Startup Ideas

At Startup School, Paul Graham read his latest essay entitled "Ideas for Startups" (which is now available on his site.) The essay is filled with interesting insights and entertaining viewpoints and is written in the classic Paul Graham style. Here is another blog entry that I recently read that talks about a similar issue but from a different angle.

Both pieces cover one of the fundamental problems I've been struggling with: what idea can I come up with that is significant enough that I wouldn't lose interest after 1 or 2 years, that users would find compelling enough to use (and customers willing to pay for), and that would be lucrative enough so that quitting my nice secure day job wouldn't mean financial suicide. I've fallen into the classic trap of analysis paralysis. Imagine if I had just started working on a new idea a year ago how much further I'd be with its evolution instead of being stuck where I'm at today still pondering a "big" idea. When I hear stories like the one about upcoming.org, where its creators worked on the site in their spare time because they found it interesting and Yahoo eventually acquired them, I tend to think Paul is right: "the best way to get a "million dollar idea" is just to do what hackers enjoy doing anyway."

Phillip Greenspun has an alternative view. Maybe the people that have worked at a big company for 10+ years that have seen the same customer problems go unsolved and break off to create a startup to solve those problems do the best. I fall into this category too so I guess I have no excuses.