How to get startup ideas: The 20 best essays and videos

To help prospective founders with this question, we’ve put together a list of the 20 best links we’ve come across on: what makes for a great startup idea, how to generate them, and how important they are.

Also, to save you hours of reading, we’ve attempted to weave the key ideas of these resources into a single essay here:

How to get startup ideas

1. How to Get Startup Ideas by Paul Graham. The founder of Y Combinator explains that “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.” He goes on to share what the very best startup ideas have in common and some tactics for generating your own.

2. Idea Generation by Sam Altman. The founder of Open AI discusses why founders should work on getting good at idea generation and surround themselves with optimistic, open-minded people. He also suggests paying attention to “important tectonic shifts”—any time you can think of something that is possible this year and wasn’t possible last year may be the seed of a great startup idea.

3. Ideas for Startups by Paul Graham. Here Paul suggests that good startup ideas often come from identifying and solving real-world problems, rather than brainstorming in a vacuum. His “Before the Startup” lecture also covers this topic.

4. Organic Startup Ideas by Paul Graham. In yet another essay, Paul posits that the best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you?

5. Blake Masters’s notes on Peter Thiel’s CS183 Startup Class — Secrets Lecture. Thiel believes that every great business is built around a “secret” and the best place to look for secrets is where no one else is looking.

6. Y Combinator: How to Get and Test Startup Ideas by Michael Seibel. An awesome 6-minute video from the former CEO of Y Combinator and cofounder of Twitch that walks through everything from starting with a problem to your MVP and recruiting your initial users.

7. Developing new startup ideas by Chris Dixon. The a16z partner suggests listing all of your potential ideas in a Google spreadsheet and walking through each idea with every smart person you can get a meeting with. This post follows Chis’s original post Why you shouldn’t keep your startup idea secret, which is also worth reading.

8. The next big thing will start out looking like a toy by Chris Dixon. Dixon argues that disruptive technologies always start out being dismissed as a “toy” because when they are first launched they “undershoot” user needs. He also writes about how hobbyists frequently spawn large industries in a separate blog post: What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years.

9. Stanford Online: How to Get Ideas by Stewart Butterfield. In the first half of this video, Stewart talks with Sam Altman about how he pivoted two failed startups into Slack and Flicker.

What makes for a great startup idea?

1. Market Research, Wireframing, and Design by Balaji Srinivasan. In these lecture notes to his Startup Engineering course at Stanford, the former founder and a16z partner talks through startup ideas, execution and markets. He argues that good ideas are important and that good ideas stem from having a bird’s eye view of what he calls “the idea maze”. For more on this topic, read Chris Dixon’s post The idea maze.

2. Founder/market fit by Chris Dixon. The a16z partner believes that “founder/market fit” (i.e. a founder’s deep understanding of the market) is the best predictor of success. This is why he argues in a separate blog post that founders should pitch themselves, not their idea.

3. Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas by Paul Graham. In an attempt to explain why otherwise smart founders have bad business ideas, Graham identifies three key mistakes: 1) choosing the first idea that comes to mind, 2) not making money a priority, and 3) avoiding competition due to fear.

4. Y Combinator: Building Product by Michael Seibel. In this more in-depth, 60-minute lecture, Michael walks through everything from analyzing the problem your solving, identifying your customer, building an MVP, setting up metrics and a product development cycle, and not being “fake Steve Jobs.”

5. Y Combinator: How to Evaluate Startup Ideas by Kevin Hale. YC partner Kevin Hale walks through the process of evaluating idea and viewing startup ideas as hypotheses for why a company could grow quickly.

6. Stanford Graduate School of Business: Business Plans by Jim Goetz. Jim is a partner at Sequoia and the title of his presentation is “Think Big, Start Small.” He argues that all of today’s tech giants started out solving a specific pain point for a specific customer.

7. Stanford Graduate School of Business: Target Big Markets by Don Valentine. The founder of Sequoia Capital talks about how Sequoia focuses on the market, the dynamics of the market, and the nature of the competition. What makes this talk so interesting is that he views the market as everything—contrary to the typical line of thought that startups are all about the team.

8. Three types of ideas - bad ones are often the best by Paul Buchheit. The creator of Gmail discusses three categories of product ideas: 1) “Obviously good” ideas that are difficult to implement (e.g. flying cars); 2) Seemingly good ideas that haven’t materialized (e.g. video phones in 2007); and 3) “Bad” ideas, which include both good and bad ideas that are difficult to distinguish between without the benefit of hindsight (e.g. PCs, Google, Blogger, Twitter, etc.). He believes that the best product ideas are often found in the “bad ideas” category.

Do startup ideas even matter?

1. The only thing that matters by Marc Andreessen. The founder of Netscape and a16z argues that the market is the most important factor in a startup’s success or failure.

2. Why a startup’s initial business plan doesn’t matter that much by Marc Andreessen. On a similar note to the above, Marc argues that it’s hard to know if your initial idea will work and that it’s “much more important for a startup to aggressively seek out a big market, and product/market fit within that market, once the startup is up and running, than it is to try to plan out what you are going to do in great detail ahead of time.”

3. Ideas vs Judgment and Execution: Climbing the Mountain by Paul Buchheit. The creator of Gmail suggests that both camps of “ideas are valuable” and “ideas are worthless” are wrong. He uses mountains as a metaphor startup ideas—the key to a successful startup lies in the judgement to choose the right mountain and navigate it effectively.

Startup Archive posts on startup ideas

1. Paul Graham’s advice for coming up with startup ideas

2. Michael Seibel on why you need to analyze the frequency and intensity of your customer’s problem.

3. Michael Seibel on how to get and test startup ideas

4. Tony Fadell on how you will know it’s the right time to go full-time on a startup idea

5. OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor explains why platform shifts are a fruitful source of startup ideas

6. How Alexis Ohanian, Steve Huffman, and Paul Graham came up with the idea for Reddit in a one-hour brainstorm

7. Sequoia Partner Jim Goetz on the importance of solving a specific pain point for a specific customer

8. Peter Thiel on the importance of starting with a small market

9. Sunday Deep Dive: Ten ideas for founders from Peter Thiel’s Zero to One

10. Peter Thiel’s four characteristics of monopoly

Other helpful resources

1. Writing a Business Plan by Sequioa Capital

2. Y Combinator: Requests for Startups

3. Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas by Paul Graham

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