Rather than creating a copycat app, I'm interested in discovering an idea that sets itself apart in terms of quality and utility. What techniques or approaches have been effective for you in identifying unique and valuable startup concepts that can compete against established market players?
Additionally, what resources or tools would you recommend for conducting research and assessing the viability of a potential startup idea?
1. Learn to be discontent. You aren't seeing ideas because you are content with the status quo. You need to be in the habit of thinking "this could be better".
2. There is a difference between a hobby idea and a business idea. Hobby ideas solve a problem, but you probably can't get someone to pay for it. A business idea may not be "fun", but people will pay for it. If you're lucky, you will find something that overlaps the two areas.
3. Businesses succeed because they solve a problem that people are willing to pay for the solution. Figure out how to monitize your idea before wasting time building something.
4. You must either already have, or have a plan to develop, expert or insider knowledge and connections in order to establish your business. For example, don't expect to build a tool to sell to banks to use if you don't know anything about the banking industry and don't know anyone in the banking industry.
5. A successful business requires (a) someone to build the thing, (b) someone to sell the thing, (c) someone to manage the thing. You might be all three of those. If you are only one of those things, then you need to partner with others who fulfill the other roles.
Good luck! We need more people building things!
Take the Google Analytics competitor. Personally I was bothered that GA got a monopoly in the space so fast and that it took so long for real competition to come along, if it has. The interesting questions revolve around “why did GA have a moat?” and “how does a new entrant overcome that?”
Wherever there is a market leading product there is a narrative that
* Google docs sucks
* Microsoft excel sucks
* Adobe creative cloud sucks
* Facebook sucks
(My current side project is something that I was thinking about 18 years ago thinking… why doesn’t this exist? But it still doesn’t, except on my server.)
[1] https://taylor.town/an-algorithm-for-generating-ideas
To validate ideas, I try building them for 1 month to find my "real-world" blindspots.
There's a quote I read once, and I wish I could find the original source so I could provide a proper citation, that I think was from Bob Parsons that goes "Never be afraid to enter a crowded market. Just be better than everybody else." That might be a little bit hyperbolic, but I think the general attitude is sound. Don't be afraid to get in there and mix it up and compete.
As the old saying goes "Startups don't die by murder, they die by suicide." Most likely, the other startup you're think about is going to die by suicide anyway. They're going to fail to execute, choose a bad market segment, screw up their marketing, screw up sales, choose SVB as their bank, or any of 1000 other things that are going to send them to the Great Accelerator In The Sky. Just don't make those mistakes, outlast them, and the market is yours!
Steve Blank[2][3] also has a lot of salient advice on these topics.
[1]: That said, somebody has to go first. So if you have an idea and you have real conviction that it's a Good Idea, then maybe you just have to go for it, even if nobody else has gone down that path. But that does, IMO, imply the need to aggressively try to invalidate your idea so you can pivot as early as possible (before wasting a lot of resources) if it does prove to be a Bad Idea. This whole topic is a lot of what @sgblank talks about in TFSTTE.
All of that said, this topic has been beat. to. death. here on HN. Use the search box and you'll find more discussion of generating startup ideas than you can shake a stick at.
"Ask HN: Looking for side project ideas" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23290536
"Ask HN: Idea Sunday" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7693262
and a couple "what would you pay $X for" threads https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ask+what+would+you+pay