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18 years old first year uni and want to build

3 points by aidenpethick ↗ HN
I really want to start a startup, I have watched the stanford course on youtube to help get the fundamentals down but I cant come up with an idea. I've been stuck on this stage for a while.

My main problem is that I can't find a problem worth solving that would be something people want.

Any advice?

7 comments

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DamonHD
Get involved in things, keep reading widely, maybe help out in uni events such as hackathons so you meet other sparky people. It'll happen.
aidenpethick
Thanks, I've joined the business students association at uni and have started looking for potential co-founders. I'm not a hacker myself but I do have a little experience in code and understand the basics. So if I was to meet a cofounder at uni it would have to be someone based on the more engineer side of things.
DamonHD
I've spent most of my life doing one start-up or another, but most of them I could not have predicted to form or goal of in advance. So maybe it'll turn out that the next itch that you want to scratch is not an engineering one. Keep your mind open!
johncoltrane
The idea is the goal, the startup is just one way to achieve that goal. The latter is pointless without the former.
adamquek
What is the thing that bug you the most? Are there existing solutions? Is the solution good enough? Can you think of something that potentially make it better?

Another suggestion would be to actively engage with people. Take advantage of you as a university students, and ask to arrange a meeting with managers from some notable companies in the industry. Find out the potential pain points and see if there's existing products or easy product to design that could help them.

brudgers
It might be that you like the idea of building more than the consequences of building something terrible because most people are like that.

What I mean is that you don't need a good idea to build something.

Instead you have to start building and see what happens and that's much harder.

But the way to get good at building is building.

It isn't searching for ideas.

Good luck.