“Some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it’s a simple adventure story. Others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe.” – Lex Luthor
tl;dr
- The equal-odds rule states that the number of creative successes correlates to the total number of works created. So more ideas increase your chances of finding great startup opportunities.
- To find plenty of startup ideas, become a prolific problem-spotter using the formula: External Stimuli x Prepared Mind = Ideas.
- Maximize external stimuli by consuming content, talking to lots of people, engaging online, and seeking new experiences.
- Prepare your mind by developing mental defenses against biases and expanding your awareness of possible solutions.
- Commit to a daily idea quota (e.g. 5 problems noticed per day) and log them without self-editing.
- Apply this formula consistently for at least a month to build your creative muscle and generate a large volume of potential startup ideas.
Intro
You’re ambitious and you want to start your own business. But you don’t know what to work on…
For some founders, the transition into startups is organic. For Sara Blakely, the idea for Spanx flowed out of personal experience when she was getting ready for a party and was frustrated with how her underwear looked under her white pants. The startup followed the idea. For other founders, the steps are reversed – They declare they’re going to build a startup, and find the idea after.
If you’re in the latter group, the part of the journey, where you’re idea-less, can be the most frustrating. I was there at the end of 2023. Even though my last startup sunk, my entrepreneurial ambition did not waver. But I didn’t know what to work on. Instead of rushing into the first thing that caught my interest, I decided to resist the temptation and stew in the discomfort of not having direction. I wanted to work on a great problem–not just any problem–and discover that would take time.
Plenty of words have been written on the execution side of startups–eg. how to land your first customer– where your destination is known. But there’s a lack of tactical advice on how to succeed on the searching side. That’s because, “searching”, by its very nature, has no good yardstick to benchmark progress. But in seeking out an idea, I did not want to drift along passively, assuming an idea will fall into my lap eventually. I approached the search process with intentionality.
The basis of my approach: Become a prolific problem-spotter. An endless number of things can be better, so I wanted to pluck ideas from the abundance of problems out there. From sheer quantity, some of those ideas had to be winners.
In this post, I outline a systematic procedure for finding business opportunities. It’s not about qualifying “good” ideas, or culling “bad” ones (A subject for a later post). It’s simply about volume.
Creative Doctrine
The “equal-odds rule”, put forward by psychology professor Dean Keith Simonton, states that the number of one’s creative successes correlates to the total number of works created. More symphonies, more great symphonies. More mathematical theorems, more groundbreaking theorems. The equal-odds rule appears to apply to a staggering array of fields. What set the winners apart in Simonton’s research—and our own experience—is volume. World-class innovators routinely generate many more possibilities than average. If you want better outcomes, fill the top of your innovation funnel with many, many more ideas for achieving them. – Jeremy Utley & Perry Klebahn in Ideaflow
As the last line suggests, innovation comes from having many ideas. And many ideas come from creative skill. So the equal-odds rule is the foundation here. Even if the tactical advice I give doesn’t resonate with you, let this be the takeaway.
Another important maxim to remember:
Efficiency is the enemy of creativity
It’s also foundational to what follows, and anything and everything creative under the sun.
Formula
The best entrepreneurs are always thinking about how things can be better and the strategy to become an endless idea generator lies in this formula:
External Stimuli x Prepared Mind = Ideas
If you look at how successful founders discovered their winning idea, it’s usually the result of some external stimulus hitting a prepared mind. Bill Gates and Paul Allen heard 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 inspired those founders to start companies was that their experiences had prepared them to notice the opportunities they represented.
This insight gives us the above formula, with inputs we can manipulate. You can discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book, etc. – By making yourself a big target for external stimulus. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions. If you do this while training your mind to notice the opportunities for what they are, then you’re guaranteed to find a great opportunity.
A remark on vernacular: People use verbs like “generate” and “come up” when describing the ideation process (I’m guilty of it throughout this post), but the more appropriate verbage is “notice”. You notice opportunities in your surroundings, as opposed to think them up (which is potentially dangerous by the way, because they might relate to problems that don’t exist).
External Stimulation
Here are some practical ways to widen your surface area for external stimuli.
- Ratchet up your content consumption: Form a habit of consuming loads of industry (and some non-industry) articles, blogs, newsletters, academic papers, podcasts, etc.
- Talk to ALOT of people: Establish a constant flow of interactions with people. Let these conversations get general; don’t try too hard to find startup ideas. You’re just looking for a spark. Maybe you’ll notice a problem they didn’t consciously realize they had, because you know how to solve it. Some questions you can ask them: What gaps do they see in their lives? What would they like to do that they can’t? What’s tedious or annoying, particularly in their work? Over 3 months of wandering, I managed to meet with 150+ unique people.
- Engage with online communities: This is just another way to interact with people, but with more breadth than depth. Be on Twitter, Reddit, BlueSky, subject-specific Whatsapp groups, etc. More directly, you can peruse posts on online marketplaces (eg. Craigslist, Etsy, Facebook) where people are declaring the pains they have and are willing to pay money to relieve. For god’s sake, there’s a subreddit, r/SomebodyMakeThis where people are offering up ideas! (The Internet never ceases to amaze.)
- Travel and get new experiences: Changing your context can help. If you visit a new place, you’ll often find you have new ideas there. The journey itself often dislodges them. But you may not have to go far to get this benefit. Sometimes it’s enough just to go for a walk. For example, to get of the San Francisco bubble, I flew to Atlanta and met loads of local innovators.
Scope
When starting, you can establish boundaries centered around your interests (eg. solar tech) or you can give yourself infinite scope. There’s no right or wrong approach. At some point, you’ll have to concentrate, but it can be creatively prohibitive (remember what I said earlier, efficiency is the enemy of creativity) to start with strict rules. So don’t be afraid to let your curiosity be your guide. It will not only drive you, but if you let it have its way, will also show you what to work on. Because your curiosity is authentically you so it never lies, and it knows more than you do about what’s worth paying attention to.
Prepare Your Mind
Markets don’t shout, they whisper
Like I said before, the task is to notice problems. You’re consuming a waterfall of sensory input to discern the clues for opporunities. There’s a lot of noise, exogenous and endogenous, that makes this difficult. That’s where cognitive skill development can help you listen carefully:
- Bias protection: If you don’t already have them, you need to develop mental defenses against biases that harm your creativity (eg. discomfort with uncertainty, fear of risk). What you work on depends on your bias profile. For me, I needed to squash this persistent feeling of urgency – To get off the bench and into the arena. That was driven by deeper factors, like the feeling of falling behind, professionally. To help get myself in the right headspace for problem-seeking, I hired a meditation coach to talk through these emotions and develop a meditation practice that specializes in cultivating patience. Your cognitive biases may differ, but try to honestly name them so you can confront them.
- Expand your solution space: How many times were you blind to a problem until you discovered a solution? Sometimes, we don’t notice problems because we’re subconciously conditioned to treat them as unsolvable. But having an expanded awareness of what’s possible will reveal more cracks, eg. by staying up-to-date with emerging technology and products.
Have Lots of Ideas
Being stimulated and prepared are necessary, but not sufficient. You have to deliberately have ideas, and log them. Might seem obvious but people fail to make it a habitual exercise. During my ~2 months of unfettered exploration, I committed to a daily idea quota: I would record 5 problems I noticed each day.
I had prompts to help me with inspiration, like, What problems did you have today? or What do you wish someone else would build so you could use it? (my full list of prompts is available here). Whatever problems came to mind, I inserted them into my tracking spreadhsheet (template can be found here). If the problem was paired with a possible solution, I would record that too, but it wasn’t a hard requirement. I wanted to limit friction to entry as much as possible. If I had a stroke of inspiration when I wasn’t in front of my desktop, I would jot down the idea in an email to myself.
Resist the urge to edit yourself. I allowed myself to be open to any muse. I would log problems like database migrations are hella time-consuming and high-risk to people don’t respond to my emails fast enough. Anything and everything was fair game, even if an immediate solution wasn’t evident for any frustration or disatisfaction.
Now, in the beginning of this practice, you’ll start hearing dissenting thoughts from your inner critic. When an idea pops into your head, it’ll retort with remarks like, “but the market is too small”, or “the space is too crowded”, or “this would be too hard to build”. It’ll shoot down ideas before you can even get them out of your head. Listening to these objections is destructive to the process. It descreases your output so it’s important to learn to shut them out (the cognitive training can help).
The first step is awareness. I’ve compiled a list of common idea filters here. Become intimiatley familiar with them all. The second step is sticking with the daily idea quota. Seriously. It not only helps you develop your creative muscles, it helps lighten your subconcious of these filters. Maybe it won’t happen on the first day. Or the second day. But eventually, you’ll struggle to meet your quota unless you suspend judgement. So you’ll give yourself permission to write down all the bad, crazy, and nonsense ideas that come to mind. And that’s the point. A quote I like by Clay Shirky, “The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act.” So if we successfully resist the feeling to edit ourselves, the equal-odds law will help us find idea glory sooner. (Worry about whittling down the list later.)
(One trick to suppress inner criticism that I haven’t tried: You can list the problems as interesting for someone else to explore. That way, your subconscious won’t shoot them down to protect you.)
Over the course of my open exploration, I produced ~350 ideas - Including the one I’ve committed to right now (although its morphed quite a bit since then). Here’s a screenshot of my idea tracker:
Conclusion
If you apply the formula correctly for long enough–I’d recommend at least a month–you’ll have built up a strong creative muscle, and antibodies against creative biases. And you’ll have more ideas than you’ll know what to do with. In that list, hopefuly you can find something that breeds enough excitment to dig deeper. Even though any idea you choose to pursue is going to flop, statistically speaking, it’ll give you a vector for validating and iterating through ideas, to get to the winning opportunity.
And the skills you develop will outlast the period of ideation. It’ll open your eyes permanently, and you’ll find you always have this background process running in your head, spotting all the possible business opportunities around you. It’s a superpower but take it from me, at times, it can be a nuisance and hard to turn off.
Acknowledgements
I stole 90% of the content here from these superb resources: