Founders can find success by evaluating their initial idea, finding the right team, and shopping for ideas in a fertile idea space.

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  00:00

  This talk provides tools to help founders come up with good startup ideas and avoid tar pit ideas.

  • Analyzing the top 100 YC companies, this talk provides conceptual tools to help stack the deck in favor of starting with a promising idea.
  • Founders commonly make mistakes when coming up with startup ideas, so this talk will discuss how to know if an idea is good and how to come up with new ones.
  • Founders should focus on specific, tractable problems rather than abstract, tar pit ideas.
  • Founders can get stuck in a tar pit when working on startup ideas that appear to solve a widespread problem, but are actually impossible to solve.
  • Despite its seeming simplicity, the idea of creating an app to make meeting up with friends more efficient has been difficult to pull off in the 20 years since it was first proposed.
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  05:06

  Start with an initial idea and use the 10 key questions to evaluate it, then find the right team to execute it in a big or rapidly growing market.

  • Google your idea, talk to people who have worked on it, and find a balance between jumping into the first idea and waiting for the perfect one.
  • Start with an initial idea that has enough interesting qualities to morph in the right direction and use the 10 key questions to evaluate it.
  • Finding the right team to work on an idea is essential for successful startup, exemplified by Plan Grid's Tracy and Ralph.
  • Look for ideas that your team is good at executing in either a big market now or a small but rapidly growing market.
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  08:31

  Starting a business in a competitive market requires a unique insight, such as using a proxy to show potential success or leveraging new technology or regulations.

  • Startups couldn't get corporate credit cards before Brex, making it a good problem to solve, and competition is usually a sign of a good startup idea, but you need a new insight to go up against entrenched competition.
  • A new technology, regulatory change, or problem can create an opportunity, such as Checker, an API for background checks, which was created due to the need for delivery services to run background checks on their workers.
  • Rapid, a food delivery company in Latin America, used Doordash, a delivery company in other parts of the world, as a proxy to show that their idea of food delivery in Latin America would likely be successful.
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  11:22

  Shopping for ideas in a fertile idea space, and capitalizing on opportunities that others shy away from, can lead to success for founders.

  • Founders often become passionate about their business over time, and software businesses are usually scalable.
  • Different idea spaces have had varying success rates over the last 10 years.
  • Picking a good idea space with a reasonable hit rate and founder market fit can lead to success, even if the initial idea isn't quite right.
  • 5tran found success by shopping for ideas in a fertile idea space, which enabled them to stumble upon a good startup idea.
  • Founders can capitalize on opportunities that others shy away from, such as hard to get started ideas, boring spaces, and existing competitors, as demonstrated by the example of Stripe.
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  16:26

  Organically noticing startup ideas is more likely to lead to success than explicitly trying to think of them.

  • Boring ideas like payroll software have a higher hit rate than fun ideas, and the day-to-day reality of a startup is mostly the same regardless of the idea.
  • Most good startup ideas have existing competitors, and founders should not shy away from them.
  • Competition is good, but a great situation is when there are existing competitors that have missed something or are not doing well, like Dropbox when it launched.
  • Organically noticing startup ideas is more likely to lead to good ones than explicitly trying to think of them.
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  20:33

  Use your expertise to come up with an idea with perfect founder market fit for success.

  • Become an expert in something valuable, work at a startup, or build interesting things to set yourself up for future success.
  • Start with what your team is especially good at and think of ideas that take advantage of your expertise for automatic founder market fit.
  • The Resi founders used their expertise in real estate and debt financing to quickly come up with an excellent idea with perfect founder market fit.
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  23:29

  Found a problem? Create a solution! Think before using this recipe to avoid tar pit ideas.

  • Vetco founders saw a great opportunity to create an Amazon-like website for veterinarians to order supplies, solving a problem that thousands of veterinarians had.
  • Think of problems you've encountered, what you've learned, and what you wish existed to find startup ideas.
  • Doordash founders wanted to order food from local restaurants and have it delivered, so they started Doordash, but this recipe can lead to tar pit ideas, so think before using it.
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  26:23

  Founders can find success by looking for new opportunities, talking to potential customers and founders, and mapping out the space to find a good startup idea.

  • Founders can look for new opportunities created by recent changes in the world, such as the pandemic, and build on successful companies like Gather Town and Nuvo Cargo.
  • Deepak, the founder of Niva Cargo, found success by systematically searching for a large market with good proxies and connections, despite lacking domain expertise.
  • A to B successfully found a good startup idea by systematically talking to potential customers and founders in a fertile idea space.
  • They drove two truck stops and talked to truck drivers and founders to become experts in the trucking industry and find startup ideas.
  • Founders can find great ideas by talking to people in the industry and mapping out the space, as A to B did to become a successful YC company.
  • Find a co-founder with an idea or look for big industries that seem broken to find a startup idea, then launch it to find out if it's good.