if i had to look for ideas for a new startup today i'd start in two places: problems i experienced firsthand during atlas, and problems that have interested me for years and that i've been tracking. i've been spending time on startup ideas for a few months now. i enjoy the mental exercise of thinking through every angle of an idea as if i were going to execute it. i did it thinking about how i'd build a crm to compete with hubspot here and how i'd build a new email client here.
thinking about startup ideas as an intellectual exercise is fun because it lets me understand which would be "good" ideas. in this post i'd like to share the framework i use to find ideas and to figure out whether they'd work.
how to look for ideas
as i said, my approach today starts in two places: problems i experienced firsthand during atlas, and problems that have interested me for years and that i follow. i'll start with the first.
people don't talk enough about how having a startup of some kind, no matter what, is a great springboard for thinking up ideas for the next ones. while building atlas 2 years ago i worked in every role: i was designer and dev, sales team, head of marketing. when you work on a startup's problems firsthand a lot of things occur to you that could be better: products that aren't enough or are too generic, apps that are the standard for solving a problem but are a pain to use. my takeaway here, and it's something i didn't know before, is that it's very hard to come up with startup ideas in the abstract and without hands-on experience. i imagine a corporate job might replace this experience too, but since i never had one i couldn't say. i also assume you don't need to found a startup. working at a very early-stage one where they give you a lot of autonomy might be enough.
there are some conditions for this to work: just having a job at a startup isn't enough. it's important that the culture is one of ownership, so they let you experiment with tools and solutions, and also (and fundamentally) so problems don't come pre-digested with a solution already attached. it has to be a place where you're the one looking for solutions.
if landing a job at a startup is hard, there's always the option of starting one. that may sound difficult but there are many ways to begin. my recommendation would probably be to go to an incubator, take a bit of capital, and use it to experiment. but having a startup isn't enough either: your style of working can't be hands-off, otherwise someone else ends up facing the problems we're talking about.
(i say it's hard to think about startup ideas in the abstract because i'm thinking about b2b startups. for a b2c startup it wouldn't be necessary and i could use my own experience to think up solutions.)
the second way of finding startup ideas i've discovered is by tracking problems that interest me. some examples: international bank accounts for latam residents. another: stripe for latam. both have had several solutions over the past years. over time i've watched the rise and fall of many of them.
since these are problems i care about, i spend time thinking about what a good solution would look like. and since it's not something i'm working on, i can watch other people's solutions from a distance. this could give me a kind of second-mover advantage if i ever decided to build in one of these spaces. the upside is that i've spent a long time watching different approaches and what's gone wrong. until a clear winner emerges, it's still worth getting into.
technically anyone can do what i've been doing: talk to founders working in spaces that interest me, understand why they chose the approach they chose, really think about what i'd do differently. all of this on top of having the problem firsthand. these two problems matter to me because i live them both. i have opinions about how i'd want the solutions to look. i know what's been tried, and what has and hasn't worked.
there's something important that follows from this: when i talk about finding ideas, i'm not talking about product ideas, i'm talking about problems. we're hunting for problems, not products. they can be problems companies have or problems individuals have, but we're not coming up with app ideas or their solutions. following the examples above, by problems i mean:
1) 'i want to build a startup for latam but every country has different payment rails and integrating them all takes forever' (there's an underlying idea here too: to build a startup for latam you have to build it for all of latam, you can't do it for just one country, and that's where the complexity of managing payments comes from).
2) 'my country's banking system isn't trustworthy and i want to save my money in a reliable account in hard currency. i also want to be able to withdraw that money to my country.'
one way to know whether the exercise is working is being able to formulate the problem in this way. note that the solution doesn't matter. the solution to the first problem can be Yuno (an integrator of payment platforms across every latam country) or it can be Pomelo (a card issuer in 5 latam countries). both attack the same problem from different angles. (one more detail: look at who founded each one. Yuno: ex-Rappi. very likely experienced the problem they solve today firsthand. Pomelo: ex-Naranja-X. they almost certainly felt the pain of issuing cards firsthand.)
how to evaluate startup ideas
TBD