How do people find their startup ideas?
And why haven't I found mine yet?
I’ve slowly been dipping my toes back into the startup space - this time in TOKYO.
This week’s Scallion Pancake strays a little from self-discovery, but as becoming a founder is so synonymous with understanding yourself and how you want to exist in the world, I decided that it still fits the SP audience.
The weather’s been quite kind here in Tokyo, where coats no longer have a place in our daily attire, but it’s still comfortable to stay outdoors for long periods of time. I’ve also been noticing more beige, soft pink, and light blues in the commuting crowds I see twice per day - I wonder if there’s a correlation between colors you wear and general mental health?
Anyway, hope you like this week’s SP, and feel free to share with those who are feeling the same⭐️
As someone who daydreams about building my cool startup, I’ve always been obsessed with figuring out what makes a founder, well, a founder.
I spent 2023 trying to find an answer to this big “how” by talking to a lot of founders. For this article, I’ll focus on one question that I found myself instinctively asking time and time again,
“How did you discover your startup idea? Or even, how did you know that this was the idea you wanted to build a startup for?”
And in my experience, there are as many answer variations to this question as there were AI startups at the Singapore Fintech Festival; so, a lot. But I’ve organized them into a few archetypes below for our convenience.
TYPES
The innate one
The co-founder one
The serial entrepreneur one
The iterative one
The personal one
The working-with-what-I-got one
The innate one:
“I was always passionate about wounds and first aid since I was a kid, so naturally in college that’s what I decided to build on.”
A founder in their early 20s building a startup on wound-healing and tissue engineering. Seemed to always be fascinated by medicine/engineering since he was a kid, so while building a startup was a surprise, building a startup on this idea in particular was not. Still in college btw.
The co-founder one:
“I had been interested in AI for a bit, but it was only when my friend introduced me to my co-founder that I realized that I wanted to work with him and build something.”
A founder who co-founded their current company on AI-assisted customer intelligence. The co-founders clicked well, decided to work together, and co-founded their startup. A case we often see in YC and others: co-founders before ideas.
The serial entrepreneur one:
“It's an unsexy problem that no one wants to fix. This is a hidden opportunity.”
A serial founder who’s built multiple niche startups that are far from the glam and glitz of AI and whatnot but are essential to daily life and society. Emphasizes that in a time where everyone wants to do climate or fintech, be the oddball that wants to disrupt the boring wall paint industry. Seems like a recyclable method for discovering opportunities.
The iterative one:
“We started as an underwear company, then evolved into athletic wear, and now we do customized corporate merch.”
A founder who advises the importance of iteration and user feedback, and notes that your first idea does not have to be and will not be a million-dollar idea. It lowers the anxieties of recovering perfectionists who often stay stuck forever in the pre-action phase even if we have ideas. Also, the truth is that all startups need to iterate to stay alive. Our assumptions of users’ needs are often wrong, so it takes user feedback and readjustment to build something that actually lasts.
The personal one:
“I needed people, so I started a human resources startup.”
A founder who has multiple startups that all somehow correlate to one another. When I asked whether he had intended to build this empire, he said that he was just trying to find solutions to problems his own business was facing. Originally built a media company, needed cheaper labor, outsourced cheap labor overseas, and started his startup scaling on what he used and needed. It’s a concept Paul Graham repeats time and time again, startup ideas come from building solutions that you need for your own problems.
The working-with-what-I-got one:
“I was laid off unexpectedly, and I needed income. So I leveraged my past at Google Ads and just started helping individual clients out.”
A founder who credits a lot of her current success to getting laid off a few years ago. She started by helping those in her network and scaled from there. Today she’s helped over 3000+ companies with their Google Ads. Start small with what you’re skilled at and scale from there if you feel like there’s a demand.
So you see, unsurprisingly, there are plenty of roads that led these successful founders to their own Romes. While I’ve organized them for us, I think in reality, every founder’s journey is probably a combination of these answers. Moreover, it’s not like every idea that comes to mind through each of these methods is developed into a startup. Founder 1 was probably also passionate about Play-dough and video games as a child, but those weren’t the ideas that evolved into startups.
I think underneath all of this, all founders share a (annoying to us pre-founder folk but,) important method/pathway to deciding your startup idea:
“When you know, you know.”
The point of this piece was to articulate and prove the point that we, dreamers of startups and entrepreneurship, should release the tension and aches we feel from feeling like we need to “find” a startup idea. In reality, the success of startups completely depends on the right time and the right place for the right things. A lot of it is like playing craps at a table in Vegas.
So what we can do until then is to prime the way we live and make sense of the world so that it is fertile ground for ideas. Stay curious, embrace your childlike wonder, and ask all the questions you can.
(Ew. Bumper sticker much?)
Anyway, stay curious, and happy weekend y’all!
Thanks for writing Risa! This is quite an insightful piece on the founders' archetype :)