There are two ways to approach this.
One set of ideas comes from starting your journey without an idea, but instead going out there, doing research, looking at statistics—maybe even checking Google search keyword traffic. In this case, you’re actively trying to find an idea, and once you come up with one, you’ll want to validate whether it’s good or bad.
The challenge is that, beyond your research—which may have taken only days or weeks—you don’t truly understand the idea yet. So, the best way to validate it is to put it out there, test it, find an audience, and see if you can reach them. Try selling it. See if the cost of sales makes sense and if it can scale.
If no one wants to pay for it—if no one even takes a call to talk about it—or if you run a small Facebook or Google ad ($10 a day, for example) and no one clicks, then maybe the idea is invalid.
But that’s usually a very shallow way of approaching entrepreneurship.
Don’t get me wrong—you can make a lot of money this way. But we’re living in a time when people are trying to take humanity to Mars, solve the world’s biggest problems, and build more energy-efficient vehicles. There are people working on creating the next global education system.
At this time, I think another way to find great startup ideas is through obsession.
When you’re obsessed with something—whether it’s sports, a certain technology, a specific culture, or any niche—you naturally become a deep consumer of it. You learn everything about it, and you start to see who else is involved in that space and what’s happening there.
Eventually, you form opinions about what you like and don’t like. At first, you may just repeat other people’s ideas, but over time, you start having your own original insights. When that happens, you will just know when an idea is right.
At that point, the question becomes: Are there enough people in the world who have this same problem?
If you’re deeply obsessed with something, you’ll intuitively see that many others interact with it too. You won’t need to go through Lean Canvas methodology or excessive testing. You can be completely opinionated.
Of course, there will still be things to learn—like how to reach people, customer acquisition costs, and scaling the product. But startups are never a straight line.
Many people will tell you, “Oh, if you’ve spent three months on something and it hasn’t worked, you should pivot or quit.” That’s nonsense.
If you truly believe an important problem exists—one that, if solved, will impact tons of people and generate wealth for you and everyone involved—then you should keep trying to solve it. Keep iterating until you find product-market fit, in as many ways as possible.
Bonus: Here is a list of the world’s biggest trends and problems by 2050. Most accelerators’ “request for startups” list contain nothing that relates to any of these, but that shouldn’t deter you from working on these problems. Remember, investors look at stats, founders create them. Build the stats by building great companies that solve great problems.
