[HN Gopher] Where to find ideas
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Where to find ideas
Author : kiyanwang
Score : 99 points
Date : 2025-08-05 06:37 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (howtogrow.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (howtogrow.substack.com)
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Look for societal, business or technology change.
|
| That is where NEW opportunity lies.
|
| Also, copy the best new ideas you see on hacker news, it's far
| from guaranteed that the inventor is able to win the market,
| steal it.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I agree, when the environment changes, new things become
| possible.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| Being a fast follower is very good approach.
|
| Let someone else burn money educating users and building a
| market.
|
| Tuck in behind them and then zoom past when they've exhausted
| themselves.
|
| Cruel - but it works.
| walterbell wrote:
| If a market was not ready for an early solution, it may become
| ready years later, due to infrastructure, mature technology or
| the business environment. In that scenario, it's sometimes
| possible to recruit customers, employees and or even investors
| from earlier attempts to serve a market.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| Good example of using ad hominem to discredit others in favour of
| your approach.
|
| Examples:
|
| - "The academic who hasn't built anything, yet feels comfortable
| telling you to use their complicated startup framework to find
| and validate ideas." Presumably a dig at lean startup.
|
| - "A market need? An underserved niche? Demand? WTF do these
| things even mean?" Come on, these aren't that hard to define.
| dancc wrote:
| "We are looking for a person who has an unavoidable priority,
| where their current options are insufficient or unworkable.
| This person would be weird not to buy our product."
|
| So in other words, a market need or underserved niche.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| Exactly. I find the post rather disingenuous.
| prmph wrote:
| I guess they mean you need to identify specific people, at a
| specific place and time, who are _desperate_ for a solution
| to some problem.
|
| They are desperate usually because it is a problem that
| affects their bottom line, prevents them completing a project
| at work, wastes an enormous amount of their time when doing
| something important to them, etc.
|
| It must be a solution that, even when distilled to its very
| core, provides clear value to specific people you can
| identify. Just lighting on a vague market need or undeserved
| niche is not enough.
|
| Not to say even purely passion projects can't succeed, but
| those are more hit-or-miss.
| rsnyder1 wrote:
| lol, I was writing angry at some academic framework, agree ad
| hominem isn't a good strategy, 100%
|
| the thing about market needs / underserved niches / demand is
| that they are easy to sorta-define, but hard to actually define
| in a way that's useful when you are trying find them, when you
| actually need to understand them
|
| the biggest unlock I've had was, 2+ years into pushing a
| product I had theoretically validated demand for, realizing
| that I didn't actually understand demand, and that demand SEEMS
| like it is "desire for a product" or "willingness to pay for a
| product" but is actually a product-agnostic thing, and when you
| see that, you see the world a lot more clearly. This video was
| super useful - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMIZqim8iXU
|
| Anyway thanks for the critique, 100% agree with half of it!
| rfrey wrote:
| Agree, feels pretty straw-man. Where are these never-built-
| anything academics? Lean startup's Steve Blank, maybe? Who did,
| what, 11 startups before moving into academia?
| secretsatan wrote:
| Steal them from your subordinates
| v5v3 wrote:
| Steal them from your peers, for example fellow students.
|
| (c) Mark Zuckerberg
| cpursley wrote:
| Steal away, ideas are cheap. Execution and distribution are the
| only two things that matter.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| The Winklevii might disagree.
|
| The concept that execution matters, ideas don't, is complete
| rubbish.
|
| If it was true, then you'd make a fortune executing extremely
| well on selling bags of dog poo.
|
| Ideas are absolutely crucial. Without a good idea you can
| execute away forever and get nowhere. And you'll need a
| really great idea to make it huge.
|
| Sure you also need luck timing hard work execution but none
| of that is worth a whit without a good idea.
|
| It's strange that so many repeat this fiction that ideas are
| worthless, execution is everything.
| nathanappere wrote:
| You can just rephrase it as "an idea alone is worthless
| without proper execution" which is what is meant.
| cpursley wrote:
| Everyone has ideas. Not everyone nails Timing + Execution +
| Distribution + Luck.
| yetihehe wrote:
| Everyone has ideas, but not all of them are good ideas.
| Bad idea + nailing all the other ones won't give you good
| results.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| Good execution and distribution require their own good ideas
| begueradj wrote:
| Some workplaces actually ask for new ideas in special must to
| attend meetings.
|
| But an idea is worthless as long as it's not implemented. That's
| why you can find free online resources sharing, for example, "70
| Small Business Ideas to Start in 2025"
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| Suddenly my mind has gone blank...
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Which is a problem. So...
| begueradj wrote:
| It should turn grey. Unless you have grey matter deficit.
| Lyngbakr wrote:
| > Serious founders don't just whiteboard, brainstorm, theorize.
| They become their potential customers, treating the task as a
| full-contact sport.
|
| This is why the advice to scratch your own itch is quite common:
| you don't need to _become_ your potential customer because you
| already _are_ your potential customer.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| The real work in software engineering is deciding how to
| represent all the details of the problem and its solution - the
| rest is just typing. The ability to understand abstract systems
| in this way is very rare. For most people, computers are magical
| objects that they don't understand. You can't ask people what
| problems they have that you could solve with a computer because
| they have very little idea of what computers are capable of: you
| can't talk about a concept of an app, you have to build it and
| put it in front of them before they can contribute to a
| conversation about it.
|
| The days when a successful startup could be founded by a person
| who makes the thing and a person who sells the thing are over,
| because all the obvious ideas have been done. You need a third
| founder: the person with deep domain knowledge who knows what
| problems exist and which ones are worth solving.
|
| I think the PULL framework in the post is an unnecessary
| formalism. My advice for finding ideas is to get out of the
| ecosystem of companies in the Big Tech or Silicon Valley
| traditions and go and work for tiny little companies where all
| the office staff work in the same room and your job is to
| modernise a C++ application that has a hard dependency on
| Microsoft Office 2003 and runs on a VM running Windows XP (which
| was the first programming job I got when I left teaching in
| 2021). Those businesses are full of problems that are easily
| solved with computers, but no one who knows how to solve those
| problems has discovered those problems yet.
| quibono wrote:
| > My advice for finding ideas is to get out of the ecosystem of
| companies in the Big Tech or Silicon Valley traditions and go
| and work for tiny little companies where all the office staff
| work in the same room and your job is to modernise a C++
| application that has a hard dependency on Microsoft Office 2003
| and runs on a VM running Windows XP (which was the first
| programming job I got when I left teaching in 2021). Those
| businesses are full of problems that are easily solved with
| computers, but no one who knows how to solve those problems has
| discovered those problems yet.
|
| Agreed. Except: smaller companies tend to have much smaller
| budgets and be less tolerant when it comes to software pricing.
|
| I would also say from experience that there is either a lot of
| commonalities in the types of issues that these companies face
| OR they have some very unique needs. In the former case one
| might as well abstract away and try to attack these problems in
| the general case. In the latter we need to hope that the niche
| can be big enough to be profitable.
| vonnik wrote:
| Agree with so much of this!
|
| Would just add that the best sales people have usually been
| folks with deep domain expertise, partially because they tend
| to have a pre-existing social network of potential users due to
| their work.
| antonkar wrote:
| This guy claims they modeled the ultimate future for 3 years and
| figured it all out: they share startup ideas
|
| https://melonusk.substack.com/
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| What is this? I can't tell if it's satire or serious or AI
| slop.
| antonkar wrote:
| Serious
| boredemployee wrote:
| i think in reality most people are already solving some problem
| and for some reason (luck, influence, networking, right place
| right time) things can scalate. in theory, everything sounds
| great in these "recipes", but in real life, a lot of other things
| come into play: lobbying, people with influence because of
| inherited wealth, and so on. I know it's not the case 100% of the
| time, but it happens a lot
| lelanthran wrote:
| You find ideas by doing.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I've written this many times before, but working in some industry
| will usually expose you to the various problems that need to be
| solved. Most of the startup founds I've met have either worked in
| tech, or as consultants, and have noticed some problem that has
| been sitting unsolved / products that suck / untapped markets.
| And it is not like you need to be a FAANG SWE or McKinsey
| consultant enjoy to that privilege.
|
| Every time I've joined a new company, or been exposed to a new
| sector, I've almost immediately found some startup potential just
| sitting around. The more boring and entrenched the sector is, the
| more you find.
|
| As a consumer, you are rarely exposed to the B2B world, or the
| inner workings of things. You are almost certainty limited to
| seeing things through consumer eyes, and thus it is easy to focus
| too much on the very saturated products / services.
| physicsguy wrote:
| I think the biggest difference though is that launching a B2B
| business is much harder to start with than a B2C one.
|
| If you're a B2C one, you launch an app/website, you get small
| but basically instant feedback by signups/usage. Reward is
| potentially low per user however.
|
| With B2B, even if you get in conversation with customers
| quickly, you still might be talking about a 6-12 months cycle
| to even get them signed up to a free trial. For large companies
| they want SSO, RBAC, etc. out of the door, plus RFC on security
| questionaires, data governance, ISO27001, etc. etc. etc.
| morkalork wrote:
| The successful pattern I've seen is someone around VP level
| in an existing industry leaving their current company and
| grabbing some engineers to build their idea. Maybe because
| their idea is great, or maybe because they're stuck at that
| level and can't advance further without leaving. But either
| way, they generally have some contact with their peers at
| other companies in industry so when they go pitch their
| product, they're much more likely to succeed than any random
| asshole off the street.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Working for small to medium size companies, I have noticed
| there are many 'solved' problems where the solutions are either
| too complex or, more commonly, too expensive.
|
| There are a lot of old boring things out there that are ripe
| for disruption.
| z0r wrote:
| Just ask people where they get theirs -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKJtOoqTxRI
| wavemode wrote:
| > Talk to 5 potential customers who should, if the hypothesis is
| true, rip the product out of your hands. Record the conversations
| so you can review them.
|
| Whatever your product is, you should be prototyping it and
| putting it in people's hands. Nobody knows what they want, so
| describing a product to them they've never seen or used tends to
| have extremely low signal-to-noise ratio.
| miggy wrote:
| A useful way to find ideas is by observing asymmetries. When
| something appears easy for some people but difficult for others,
| or vice versa, it often reveals underlying complexity, missing
| tools, or flawed mental models. Frustration can also be a signal.
| If something feels unnecessarily painful or awkward while others
| seem fine with it, there may be an opportunity to simplify,
| rethink, or build something better. These patterns often lead to
| meaningful insights or practical solutions.
| hollowonepl wrote:
| Gosh... I thought all that startup mentoring nonsense era is
| over... work is work... should give money I get it and it should
| give enough time to spend it wisely, I get it for a while too..
| but all that nonsense about problem solving? It should have a
| business case so it's something beyond pumped up idea to make
| world worse... I've seen enough startups that aimed to fix
| problems that never truly existed and generated more problems to
| speculate on an idea there actually is a business model for it..
| I think debunked truth about startup ideas is to find a gig that
| fat boy investors buy in when you realize, cash out, buy a winery
| and relax... others will keep fixing problems you've generated,
| but wine tastes good. All other ideas is just bollocks for young
| minds to be lied that world we live in is not feudal. Forgive me
| being brutally honest... but we are 20 years after Zuck being
| impressed by Napster way of impressing investors. We should have
| learned something real from that.
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