Looking for a startup idea? There’s no silver bullet, but here are a few pointers

Photo credit: Burak Kebapci

Alexander is a TIA Star Contributor and publishes high-value content that serves the Asian tech community. Read more from TIA Star Contributors here.

People ask me how to find an idea for their startup all the time. And you know what? I don’t really have a great answer. It’s just really fricking hard if you’re not thinking the right way and looking for insights in the wrong places.

Fundamentally, great ideas come from two insights:

• Behavioral: The way people do things is inefficient and there’s a better solution.
• Technical: You come up with a way to digitalize something.

Business founders are more likely to see the former, and techies the latter. Ideally, you have both, which requires great timing.

So, I’m going to mind vomit some ideas on this topic. While there is no silver bullet here, this will save you time if you’re stuck.

(I wrote a blog post about validating an idea if you want to know more about it.)

Founder-market fit

The notion of “founder-market fit” is important, so start here.

What are you really good at? What do you like? Where do you have a huge network for sales or hiring? Are you from a certain industry?

The goal here is to figure out what you shouldn’t do and what you might do. Removing options helps you focus and kills certain ideas you might have (which saves time in validation).

Figure out what kind of model you want to do and can be good at (and ideally have a network around), then you will know what pool you are fishing in.

Copying ideas

Copying ideas is a really viable option, but it does not guarantee success.

You can copy most of the business model, but you have to then innovate in the execution, depending on where you transfer the idea to. This is really important especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America where executing is harder for so many reasons.

Old industry

Issue is insight

Business model analysis

Get pissed off more

Apply a cool business model to something else

Start and fail forward