[tester457]

Paul Graham's article How to Get Startup Ideas [0] is this approach.

> The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.

> The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way.

> Why is it so important to work on a problem you have? Among other things, it ensures the problem really exists. It sounds obvious to say you should only work on problems that exist. And yet by far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has.

His article Schlep Blindness [1] is good too.

> There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call schlep blindness. Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It means a tedious, unpleasant task.

> The most striking example I know of schlep blindness is Stripe, or rather Stripe's idea. For over a decade, every hacker who'd ever had to process payments online knew how painful the experience was. Thousands of people must have known about this problem. And yet when they started startups, they decided to build recipe sites, or aggregators for local events. Why? Why work on problems few care much about and no one will pay for, when you could fix one of the most important components of the world's infrastructure? Because schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of fixing payments.

[0] https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html [1] https://paulgraham.com/schlep.html

[yobbo]

I don't see the difficulty as finding the problem (schlep blindness) or an idea of the solution. Rather, it's always imagining realistic ways of implementing a solution.

In payments, for example, the problem is never "building the thing". It will always be gaining permission (whatever it means for your application) of hooking into the system. It might require depositing some amount of capital; and it's usually an amount larger than any startup can reasonably get. Most such barriers are there by design.

[tester457]

And fixing payments would have required incredible connections, the founders that chose recipe sites knew that fixing payments would have been a decade long ordeal requiring networks they did not have access to.

In some problems, the hard part isn't programming, it's everything else. At least with technical problems you can implement the recipe or streaming site and you're done. But payments was a human problem, requiring people to deal with government, regulation, accounting, etc.

[mandeepj]

> schlep blindness

Thanks for that! I was about to add a reply describing my situation of schlep blindness without using that noun. Of course, it'd have taken much longer text.

I'd say besides identifying problems, you'd have to have a knack for look-out for an easy solution for that problem, and most importantly building a business around that solution.

Back in 2004/2005, I was working with a payment gateway; it was super difficult to work with. I forgot the name now. I guess it was along the likes of Authorize.net. But, at that time, it never occurred to me to turn that into a business problem and solve it (face palm).