As someone who has spent decades in the technology sector, you’re intrigued by overnight success stories you read about in the tech section of your favorite magazines and blogs, and it’s an understatement to say that the idea of launching your own tech startup has occurred to you more than a few times.
When you read about the founder’s stories, captivated by their journey to fame and fortune, you also notice something interesting: you’re not that different from these pioneers you admire, sharing similar aspirations, technical skill sets, and experience.
Perhaps you’ve even studied the things you need to consider before launching a startup, and you could give a TEDx talk about how to find the equipment you need, choose a great name for your company, design an attention-getting logo, create an attractive website, and figure out what your customers want based on your surveys.
Unfortunately, there’s just one problem: You have no idea where to find a problem worth solving, something that will change the world for the better.
How does one come up with an idea worth building an entire business around? Should you pick a market that’s trending? Should you probe markets that haven’t changed in decades? Should you re-examine your passion to spy on a business idea at the bottom of the idea barrel?
While many people you know in the tech space, your mentors, colleagues, and friends, have no problems with ideation but struggle with implementation, your problem is just the opposite. If you had a great idea, you would introduce it to the world with panache. But how do you come up with that gem of an idea?
What Is a Groundbreaking Idea?
Before delving into the alchemy of how to discover brilliant ideas, it’s essential to recognize what a remarkable idea looks like in the first place.
Embrace.io is an excellent example of an ingenious idea, one that made such a profound impression on savvy investors like The Chernin Group (TCG) that it raised $2.5 million in venture capital funding.
Co-founders Eric Futoran, Maggie Shih, and Fredric Newberg came up with the idea to help fellow developers detect overlooked glitches in their mobile apps. Embrace.io, which helps developers answer fundamental questions about app loading speeds, performance, and user-friendliness, is a “diagnostic” app. It helps developers figure out what issues delight beta users when they try out their app or disappoint them just before they abandon the app.
In an interview with VentureBeat, Eric Futon explained the genesis of the idea for the app: disillusion with the current state of reliable tech for analytics, logs, and crash reports led the team to develop a unified platform to measure the technical information emerging from different devices.
Paths for Thinking
In an old Forbes article, What Are The Best Ways To Think Of Ideas For A Startup? Dan Lewis, a head product developer, discussed 3 paths that led to groundbreaking ideas:
The first path is to have a spontaneous idea. This can occur anytime, anywhere. While you can’t invite bolts from the blue, what matters is how you respond. Do you dismiss intriguing ideas or accept them? Do you nurture them or never give them a second thought?
The second path is to notice a problem in your industry and research all possible solutions, prompted by curiosity more than anything else.
The third path is to focus on your ambition to become a successful entrepreneur and look for a problem to solve. Steve Jobs, for example, invented the iPhone after identifying all the issues plaguing mobile phones. He then built teams of smart software engineers to find solutions.
If you’ve always wanted to build a tech startup, you now know how to search through a constellation of ideas to notice a protostar that will light up your world.
