That suggests how weird this process is: you're trying to see things that are obvious, and yet that you hadn't seen. The best plan may be just to keep a background process running, looking for things that seem to be missing. The Facebook was just a way for undergrads to stalk one another. Once you're living in the future in some respect, the way to notice startup ideas is to look for things that seem to be missing. The reason those stimuli caused those founders to wstęp companies was that their experiences had prepared them to notice the opportunities they represented. It's i big advantage, when you're considering an idea like putting a college facebook online, if instead of merely thinking "That's an interesting idea," you can think instead "That's an interesting idea. I'll try building an initial version tonight." It's even better when you're both a programmer and the target user, because then the cycle of generating new versions and testing them on users can happen inside one head. When something annoys you, it could be because you're living in the future. Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones.
Przejdź do sklepu Bill Gates and Paul Allen hear about the Altair and think "A bet we could write a Basic interpreter for it." Drew Houston realizes he's forgotten his USB stick and thinks "I really need to make my files live online." Lots of people heard about the Altair. Paul Buchheit says that people at the leading edge of a rapidly changing field "live in the future." Combine that with Pirsig and you get: Live in the future, then build what's missing. If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing fast, when you have a hunch that something is worth doing, you're more likely to be right. When you find the right sort of problem, you should probably be able to describe it as obvious, at least to you. You may have expected recipes for coming up with startup ideas, and instead I'm telling you that the key is to have a mind that's prepared in the right way. If you look at the way successful founders have had their ideas, it's generally the result of some external stimulus hitting a prepared mind. The examples of the most successful founders make that clear.
The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not "think up" but "notice." At YC we call ideas that grow naturally out of the founders' own experiences "organic" startup ideas. They grew out of things their founders built because there seemed a widz in the world. Because you get i bieg of email, or because it's hard to get email out of your inbox? It was not so much because he was i programmer that Facebook seemed a good inicjatywa to Mark Zuckerberg as because he used computers so much. But Mark already lived online; to him it seemed natural. But you know the ideas are out there. And why is it hard to get emails out of your inbox? Occasionally it's obvious from the beginning when there's a path out of the initial niche. What you need wówczas do is turn off the filters that usually prevent you from seeing them.
Empirically, the way to have good startup ideas is to become the sort of person who has them. But there are limits to how well this can be done, no matter how much experience you have. I'm kwalifikacji sure how useful his advice is for painting specifically, but it fits this situation well. Is an inbox the optimal tool for that? Even the most radically open-minded of us mostly do that. The most successful startups almost all begin this way. If you knew about all the things we'll get in the next 50 years but don't have yet, you'd find present day life pretty constraining, just as someone from the present would if they were sent back 50 years in i time machine. When we started Viaweb, all the online stores were built by hand, by web designers making individual HTML pages. Neither Apple nor Yahoo nor Google nor Facebook were even supposed to be companies at first.