Paul Graham: How to Find an Idea for a Startup (Part Two)

This post is a continuation of the first part of the translation of one large article by Paul Graham on how to find your startup idea. This is not a step-by-step instruction, but rather Grem’s deep philosophical essay, based on his rich experience as the founder of YCombinator, the most successful startup accelerator. We continue:

Consciousness

But how to determine if an idea has a way out? How to understand whether this is the embryo of a large company or just a product doomed to a narrow niche? Often this is not possible to do. At the beginning, AirBnb founders were not aware of the scale of the encroachment on the market. Initially, they had a narrower idea. They were going to let the owners rent out their space during exhibitions and conferences. They did not foresee the expansion of this idea; she imposed herself gradually. All that they knew at the beginning was that there was some kind of fish on the hook. Perhaps this is as much as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg originally knew.

It is rarely obvious from the very beginning that an idea has a way “out” from a primary niche. And sometimes I see a path that is not immediately obvious - this is one of our specialties here at YC. But still there are limits to how exactly this can be done. And no matter how much experience you have. The most important thing in understanding the way “out” is to recognize the fact that it is difficult to see.

But if you can’t predict whether an idea has this big way, how to choose between ideas? The truth is disappointing, but interesting: if you are a person of the correct "breed", then you have the right type of intuition. If you are at the forefront of achievements in an area that is changing rapidly, and you have a hunch that something is worth doing, the likelihood that you are right is higher.

In the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Care, Robert Piercing writes:
“Do you want to know how to draw a perfect picture?” It's simple. Make yourself perfect, and then just draw completely naturally. ”

I have been surprised at this passage since I read it at the university. I'm not sure how much this advice is useful specifically for drawing, but it perfectly describes our situation. Empirically: the best way to a good startup idea is to become the type of person who has them.

To be at the forefront of achievements in any field does not mean that you need to be the one who moves it all forward. You can be just a user on the cutting edge. Facebook seemed to Mark a good idea, not so much because he was a programmer, but because he used the computer a lot. If you asked the majority of 40-year-olds in 2004, would you like to make your life semi-public on the Internet, they would be horrified by this idea. But Mark already lived online; it was natural for him.

Paul Buchait says people on the cutting edge of a fast-paced area "live in the future." If this phrase is combined with the Piercing phrase, we get:

Live in the future and create what is missing.

This perfectly describes the way in which many (if not all) large startups began their journey. Neither Apple, nor Yahoo, nor Google, nor Facebook planned to become companies at the beginning. They grew out of things that, as their founders thought, were missing in this world.

If you look at the way successful founders found their ideas, you will find that this is usually the result of some external stimulus that affects the “prepared” consciousness. Bill Gates and Paul Allen heard about Altair and thought, "I bet we could write a basic interpreter for him." Drew Huston realized that he had forgotten his USB flash drive and thought, “I need to make my files live online.” Many people heard about Altair, many forgot flash drives. The reason these stimuli forced their founders to start projects was because their experience taught them to notice the possibilities that they were presented with.

A verb that should be used with respect for startup ideas is not “inventing”, but “noticing”. We have YC, we call ideas that grew naturally from the experience of their founders - organic startup ideas. Most successful startups start that way.

Perhaps this is not what you wanted to hear. You probably expected to hear a recipe on how to come up with an idea, but instead I tell you that the key is to have a properly prepared consciousness. But this is also a type of recipe: it’s just one that can take a year in the worst case instead of one weekend.

If you are not at the cutting edge of something rapidly changing, you can get there. For example, any smart enough person can get on the cutting edge of programming (such as developing mobile applications) throughout the year. Since a successful startup will eat 3-5 years of your life, a year of preparation would be a reasonable investment. Especially if you are still looking for a co-founder.

But you do not need to learn to program in order to be on the cutting edge of a sphere that is changing rapidly. Other areas are also changing rapidly. And although learning to program is not necessary, it is reasonable for the foreseeable future. According to Macr Andrehssen, software is eating up the world, and this trend will continue for decades to come.

Programming also means that when you have ideas, you will be able to implement them. This is not a matter of life and death (Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com - did not know how), but an advantage. A good advantage if you are considering the idea of ​​launching Facebook. Instead of just thinking like “This is an interesting idea”, you can think “This is an interesting idea. I’ll try to build the first version tonight. ” It is even better when you are a programmer and at the same time a target user, since then the cycle of developing a new version and testing it on users can occur in one head.

Notice

As soon as you begin to live in the future (in some respects), the way to notice a startup idea is to look at things that are missing. If you are really at the forefront of a rapidly developing sphere, you will always find a bunch of things that are missing. What will not be obvious is that they are ideas for a startup. Therefore, if you want to find a startup idea, you need not only to turn on the filter “What is missing?” You also need to turn off any other filter, in particular, “Can this become a big company?” There will still be enough time to do this check later. But if you think about it initially, it will lead to the fact that you will not only filter out a lot of good ideas, but also that you will focus on a bad idea.

Most of the things that are missing will take some time to be noticed. One must practically deceive oneself in order to see these ideas around us.

But we know that ideas surround us. And there is no such problem that has no solution. The probability is negligible, which is exactly the moment when the process will stop. You can be sure that people will build things in the next couple of years that will make you wonder: "How have I lived without this until now?"

And when these problems are resolved, they will probably look incredibly obvious in retrospect. Therefore, you need to turn off the filter, which prevents them from seeing. The most powerful obstacle is to perceive the current state of the world as a given. Even the most open and receptive of us often suffer from this. You would not be able to get from your bed to the front door if you had not stopped questioning everything and asking questions.

But if you are looking for a startup idea, you can sacrifice some efficiency of accepting everything for granted and start asking questions. Why is our mail overflowing? Because we receive too many letters or because it is difficult to delete the letter from the inbox? Why do we get too many letters? What problems do people try to solve with letters? Are there any better ways to solve it? Why do not we delete letters after reading? Is the inbox the perfect solution for this?

Pay particular attention to things that annoy you. The advantage of taking the current state of things as a given is not only that it makes life (locally) more efficient, but also that we become more tolerant. If you knew about all those things that would appear in the next 50 years, but would not have now, you would have seemed very limited today, just as if you had been sent back 50 years in a time machine. If something annoys you, maybe it's because you live in the future.

If you find the right type of problem, you can probably describe it as obvious. At least for yourself. When we launched Viaweb, all online stores were created by hand: web designers created each page separately in HTML. For us programmers, it was obvious that these sites should be automatically generated by software.

This means a rather strange thing that finding a startup idea is a matter of seeing the obvious. This indicates how strange the whole process is: you are trying to see things that are obvious, but nonetheless that you have not seen.

Since all you have to do is let go of consciousness, it might be better not to try to attack the problem in the forehead, i.e. sit down and start thinking about her. The best solution is to just start the process in the background and look at things that are still missing. Work on complex problems, following your curiosity, but take a second to look yourself over your shoulder, noting the flaws and "anomalies."

Give yourself some time. You have enough control over the speed with which you turn your consciousness into “prepared”, but you have much less control over external stimuli that spark ideas, when they - stimuli - strike the mind. Drew Huston worked on a less promising idea before DropBox: a startup to prepare for the SAT (exam). But DropBox was a much better idea: both in an absolute sense and in terms of matching its experience and skills.

One way to fool yourself into an idea is to work on a project that seems to be cool. When you do something similar, you are inevitably, quite naturally inclined to build things that are not there. To build something that already exists would not seem so interesting to you.

While trying to come up with a startup idea usually ends poorly, working on a thing that could be rejected as a “toy” often leads to good ideas. When something is described as a toy, it means that it has everything that is inherent in the idea, except for significance. That's cool; users like it, it just does not matter. But if you live in the future, and you build something cool that users like, then this can be more important than it seems to outsiders. Micro computers seemed like toys when Apple and Microsoft started working on them. I am old enough to remember this era: people who owned their own computer were called an “amateur”. BackRub seemed like an inconsistent science project. Facebook was just a way for students to peek at each other.

At YC, we are always intrigued to meet a startup working on something that in our view some know-it-all from the forum would call it a toy. This is a good sign for us that the idea is good.

If you can afford to accept the long term (and you cannot help it), the phrase: “Live in the future and create what is missing” should be rephrased:

Live in the future and create what seems interesting.

Continuation (part three) - tomorrow. Good digestion of new thoughts.