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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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"
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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Ensure that you listen to and record feedback from your clients. https://www.forbes.com/councils/theyec/2019/06/13/10-smart-w...
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.
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.
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.
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.
I agree, when the environment changes, new things become possible.
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.
> 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.
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.
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"
Suddenly my mind has gone blank…
Which is a problem. So...
It should turn grey. Unless you have grey matter deficit.
Just ask people where they get theirs - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKJtOoqTxRI
You find ideas by doing.
I agree. Learnt this the hard way!
Steal them from your subordinates
Steal away, ideas are cheap. Execution and distribution are the only two things that matter.
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.
You can just rephrase it as "an idea alone is worthless without proper execution" which is what is meant.
Everyone has ideas. Not everyone nails Timing + Execution + Distribution + Luck.
Everyone has ideas, but not all of them are good ideas. Bad idea + nailing all the other ones won't give you good results.
Good execution and distribution require their own good ideas
Steal them from your peers, for example fellow students.
© Mark Zuckerberg
This guy claims they modeled the ultimate future for 3 years and figured it all out: they share startup ideas
https://melonusk.substack.com/
What is this? I can’t tell if it’s satire or serious or AI slop.
Serious
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
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.
[dead]
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.
"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.
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.
Exactly. I find the post rather disingenuous.
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!
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?