**Want to start a startup?** Get funded by [Y
Combinator](http://ycombinator.com/apply.html).  
  
  
November 2012  
  
The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to
look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.  
  
The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're
something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and
that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and
Facebook all began this way.  
  
**Problems**  
  
Why is it so important to work on a problem you have? Among other things, it
ensures the problem really exists. It sounds obvious to say you should only
work on problems that exist. And yet by far the most common mistake startups
make is to solve problems no one has.  
  
I made it myself. In 1995 I started a company to put art galleries online. But
galleries didn't want to be online. It's not how the art business works. So
why did I spend 6 months working on this stupid idea? Because I didn't pay
attention to users. I invented a model of the world that didn't correspond to
reality, and worked from that. I didn't notice my model was wrong until I
tried to convince users to pay for what we'd built. Even then I took
embarrassingly long to catch on. I was attached to my model of the world, and
I'd spent a lot of time on the software. They had to want it!  
  
Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by
trying to think of startup ideas. That m.o. is doubly dangerous: it doesn't
merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough
to fool you into working on them.  
  
At YC we call these "made-up" or "sitcom" startup ideas. Imagine one of the
characters on a TV show was starting a startup. The writers would have to
invent something for it to do. But coming up with good startup ideas is hard.
It's not something you can do for the asking. So (unless they got amazingly
lucky) the writers would come up with an idea that sounded plausible, but was
actually bad.  
  
For example, a social network for pet owners. It doesn't sound obviously
mistaken. Millions of people have pets. Often they care a lot about their pets
and spend a lot of money on them. Surely many of these people would like a
site where they could talk to other pet owners. Not all of them perhaps, but
if just 2 or 3 percent were regular visitors, you could have millions of
users. You could serve them targeted offers, and maybe charge for premium
features. [1]  
  
The danger of an idea like this is that when you run it by your friends with
pets, they don't say "I would _never_ use this." They say "Yeah, maybe I could
see using something like that." Even when the startup launches, it will sound
plausible to a lot of people. They don't want to use it themselves, at least
not right now, but they could imagine other people wanting it. Sum that
reaction across the entire population, and you have zero users. [2]  
  
**Well**  
  
When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need
what they're making — not just people who could see themselves using it one
day, but who want it urgently. Usually this initial group of users is small,
for the simple reason that if there were something that large numbers of
people urgently needed and that could be built with the amount of effort a
startup usually puts into a version one, it would probably already exist.
Which means you have to compromise on one dimension: you can either build
something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small
number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter. Not all ideas of that
type are good startup ideas, but nearly all good startup ideas are of that
type.  
  
Imagine a graph whose x axis represents all the people who might want what
you're making and whose y axis represents how much they want it. If you invert
the scale on the y axis, you can envision companies as holes. Google is an
immense crater: hundreds of millions of people use it, and they need it a lot.
A startup just starting out can't expect to excavate that much volume. So you
have two choices about the shape of hole you start with. You can either dig a
hole that's broad but shallow, or one that's narrow and deep, like a well.  
  
Made-up startup ideas are usually of the first type. Lots of people are mildly
interested in a social network for pet owners.  
  
Nearly all good startup ideas are of the second type. Microsoft was a well
when they made Altair Basic. There were only a couple thousand Altair owners,
but without this software they were programming in machine language. Thirty
years later Facebook had the same shape. Their first site was exclusively for
Harvard students, of which there are only a few thousand, but those few
thousand users wanted it a lot.  
  
When you have an idea for a startup, ask yourself: who wants this right now?
Who wants this so much that they'll use it even when it's a crappy version one
made by a two-person startup they've never heard of? If you can't answer that,
the idea is probably bad. [3]  
  
You don't need the narrowness of the well per se. It's depth you need; you get
narrowness as a byproduct of optimizing for depth (and speed). But you almost
always do get it. In practice the link between depth and narrowness is so
strong that it's a good sign when you know that an idea will appeal strongly
to a specific group or type of user.  
  
But while demand shaped like a well is almost a necessary condition for a good
startup idea, it's not a sufficient one. If Mark Zuckerberg had built
something that could only ever have appealed to Harvard students, it would not
have been a good startup idea. Facebook was a good idea because it started
with a small market there was a fast path out of. Colleges are similar enough
that if you build a facebook that works at Harvard, it will work at any
college. So you spread rapidly through all the colleges. Once you have all the
college students, you get everyone else simply by letting them in.  
  
Similarly for Microsoft: Basic for the Altair; Basic for other machines; other
languages besides Basic; operating systems; applications; IPO.  
  
**Self**  
  
How do you tell whether there's a path out of an idea? How do you tell whether
something is the germ of a giant company, or just a niche product? Often you
can't. The founders of Airbnb didn't realize at first how big a market they
were tapping. Initially they had a much narrower idea. They were going to let
hosts rent out space on their floors during conventions. They didn't foresee
the expansion of this idea; it forced itself upon them gradually. All they
knew at first is that they were onto something. That's probably as much as
Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg knew at first.  
  
Occasionally it's obvious from the beginning when there's a path out of the
initial niche. And sometimes I can see a path that's not immediately obvious;
that's one of our specialties at YC. But there are limits to how well this can
be done, no matter how much experience you have. The most important thing to
understand about paths out of the initial idea is the meta-fact that these are
hard to see.  
  
So if you can't predict whether there's a path out of an idea, how do you
choose between ideas? The truth is disappointing but interesting: if you're
the right sort of person, you have the right sort of hunches. If you're at the
leading edge of a field that's changing fast, when you have a hunch that
something is worth doing, you're more likely to be right.  
  
In _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ , Robert Pirsig says:

> You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself
> perfect and then just paint naturally.

I've wondered about that passage since I read it in high school. I'm not sure
how useful his advice is for painting specifically, but it fits this situation
well. Empirically, the way to have good startup ideas is to become the sort of
person who has them.  
  
Being at the leading edge of a field doesn't mean you have to be one of the
people pushing it forward. You can also be at the leading edge as a user. It
was not so much because he was a programmer that Facebook seemed a good idea
to Mark Zuckerberg as because he used computers so much. If you'd asked most
40 year olds in 2004 whether they'd like to publish their lives semi-publicly
on the Internet, they'd have been horrified at the idea. But Mark already
lived online; to him it seemed natural.  
  
Paul Buchheit says that people at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field
"live in the future." Combine that with Pirsig and you get:

> Live in the future, then build what's missing.

That describes the way many if not most of the biggest startups got started.
Neither Apple nor Yahoo nor Google nor Facebook were even supposed to be
companies at first. They grew out of things their founders built because there
seemed a gap in the world.  
  
If you look at the way successful founders have had their ideas, it's
generally the result of some external stimulus hitting a prepared mind. Bill
Gates and Paul Allen hear about the Altair and think "I bet we could write a
Basic interpreter for it." Drew Houston realizes he's forgotten his USB stick
and thinks "I really need to make my files live online." Lots of people heard
about the Altair. Lots forgot USB sticks. The reason those stimuli caused
those founders to start companies was that their experiences had prepared them
to notice the opportunities they represented.  
  
The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not "think up"
but "notice." At YC we call ideas that grow naturally out of the founders' own
experiences "organic" startup ideas. The most successful startups almost all
begin this way.  
  
That may not have been what you wanted to hear. You may have expected recipes
for coming up with startup ideas, and instead I'm telling you that the key is
to have a mind that's prepared in the right way. But disappointing though it
may be, this is the truth. And it is a recipe of a sort, just one that in the
worst case takes a year rather than a weekend.  
  
If you're not at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, you can get
to one. For example, anyone reasonably smart can probably get to an edge of
programming (e.g. building mobile apps) in a year. Since a successful startup
will consume at least 3-5 years of your life, a year's preparation would be a
reasonable investment. Especially if you're also looking for a cofounder. [4]  
  
You don't have to learn programming to be at the leading edge of a domain
that's changing fast. Other domains change fast. But while learning to hack is
not necessary, it is for the forseeable future sufficient. As Marc Andreessen
put it, software is eating the world, and this trend has decades left to run.  
  
Knowing how to hack also means that when you have ideas, you'll be able to
implement them. That's not absolutely necessary (Jeff Bezos couldn't) but it's
an advantage. It's a big advantage, when you're considering an idea like
putting a college facebook online, if instead of merely thinking "That's an
interesting idea," you can think instead "That's an interesting idea. I'll try
building an initial version tonight." It's even better when you're both a
programmer and the target user, because then the cycle of generating new
versions and testing them on users can happen inside one head.  
  
**Noticing**  
  
Once you're living in the future in some respect, the way to notice startup
ideas is to look for things that seem to be missing. If you're really at the
leading edge of a rapidly changing field, there will be things that are
obviously missing. What won't be obvious is that they're startup ideas. So if
you want to find startup ideas, don't merely turn on the filter "What's
missing?" Also turn off every other filter, particularly "Could this be a big
company?" There's plenty of time to apply that test later. But if you're
thinking about that initially, it may not only filter out lots of good ideas,
but also cause you to focus on bad ones.  
  
Most things that are missing will take some time to see. You almost have to
trick yourself into seeing the ideas around you.  
  
But you _know_ the ideas are out there. This is not one of those problems
where there might not be an answer. It's impossibly unlikely that this is the
exact moment when technological progress stops. You can be sure people are
going to build things in the next few years that will make you think "What did
I do before x?"  
  
And when these problems get solved, they will probably seem flamingly obvious
in retrospect. What you need to do is turn off the filters that usually
prevent you from seeing them. The most powerful is simply taking the current
state of the world for granted. Even the most radically open-minded of us
mostly do that. You couldn't get from your bed to the front door if you
stopped to question everything.  
  
But if you're looking for startup ideas you can sacrifice some of the
efficiency of taking the status quo for granted and start to question things.
Why is your inbox overflowing? Because you get a lot of email, or because it's
hard to get email out of your inbox? Why do you get so much email? What
problems are people trying to solve by sending you email? Are there better
ways to solve them? And why is it hard to get emails out of your inbox? Why do
you keep emails around after you've read them? Is an inbox the optimal tool
for that?  
  
Pay particular attention to things that chafe you. The advantage of taking the
status quo for granted is not just that it makes life (locally) more
efficient, but also that it makes life more tolerable. If you knew about all
the things we'll get in the next 50 years but don't have yet, you'd find
present day life pretty constraining, just as someone from the present would
if they were sent back 50 years in a time machine. When something annoys you,
it could be because you're living in the future.  
  
When you find the right sort of problem, you should probably be able to
describe it as _obvious_ , at least to you. When we started Viaweb, all the
online stores were built by hand, by web designers making individual HTML
pages. It was obvious to us as programmers that these sites would have to be
generated by software. [5]  
  
Which means, strangely enough, that coming up with startup ideas is a question
of seeing the obvious. That suggests how weird this process is: you're trying
to see things that are obvious, and yet that you hadn't seen.  
  
Since what you need to do here is loosen up your own mind, it may be best not
to make too much of a direct frontal attack on the problem — i.e. to sit down
and try to think of ideas. The best plan may be just to keep a background
process running, looking for things that seem to be missing. Work on hard
problems, driven mainly by curiosity, but have a second self watching over
your shoulder, taking note of gaps and anomalies. [6]  
  
Give yourself some time. You have a lot of control over the rate at which you
turn yours into a prepared mind, but you have less control over the stimuli
that spark ideas when they hit it. If Bill Gates and Paul Allen had
constrained themselves to come up with a startup idea in one month, what if
they'd chosen a month before the Altair appeared? They probably would have
worked on a less promising idea. Drew Houston did work on a less promising
idea before Dropbox: an SAT prep startup. But Dropbox was a much better idea,
both in the absolute sense and also as a match for his skills. [7]  
  
A good way to trick yourself into noticing ideas is to work on projects that
seem like they'd be cool. If you do that, you'll naturally tend to build
things that are missing. It wouldn't seem as interesting to build something
that already existed.  
  
Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on
things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones. When
something is described as a toy, that means it has everything an idea needs
except being important. It's cool; users love it; it just doesn't matter. But
if you're living in the future and you build something cool that users love,
it may matter more than outsiders think. Microcomputers seemed like toys when
Apple and Microsoft started working on them. I'm old enough to remember that
era; the usual term for people with their own microcomputers was "hobbyists."
BackRub seemed like an inconsequential science project. The Facebook was just
a way for undergrads to stalk one another.  
  
At YC we're excited when we meet startups working on things that we could
imagine know-it-alls on forums dismissing as toys. To us that's positive
evidence an idea is good.  
  
If you can afford to take a long view (and arguably you can't afford not to),
you can turn "Live in the future and build what's missing" into something even
better:

> Live in the future and build what seems interesting.

  
  
**School**  
  
That's what I'd advise college students to do, rather than trying to learn
about "entrepreneurship." "Entrepreneurship" is something you learn best by
doing it. The examples of the most successful founders make that clear. What
you should be spending your time on in college is ratcheting yourself into the
future. College is an incomparable opportunity to do that. What a waste to
sacrifice an opportunity to solve the hard part of starting a startup —
becoming the sort of person who can have organic startup ideas — by spending
time learning about the easy part. Especially since you won't even really
learn about it, any more than you'd learn about sex in a class. All you'll
learn is the words for things.  
  
The clash of domains is a particularly fruitful source of ideas. If you know a
lot about programming and you start learning about some other field, you'll
probably see problems that software could solve. In fact, you're doubly likely
to find good problems in another domain: (a) the inhabitants of that domain
are not as likely as software people to have already solved their problems
with software, and (b) since you come into the new domain totally ignorant,
you don't even know what the status quo is to take it for granted.  
  
So if you're a CS major and you want to start a startup, instead of taking a
class on entrepreneurship you're better off taking a class on, say, genetics.
Or better still, go work for a biotech company. CS majors normally get summer
jobs at computer hardware or software companies. But if you want to find
startup ideas, you might do better to get a summer job in some unrelated
field. [8]  
  
Or don't take any extra classes, and just build things. It's no coincidence
that Microsoft and Facebook both got started in January. At Harvard that is
(or was) Reading Period, when students have no classes to attend because
they're supposed to be studying for finals. [9]  
  
But don't feel like you have to build things that will become startups. That's
premature optimization. Just build things. Preferably with other students.
It's not just the classes that make a university such a good place to crank
oneself into the future. You're also surrounded by other people trying to do
the same thing. If you work together with them on projects, you'll end up
producing not just organic ideas, but organic ideas with organic founding
teams — and that, empirically, is the best combination.  
  
Beware of research. If an undergrad writes something all his friends start
using, it's quite likely to represent a good startup idea. Whereas a PhD
dissertation is extremely unlikely to. For some reason, the more a project has
to count as research, the less likely it is to be something that could be
turned into a startup. [10] I think the reason is that the subset of ideas
that count as research is so narrow that it's unlikely that a project that
satisfied that constraint would also satisfy the orthogonal constraint of
solving users' problems. Whereas when students (or professors) build something
as a side-project, they automatically gravitate toward solving users' problems
— perhaps even with an additional energy that comes from being freed from the
constraints of research.  
  
**Competition**  
  
Because a good idea should seem obvious, when you have one you'll tend to feel
that you're late. Don't let that deter you. Worrying that you're late is one
of the signs of a good idea. Ten minutes of searching the web will usually
settle the question. Even if you find someone else working on the same thing,
you're probably not too late. It's exceptionally rare for startups to be
killed by competitors — so rare that you can almost discount the possibility.
So unless you discover a competitor with the sort of lock-in that would
prevent users from choosing you, don't discard the idea.  
  
If you're uncertain, ask users. The question of whether you're too late is
subsumed by the question of whether anyone urgently needs what you plan to
make. If you have something that no competitor does and that some subset of
users urgently need, you have a beachhead. [11]  
  
The question then is whether that beachhead is big enough. Or more
importantly, who's in it: if the beachhead consists of people doing something
lots more people will be doing in the future, then it's probably big enough no
matter how small it is. For example, if you're building something
differentiated from competitors by the fact that it works on phones, but it
only works on the newest phones, that's probably a big enough beachhead.  
  
Err on the side of doing things where you'll face competitors. Inexperienced
founders usually give competitors more credit than they deserve. Whether you
succeed depends far more on you than on your competitors. So better a good
idea with competitors than a bad one without.  
  
You don't need to worry about entering a "crowded market" so long as you have
a thesis about what everyone else in it is overlooking. In fact that's a very
promising starting point. Google was that type of idea. Your thesis has to be
more precise than "we're going to make an x that doesn't suck" though. You
have to be able to phrase it in terms of something the incumbents are
overlooking. Best of all is when you can say that they didn't have the courage
of their convictions, and that your plan is what they'd have done if they'd
followed through on their own insights. Google was that type of idea too. The
search engines that preceded them shied away from the most radical
implications of what they were doing — particularly that the better a job they
did, the faster users would leave.  
  
A crowded market is actually a good sign, because it means both that there's
demand and that none of the existing solutions are good enough. A startup
can't hope to enter a market that's obviously big and yet in which they have
no competitors. So any startup that succeeds is either going to be entering a
market with existing competitors, but armed with some secret weapon that will
get them all the users (like Google), or entering a market that looks small
but which will turn out to be big (like Microsoft). [12]  
  
**Filters**  
  
There are two more filters you'll need to turn off if you want to notice
startup ideas: the unsexy filter and the schlep filter.  
  
Most programmers wish they could start a startup by just writing some
brilliant code, pushing it to a server, and having users pay them lots of
money. They'd prefer not to deal with tedious problems or get involved in
messy ways with the real world. Which is a reasonable preference, because such
things slow you down. But this preference is so widespread that the space of
convenient startup ideas has been stripped pretty clean. If you let your mind
wander a few blocks down the street to the messy, tedious ideas, you'll find
valuable ones just sitting there waiting to be implemented.  
  
The schlep filter is so dangerous that I wrote a separate essay about the
condition it induces, which I called [schlep blindness](schlep.html). I gave
Stripe as an example of a startup that benefited from turning off this filter,
and a pretty striking example it is. Thousands of programmers were in a
position to see this idea; thousands of programmers knew how painful it was to
process payments before Stripe. But when they looked for startup ideas they
didn't see this one, because unconsciously they shrank from having to deal
with payments. And dealing with payments is a schlep for Stripe, but not an
intolerable one. In fact they might have had net less pain; because the fear
of dealing with payments kept most people away from this idea, Stripe has had
comparatively smooth sailing in other areas that are sometimes painful, like
user acquisition. They didn't have to try very hard to make themselves heard
by users, because users were desperately waiting for what they were building.  
  
The unsexy filter is similar to the schlep filter, except it keeps you from
working on problems you despise rather than ones you fear. We overcame this
one to work on Viaweb. There were interesting things about the architecture of
our software, but we weren't interested in ecommerce per se. We could see the
problem was one that needed to be solved though.  
  
Turning off the schlep filter is more important than turning off the unsexy
filter, because the schlep filter is more likely to be an illusion. And even
to the degree it isn't, it's a worse form of self-indulgence. Starting a
successful startup is going to be fairly laborious no matter what. Even if the
product doesn't entail a lot of schleps, you'll still have plenty dealing with
investors, hiring and firing people, and so on. So if there's some idea you
think would be cool but you're kept away from by fear of the schleps involved,
don't worry: any sufficiently good idea will have as many.  
  
The unsexy filter, while still a source of error, is not as entirely useless
as the schlep filter. If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing
rapidly, your ideas about what's sexy will be somewhat correlated with what's
valuable in practice. Particularly as you get older and more experienced. Plus
if you find an idea sexy, you'll work on it more enthusiastically. [13]  
  
**Recipes**  
  
While the best way to discover startup ideas is to become the sort of person
who has them and then build whatever interests you, sometimes you don't have
that luxury. Sometimes you need an idea now. For example, if you're working on
a startup and your initial idea turns out to be bad.  
  
For the rest of this essay I'll talk about tricks for coming up with startup
ideas on demand. Although empirically you're better off using the organic
strategy, you could succeed this way. You just have to be more disciplined.
When you use the organic method, you don't even notice an idea unless it's
evidence that something is truly missing. But when you make a conscious effort
to think of startup ideas, you have to replace this natural constraint with
self-discipline. You'll see a lot more ideas, most of them bad, so you need to
be able to filter them.  
  
One of the biggest dangers of not using the organic method is the example of
the organic method. Organic ideas feel like inspirations. There are a lot of
stories about successful startups that began when the founders had what seemed
a crazy idea but "just knew" it was promising. When you feel that about an
idea you've had while trying to come up with startup ideas, you're probably
mistaken.  
  
When searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise. If
you're a database expert, don't build a chat app for teenagers (unless you're
also a teenager). Maybe it's a good idea, but you can't trust your judgment
about that, so ignore it. There have to be other ideas that involve databases,
and whose quality you can judge. Do you find it hard to come up with good
ideas involving databases? That's because your expertise raises your
standards. Your ideas about chat apps are just as bad, but you're giving
yourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain.  
  
The place to start looking for ideas is things you need. There _must_ be
things you need. [14]  
  
One good trick is to ask yourself whether in your previous job you ever found
yourself saying "Why doesn't someone make x? If someone made x we'd buy it in
a second." If you can think of any x people said that about, you probably have
an idea. You know there's demand, and people don't say that about things that
are impossible to build.  
  
More generally, try asking yourself whether there's something unusual about
you that makes your needs different from most other people's. You're probably
not the only one. It's especially good if you're different in a way people
will increasingly be.  
  
If you're changing ideas, one unusual thing about you is the idea you'd
previously been working on. Did you discover any needs while working on it?
Several well-known startups began this way. Hotmail began as something its
founders wrote to talk about their previous startup idea while they were
working at their day jobs. [15]  
  
A particularly promising way to be unusual is to be young. Some of the most
valuable new ideas take root first among people in their teens and early
twenties. And while young founders are at a disadvantage in some respects,
they're the only ones who really understand their peers. It would have been
very hard for someone who wasn't a college student to start Facebook. So if
you're a young founder (under 23 say), are there things you and your friends
would like to do that current technology won't let you?  
  
The next best thing to an unmet need of your own is an unmet need of someone
else. Try talking to everyone you can about the gaps they find in the world.
What's missing? What would they like to do that they can't? What's tedious or
annoying, particularly in their work? Let the conversation get general; don't
be trying too hard to find startup ideas. You're just looking for something to
spark a thought. Maybe you'll notice a problem they didn't consciously realize
they had, because you know how to solve it.  
  
When you find an unmet need that isn't your own, it may be somewhat blurry at
first. The person who needs something may not know exactly what they need. In
that case I often recommend that founders act like consultants — that they do
what they'd do if they'd been retained to solve the problems of this one user.
People's problems are similar enough that nearly all the code you write this
way will be reusable, and whatever isn't will be a small price to start out
certain that you've reached the bottom of the well. [16]  
  
One way to ensure you do a good job solving other people's problems is to make
them your own. When Rajat Suri of E la Carte decided to write software for
restaurants, he got a job as a waiter to learn how restaurants worked. That
may seem like taking things to extremes, but startups are extreme. We love it
when founders do such things.  
  
In fact, one strategy I recommend to people who need a new idea is not merely
to turn off their schlep and unsexy filters, but to seek out ideas that are
unsexy or involve schleps. Don't try to start Twitter. Those ideas are so rare
that you can't find them by looking for them. Make something unsexy that
people will pay you for.  
  
A good trick for bypassing the schlep and to some extent the unsexy filter is
to ask what you wish someone else would build, so that you could use it. What
would you pay for right now?  
  
Since startups often garbage-collect broken companies and industries, it can
be a good trick to look for those that are dying, or deserve to, and try to
imagine what kind of company would profit from their demise. For example,
journalism is in free fall at the moment. But there may still be money to be
made from something like journalism. What sort of company might cause people
in the future to say "this replaced journalism" on some axis?  
  
But imagine asking that in the future, not now. When one company or industry
replaces another, it usually comes in from the side. So don't look for a
replacement for x; look for something that people will later say turned out to
be a replacement for x. And be imaginative about the axis along which the
replacement occurs. Traditional journalism, for example, is a way for readers
to get information and to kill time, a way for writers to make money and to
get attention, and a vehicle for several different types of advertising. It
could be replaced on any of these axes (it has already started to be on most).  
  
When startups consume incumbents, they usually start by serving some small but
important market that the big players ignore. It's particularly good if
there's an admixture of disdain in the big players' attitude, because that
often misleads them. For example, after Steve Wozniak built the computer that
became the Apple I, he felt obliged to give his then-employer Hewlett-Packard
the option to produce it. Fortunately for him, they turned it down, and one of
the reasons they did was that it used a TV for a monitor, which seemed
intolerably d�class� to a high-end hardware company like HP was at the time.
[17]  
  
Are there groups of [scruffy](marginal.html) but sophisticated users like the
early microcomputer "hobbyists" that are currently being ignored by the big
players? A startup with its sights set on bigger things can often capture a
small market easily by expending an effort that wouldn't be justified by that
market alone.  
  
Similarly, since the most successful startups generally ride some wave bigger
than themselves, it could be a good trick to look for waves and ask how one
could benefit from them. The prices of gene sequencing and 3D printing are
both experiencing Moore's Law-like declines. What new things will we be able
to do in the new world we'll have in a few years? What are we unconsciously
ruling out as impossible that will soon be possible?  
  
**Organic**  
  
But talking about looking explicitly for waves makes it clear that such
recipes are plan B for getting startup ideas. Looking for waves is essentially
a way to simulate the organic method. If you're at the leading edge of some
rapidly changing field, you don't have to look for waves; you are the wave.  
  
Finding startup ideas is a subtle business, and that's why most people who try
fail so miserably. It doesn't work well simply to try to think of startup
ideas. If you do that, you get bad ones that sound dangerously plausible. The
best approach is more indirect: if you have the right sort of background, good
startup ideas will seem obvious to you. But even then, not immediately. It
takes time to come across situations where you notice something missing. And
often these gaps won't seem to be ideas for companies, just things that would
be interesting to build. Which is why it's good to have the time and the
inclination to build things just because they're interesting.  
  
Live in the future and build what seems interesting. Strange as it sounds,
that's the real recipe.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
**Notes**  
  
[1] This form of bad idea has been around as long as the web. It was common in
the 1990s, except then people who had it used to say they were going to create
a portal for x instead of a social network for x. Structurally the idea is
stone soup: you post a sign saying "this is the place for people interested in
x," and all those people show up and you make money from them. What lures
founders into this sort of idea are statistics about the millions of people
who might be interested in each type of x. What they forget is that any given
person might have 20 affinities by this standard, and no one is going to visit
20 different communities regularly.  
  
[2] I'm not saying, incidentally, that I know for sure a social network for
pet owners is a bad idea. I know it's a bad idea the way I know randomly
generated DNA would not produce a viable organism. The set of plausible
sounding startup ideas is many times larger than the set of good ones, and
many of the good ones don't even sound that plausible. So if all you know
about a startup idea is that it sounds plausible, you have to assume it's bad.  
  
[3] More precisely, the users' need has to give them sufficient activation
energy to start using whatever you make, which can vary a lot. For example,
the activation energy for enterprise software sold through traditional
channels is very high, so you'd have to be a _lot_ better to get users to
switch. Whereas the activation energy required to switch to a new search
engine is low. Which in turn is why search engines are so much better than
enterprise software.  
  
[4] This gets harder as you get older. While the space of ideas doesn't have
dangerous local maxima, the space of careers does. There are fairly high walls
between most of the paths people take through life, and the older you get, the
higher the walls become.  
  
[5] It was also obvious to us that the web was going to be a big deal. Few
non-programmers grasped that in 1995, but the programmers had seen what GUIs
had done for desktop computers.  
  
[6] Maybe it would work to have this second self keep a journal, and each
night to make a brief entry listing the gaps and anomalies you'd noticed that
day. Not startup ideas, just the raw gaps and anomalies.  
  
[7] Sam Altman points out that taking time to come up with an idea is not
merely a better strategy in an absolute sense, but also like an undervalued
stock in that so few founders do it.  
  
There's comparatively little competition for the best ideas, because few
founders are willing to put in the time required to notice them. Whereas there
is a great deal of competition for mediocre ideas, because when people make up
startup ideas, they tend to make up the same ones.  
  
[8] For the computer hardware and software companies, summer jobs are the
first phase of the recruiting funnel. But if you're good you can skip the
first phase. If you're good you'll have no trouble getting hired by these
companies when you graduate, regardless of how you spent your summers.  
  
[9] The empirical evidence suggests that if colleges want to help their
students start startups, the best thing they can do is leave them alone in the
right way.  
  
[10] I'm speaking here of IT startups; in biotech things are different.  
  
[11] This is an instance of a more general rule: focus on users, not
competitors. The most important information about competitors is what you
learn via users anyway.  
  
[12] In practice most successful startups have elements of both. And you can
describe each strategy in terms of the other by adjusting the boundaries of
what you call the market. But it's useful to consider these two ideas
separately.  
  
[13] I almost hesitate to raise that point though. Startups are businesses;
the point of a business is to make money; and with that additional constraint,
you can't expect you'll be able to spend all your time working on what
interests you most.  
  
[14] The need has to be a strong one. You can retroactively describe any made-
up idea as something you need. But do you really need that recipe site or
local event aggregator as much as Drew Houston needed Dropbox, or Brian Chesky
and Joe Gebbia needed Airbnb?  
  
Quite often at YC I find myself asking founders "Would you use this thing
yourself, if you hadn't written it?" and you'd be surprised how often the
answer is no.  
  
[15] Paul Buchheit points out that trying to sell something bad can be a
source of better ideas:  
  
"The best technique I've found for dealing with YC companies that have bad
ideas is to tell them to go sell the product ASAP (before wasting time
building it). Not only do they learn that nobody wants what they are building,
they very often come back with a real idea that they discovered in the process
of trying to sell the bad idea."  
  
[16] Here's a recipe that might produce the next Facebook, if you're college
students. If you have a connection to one of the more powerful sororities at
your school, approach the queen bees thereof and offer to be their personal IT
consultants, building anything they could imagine needing in their social
lives that didn't already exist. Anything that got built this way would be
very promising, because such users are not just the most demanding but also
the perfect point to spread from.  
  
I have no idea whether this would work.  
  
[17] And the reason it used a TV for a monitor is that Steve Wozniak started
out by solving his own problems. He, like most of his peers, couldn't afford a
monitor.  
  
  
  
**Thanks** to Sam Altman, Mike Arrington, Paul Buchheit, John Collison,
Patrick Collison, Garry Tan, and Harj Taggar for reading drafts of this, and
Marc Andreessen, Joe Gebbia, Reid Hoffman, Shel Kaphan, Mike Moritz and Kevin
Systrom for answering my questions about startup history.  
  

