[onion2k]

Idea/Thesis, Hypothesis, Target, Test and some where later - build.

This is a common strategy if you just want to 'do a startup' but it misses the need. Every successful business I can think of started with a founder needing a product to exist. All the startups I've been involved in have been products I wanted to exist because I needed them myself, or I had a close relationship with someone who needed them. Turning them in to something that could make money was a key goal, but I'd have built some form of them anyway even if it wasn't.

If you're just thinking up things people might want and throwing up a landing page to see if people claim they're interested I suspect you're going to get bored quickly, and you'll move on to the next even better idea very quickly.

That's not to say it can't work if you're making something just because 300 people signed up to your Launchrock page, but I think the motivation to succeed won't weather the storms that your startup will face if that's the only reason you have to build something.

[invalidOrTaken]

This is a really good point.

Everything I've built on my own has been something I wanted. In some cases they were more complicated than I thought so I never got to the customer validation stage, but that wasn't quite the disaster it could have been, because cash wasn't the (only) motivation.

Except...when it was, and yeah, my bad. So on the one hand I look back and kick myself for not first probing the market, but then I also remember that I did probe it, found there wasn't one, and didn't really care.

It can be a fine line between building a "me-too" product and something that no one wants.

[mpfundstein]

the whole Lean Startup methodology is snake oil IMO. it is used primarily by consultants to lure big corps into "innovation methodologies".* While its certainly an improvement over status quo, results were mostly meh anyway. you just cant force good ideas

the best startups are the ones mentioned by OP. visionary founder who needs that stuff himself.

* i was director at a small 7mm/yr consultancy and did precisely that

[webmaven]

The main point of lean startup isn't to have better ideas, it is to identify and discard bad ones faster, and focus your limited resources on the wheat among the chaff.

[mdorazio]

I'd caveat this with the note that many unicorns, including a couple I've worked with, didn't solve any problem that a solution wasn't available for - they instead solved it better/more cheaply or in a new way. This is especially true in the B2B SaaS market where any large addressable market likely has incumbents you'll be fighting against, even if only tangentially.

[GoatOfAplomb]

There's a lot to be said for working on solutions to problems you have yourself. But I think that also leaves a lot of very fertile ground untouched - the problems that startup founders tend not to have, but many other people do.