When people think about a new business, product or feature, they love to obsess over ideas. They are trying to find the next big thing and brainstorm ideas. The truth is that this approach will mostly lead to failure. Behind every great business or feature is a problem that is being solved. By solving a problem, you build something user-centric. You satisfy someone’s need or heal their pain. This is the first and most important step for finding a solution and startup idea. The following advice applies to both, startup ideas and new products for existing companies.
It’s not your fault. The media always talks about those great ideas from silicon valley. You couldn’t know better. So let me show you a small example that will explain why problems are more important than ideas.
Back in 2008, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp were at a conference in Paris and it was a snowy day. They complained about the weather and how they didn’t want to stand outside to hail a cab. This was the moment where they realized that there are millions of people with the exact same problem. Uber was born that day. The first solution or “idea” that they had was also different then the Uber we know. But the important part was that they found a problem that needed to be solved. What followed were many iterations of the solution to get to the perfect one.
Once you have found a problem that needs to be solved, you can start thinking about ideas on how to solve this problem. It is important that you keep validating if the problem you found is really worth solving. This means that you need to figure out how big the need or pain for your potential users is. Also, when you start creating solutions on how to solve it, keep validating the solutions with your target user. Use their feedback to update your solution until you found a minimum viable product.
Validation
There are different techniques to validate products or solutions. You can conduct interviews or observe how people use prototypes. Another method is to create landing pages and let people sign up for your future product. This is a technique that Dropbox used before the launch of its actual product. A great resource for validating an idea is the book “WILL IT FLY” by Pat Flynn. It is basically a step by step guide for startup idea validation.
Continuous validation, combined with the previous advice that you first need to find a problem worth solving, will increase your chances of finding this great startup or product idea that you were always looking for.
Another important advice is that you try to bring out a minimum viable product as early as possible. Only once people use your product, you will see if it really offers that value that you imagined. It might even be that you will fail in the beginning but with the feedback you get, you can build better versions. Keep in mind that a lot of great startups had difficulties in the beginning. Take Instagram for example. It took years until the product became this great photo sharing social platform. Before, the founder taught himself coding after his workday and first created an app in which you could check in at places that you visit. He gave prototypes to his friend and they started using it and giving him feedback. After several iterations, it became what we know today as Instagram.
If you want to read more about the typical mistakes that people make when creating a product, read my other blog post about the 7 warning sign of product failure.
I hope that this post helped you to find an approach for coming up with the next great startup idea. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.
