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March 12, 2024
March 12, 2024

Where do startup ideas come from?

It’s not the best idea - no joke intended - to try and build your startup from just an idea. Instead, we recommend looking for a key insight instead.

It’s understandable that you might look at the world around you and wonder how startup founders manage to come up with their ideas. All the good ideas are taken, you might think, as you try and think of an idea of your own.

It’s not the best idea - no joke intended - to try and build your startup from just an idea. Instead, we recommend looking for a key insight instead. One that will help you dominate a market or make meaningful change will prove a far more flexible way to build a startup than trying to stick to a single, narrow solution: in other words, your original idea.

Your insights should allow you to identify problems in your chosen area, from which you can explore the opportunities to provide solutions. Let’s look at a few important factors worth considering.

  1. Passions and motivations: Creating a successful tech startup is hard and can take  a long time, so what really motivates you to make a difference?
  2. Start with people: What groups of people do you have strong connections or affinities with and what key problems are these groups trying to address?
  3. Personal experiences: Many startups are created as a result of personal experiences, or those of family or friends, as these experiences can create strong motivations to find ways to make improvements.
  4. Domain or industry expertise: Having a specialised insider knowledge or expertise within a particular industry or discipline can be a great source of insight. It can be hard for outsiders to identify and understand the problems you’re trying to solve.
  5. Access to technology: Do you have access to a novel technology or have you been able to develop a new way of doing things?

Remember, our ultimate purpose here is to create valuable insights that can turn into a potential startup.

Find out more about generating your own startup ideas and finding the solutions to problems on the Startup Basics course which you can access for free via Techscaler membership.

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