I get a lot of questions, since I'm in the mobile app space, where people think if you can come up with some idea where the keywords are easy to compete on, throw up compelling app icon and marketing and "game" the system, you can make any idea work.
Almost 100% false.
Paul Graham touches on the idea and calls these ideas "sitcom 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."
Not only will you struggle to find success on ideas you percieve to be problems, you'll probably have way more trouble than you think on ideas that are already "successes" and you think you can bite off a chunk of the market.
You're still doing the same thing: you're making assumptions that people WANT a different solution, and that people will want the different solution you are making up in your head.
What's the solution to this? How the F*ck do we actually find ideas worth building?
The solution is easy to understand and hard to do: we immerse ourselves in other peoples problems.
In the app space, their's two major strategies and just about every app company is somewhere on the spectrum between these two strategies:
1. Kill it big with one app. Think Snapchat, Instagram, Tinder.
2. Build a whole bunch of smaller apps. Most people do this (my app portfolio I recently sold was somewhere inbetween these two strategies).
I have a friend who operated mostly on the Google Play store who before selling his company had built over 200(!) apps.
He wasn't just making up ideas however, he was immersing himself daily in trends. He'd pick up on the latest buzzwords. He kept up to date with everything going on in the news. He'd learn the specific language people were using to describe their problems.
And when his team built his apps, they would commit as little effort as possible. They knew YOU CAN'T WILL AN IDEA INTO EXISTENCE. So if it didn't work, they were already building another app (The google play store is way better at this strategy than iOS but it can work on both).
This strategy complimented his personality, and it worked. At one point he was doing like 1M downloads a month.
The other strategy (one big winner) is my preferred method (and I started my app portfolio with GifShare which was a big winner).
Big ideas are NOT easy to stumble upon, so the best strategy here is to increase your exposure to opportunity.
Work at a startup and meet everyone worth knowing in your industry and in your city. Ask people about their problems. Get people to tell you their app ideas. Run ideas by your friends. See what ideas & problems your friends are passionate about. Establish yourself as an expert. Build relationships with investors and other experts.
If you get your network involved, then you might not even have to come up with the idea yourself. With GifShare for example, I had someone I'd become friends with on the internet tell me the idea after running into the problem himself.
And think about if the next big idea like Tinder comes along. If you are well connected, your network will reach out to you to be part of the project. Exposure to opportunities at its best.
Stop building made up ideas and instead become sensitive to what the worlds problems are and put yourself in a position to be there when a solution is needed.
Almost 100% false.
Paul Graham touches on the idea and calls these ideas "sitcom 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."
Not only will you struggle to find success on ideas you percieve to be problems, you'll probably have way more trouble than you think on ideas that are already "successes" and you think you can bite off a chunk of the market.
You're still doing the same thing: you're making assumptions that people WANT a different solution, and that people will want the different solution you are making up in your head.
What's the solution to this? How the F*ck do we actually find ideas worth building?
The solution is easy to understand and hard to do: we immerse ourselves in other peoples problems.
In the app space, their's two major strategies and just about every app company is somewhere on the spectrum between these two strategies:
1. Kill it big with one app. Think Snapchat, Instagram, Tinder.
2. Build a whole bunch of smaller apps. Most people do this (my app portfolio I recently sold was somewhere inbetween these two strategies).
I have a friend who operated mostly on the Google Play store who before selling his company had built over 200(!) apps.
He wasn't just making up ideas however, he was immersing himself daily in trends. He'd pick up on the latest buzzwords. He kept up to date with everything going on in the news. He'd learn the specific language people were using to describe their problems.
And when his team built his apps, they would commit as little effort as possible. They knew YOU CAN'T WILL AN IDEA INTO EXISTENCE. So if it didn't work, they were already building another app (The google play store is way better at this strategy than iOS but it can work on both).
This strategy complimented his personality, and it worked. At one point he was doing like 1M downloads a month.
The other strategy (one big winner) is my preferred method (and I started my app portfolio with GifShare which was a big winner).
Big ideas are NOT easy to stumble upon, so the best strategy here is to increase your exposure to opportunity.
Work at a startup and meet everyone worth knowing in your industry and in your city. Ask people about their problems. Get people to tell you their app ideas. Run ideas by your friends. See what ideas & problems your friends are passionate about. Establish yourself as an expert. Build relationships with investors and other experts.
If you get your network involved, then you might not even have to come up with the idea yourself. With GifShare for example, I had someone I'd become friends with on the internet tell me the idea after running into the problem himself.
And think about if the next big idea like Tinder comes along. If you are well connected, your network will reach out to you to be part of the project. Exposure to opportunities at its best.
Stop building made up ideas and instead become sensitive to what the worlds problems are and put yourself in a position to be there when a solution is needed.
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