Ask HN: How do you get startup ideas?

Just keep your eyes and ears open. The set of all possible startup ideas is an infinite one, so no matter what your age/position/domain is, you can, at any point in your life find one or more ideas that can be turned into a startup. How to find them? => Just be a keen observer for a couple of days. Look at the people around you and assess the stuff that you go through on a daily basis and ask yourself whether you can fix something that's broken or do something to make it easier. The next question is, how better will your target customers' lives be when you solve that problem. If the answer is "a lot", then eureka! you have it. It's perfectly okay if the initial user base that you have considered is very small. But your solution has to make them love you very much

Im always looking for what bugs me about doing xyz. Scratching your own itch is always a great place to start. So maybe keep a swipe file somewhere of notes on things that you think don't make sense/could be better.

Once you have a few ideas, then go about validating whether there really is a market for your ideas (ie Problem/Solution fit) and then take it from there.

Perhaps reading up on the lean startup methodology will help you in terms of practically progressing from idea to validation to mvp and beyond.

Also, if whatever that thing is, is something you're passionate about - the likelihood of your sticking with it over the long term is far greater than just doing it because it seems like a great idea/for the money.

I get startup ideas just from noticing things that are missing. For example if someone says "Man I wish there was a way to do that", I find opportunity in it and see if I can make a product for it.

You don't know if the market is too small until you get out there and do some testing. Speculation isn't going to go far.

If you have an idea and discover that someone else did to, great! It's been partially validated. Which particular edge of it are you going to take? What differentiates it from their execution?

The subset of good ideas that have no current executors is way smaller than the subset of good ideas that can be successfully executed.

Don't give up only because someone else is already executing; do it better than them.

This might help. This is in no way comprehensive, but rather just to help you get unblocked, and that, age has less to do with creative ideas, than you are making it.

1. Industries that disrespect their customers. Say, you had a bad service/sales rep experience. Then you tried to switch, but found out that every other large competitor to this one is as bad. Probably the reason why there are so many banking/financial services upstarts in the last couple of years.

Caveat - usually these businesses are good at building high switching costs into their products. How many times have you thought of ditching your bank, but have never got around to it?

2. Fat and thin margins. If everyone is enjoying a fat margin, they are most likely colluding in their industry, and have some kind of (in)formal association barring anyone else to entry with lower price. Can you legally go against that trade association. Technology helps in leap frogging in these situations. Thin margin businesses (usually) indicate that all the efficiency that there is to be extracted has been. This can still be disrupted, if your tech can find new ways of doing things.

Finally, take a look at this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_trade

Fedric Tudor started the whole ice industry by cutting pieces of lake in the north and shipping them to south. People weren't even used to having ice in their drinks. He created a whole new market and industry.

This might have been said a million times, most ideas look bad on the surface. What makes them good is the execution. :)

Inefficiencies in life.

Anytime I notice something takes vastly longer than it should, then I know there must be a solution to fix that problem.

As always, PG has a great post on this: http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

Read Incessantly, business and tech blogs. The subconscious is this amazing place where startup idea incubation occurs. For me, as I read about all of the new things that exist, and all of the cool new technologies that are surfacing, my mind starts to make connections. I am then able to consider how such technologies could be expressed differently to solve other existing problems.

I took an entrepreneurship course a while back that would have us do daily "opportunity reports". These reports were a list of 50 business ideas. They could -- and most were -- awful and not feasible ideas, but the point is to produce 50 ideas every day. After the course of a few months, I noticed it started changing the way I see the world. Everything that I came across (blogs, standing in line at the grocery store, etc) I would be looking for opportunities.

I think that's a good place to start.

I assume you've had jobs since then. What did you learn about the industry you're in? Where do you see problems that could be solved with software? And did you meet anyone on the business side of that industry that you think might want to be in a startup instead?

I didn't start from "I want to have a startup" and go looking for an idea. I started with an idea based on industry experience, and realized a startup is the way to get it done.