3 Ways To Find Your Next Startup Idea

A practical guide on finding startup ideas that are worth pursuing

Image Credit

Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur or going through a pivot, finalizing a startup idea could be overwhelming.

A good founder usually has a bag of ideas. Having multiple ideas is good, but not ideas are created equal.

In this post, I’m sharing the process that I use to decide what ideas are worth executing and how to eliminate weak ideas.

1. The power of scratching your own itch

The best business ideas usually come from scratching a personal need. When you solve your own problem, you spend your time building something that you’re passionate about. This is more common in creating direct-to-consumer businesses.

Start with a list of problems that you’d like to solve for yourself. Rank this list in the order of pain point. Then rank this list in the order of how frequently you experience the pain point. Ideally, you want to pick the idea that ranks top in the pain point as well as in usage frequency.

Once you’ve found your top problems, do some research in market sizing. There is a good chance that there are enough users who also struggle with the same pain points you’re experiencing.

This is how my consumer app Nucleus was born. Nucleus is a supercharged calendar app for busy professionals, who have multiple external meetings in a day, to quickly collect the context and get ready for their next meeting on the go.

Problem: Before Nucleus, to prepare for my meetings, I would check my email to find what we’ve already exchanged. I will go on Linkedin to learn more about their background. I will check the location: check directions or call a Uber. If it’s a breakfast/lunch/dinner meeting, I will check Yelp to find what’s popular. All of this takes time hopping from one app to app, entering the same information again and again.

Frequency: This was a frequent problem. On average, I’d have 4–6 external meetings every day.

Market Sizing: This problem applies to recruiters, sales professionals, founders, executives, venture capitalists, or anyone who’s meeting new people multiples…