did something slightly different. Instead of picking one idea and obsessing over it, I started collecting them. Just dumping everything interesting I came across into one place, patterns, half-baked thoughts, things I’d normally ignore after a day. That eventually turned into a small database (I later called it StartupIdeasDB, mostly for myself), but the useful part wasn’t the tool,it was being able to see ideas next to each other without being emotionally attached to any one of them.

And that’s where things started to shift. A lot of ideas that felt “solid” in isolation looked pretty weak when placed next to 20 similar ones. You start noticing how often the same concepts repeat with slightly different wording. You also start realising how easy it is to convince yourself something is good just because you spent a few hours thinking about it.

The bigger realisation for me was that I was asking the wrong question the whole time. I kept asking “is this a good idea?” which is a very easy question to answer with bias. What actually helped more was asking “who is this immediately useful for, and how would it reach them?” Most ideas don’t survive that question.

Also noticed that the difference between something sounding smart and something people will actually use is… huge. Way bigger than I assumed earlier. Ironically, going through hundreds of ideas didn’t make me more creative or inspired. It made me a lot more skeptical. In a good way, I think.

Now when I come across something interesting, my default instinct is to try and disprove it quickly instead of getting excited and building around it. Still figuring this out, but this shift alone has probably saved me months of going in the wrong direction.

How are others here evaluate ideas before committing to them ?

For me, it's around product-market-distribution-founder fit. Some questions are:

Product-market: Are folks already spending money on such products or problems? How does my product solve that issue? What are their alternatives, including doing nothing? Are there big players? If yes, there's plenty of money. How's my product different? Any smaller niches that are underserved?

Distribution: How can I reach the target customers? Is that a channel I can actually access? Do i even have a chance to reach them?

Founder: Is that product-market-distribution combination my thing? Is that a distribution channel I want to use, or does it turn me completely off? Do I even want to serve those types of customers?

It might be a super product-market-distribution fit, but if it includes stuff I dislike or even hate, the risk of procrastination, etc., rises sky-high, and everything becomes a pain, a dread, and a constant fight, exhausting my willpower fast and thus causing me to fail.

I look for a "social friction" moat. If an idea can be executed entirely from behind a keyboard, the competition is infinite. But if it requires me to sweat, do meatspace socializing, and actually walk into a physical building to hand people a solution, competition drops to near zero.

The literal application of "do things that don't scale."

Beyond that, I look for ROI besides wealth. Even if it doesn't blow up in popularity will it still improve my life if just a few adopt it/appreciate it?

Do you know what "startup" means? A restaurant business isn't a startup. A consultancy isn't a startup. The whole point is to do something that does scale.

VCs won't invest in something that doesn't scale, and therefore angels and incubators/accelerators won't either, if they have any sense.

The software scales just fine, the initial user acquisition doesn't. That's literally the premise of the PG essay I quoted.

But thanks for the pedantic dictionary check on what a VC will fund. Super helpful contribution to a conversation about whether an idea is actually useful to human beings. Not all of us are building just to beg for angel money.

I would say the good idea is something that you solve for yourself - sort of solving personal problem. And then realizing you can market that as your product to help others solve the same problem. That's the main idea of any business or any tech startup. Isn't it?

If you think you have found the right idea to devote your next 5-10 years of life, then normatively thinking you should be able to create a 500-1000 pages PPT to document all the strengths and shortcomings of your idea/product and it's possible evolution path for next 5 years. If you think this exercise is not worthwhile enough, then know that you are not serious and are just chasing the hype. This exercise is much easier now due to AI but you still need to ask right questions.

This is overengineering taken to the max. Probably OCPD or waterfall methodology or something. While you're creating your 500+ page deck I will already be iterating and learning on my startup idea in a lean/agile way.

Nothing wrong in that. But in research we have a thing called survey the already existing literature on the problem and checking what worked or didn't. If you want to learn by doing mistakes of your own, be my guest. Just know that it is expensive. Also if you aren't thinking that hard about your startup ideas, then most probably the VCs aren't either which means you get some free money to play around with and make mistakes as long as the music last. That is also a thing.

Maybe I am wrong, but I don't think OP is suggesting that you actually create all the PPT slides and document everything before building a prototype or otherwise taking steps to start building a workable product.

But if the idea isn't fleshed out enough where you think that you could go through all that trouble; then maybe you are jumping the gun.

Changing the process is great. But did it help you start any of those ideas??

There are whole books written on the topic. Entrepreneurship programs cover a lot of techniques.

What I usually do is analysis: SWOT: Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. In other words, why am I in position of doing it better, why other can do it better, is there an opportunity that only I see, are there threats from other places, like other industries, government, etc.

I search for a problem to solve. You need a problem that you clearly see that people are struggling. That is why experience at some area is very important. For example, working in the kitchen at a restaurant, you will see more problems and inconveniences, than me who only have ideas. Working on that place, you know the people personally, you have your PERSONAS, you first testers!

Once you have a problem, once you have a good analysis of what's possible, where you are in the market, then comes the real requirements gathering, and subsequent. Don't hurry, talk to people gain more information, read more books on the topic, meet people.

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