Paul Graham, Godfather of Silicon Valley Entrepreneurship: how to obtain entrepreneurial idea (3)

Filter

If you want to notice the idea of entrepreneurship, You need to close two more filters: the unsexy filter (which does not despise or look down on something) and the dislike filter (schlep filter, you are disgusted/bored with something and want to avoid it ).

Most programmers want to start their own business easily: write beautiful code, place it on the server, and pay a large amount of money to users. They don't want to deal with boring problems, or with the troublesome real world. It is understandable to have such an idea, because these things are also a burden. However, there are too many people with the same idea, and the idea of easy start-up is increasingly rare. If you start thinking and think about the annoying and boring idea, you will find that some of the idea values are considerable and you are waiting quietly.

Schlep filter is quite dangerous. I have also written an article specifically to explain the consequences of it-what I call it the aversion blind zone (schlep ).
). (Note: The term schlep was originally from a Jewish language and is widely used in the United States. It means tedious and annoying work .) As an example of stripe, it is a typical case of disabling and benefiting from the dislike filter. Thousands of programmers can see this idea, and they all know it in stripe.
One thing that really hurts when dealing with online payments. But they turned a blind eye to Stripe's idea when looking for a startup, because they would unconsciously avoid payment-related matters. For stripe, tossing and paying make them hate, but this dislike is tolerable. As a matter of fact, most people are afraid to process online payments, stripe has lost many competitors, so it can be smooth in some places that should have encountered difficulties (such as users. They don't have to let users hear their own voice, because users have long been eager to see the emergence of stripe.

The unsexy filter is similar to the dislike filter, except that the former avoids your disdain or incomprehension, while the latter avoids your fear. When we started viaweb, we overcame the need to disable unsexy.
Filter: we are very interested in software architecture, but we are not interested in e-commerce. Later, we realized that this was one of the difficulties that had to be solved.

Closing a dislike filter is more important than closing a contempt filter, because it is more likely to become an illusion that it is a form of worse self-indulgence. In any case, it is time-consuming and laborious to start a startup company. Even if the product won't bring you a lot of trouble, you have to deal with investors, recruit or fire employees, and so on. So, if you find a cool idea, but you are stuck because you are afraid of the troubles and dislikes in the process, I can only wish you good luck.

Although the contempt for the filter is also the source of the error, it is not as useless as the dislike filter. If you are at the forefront of the fast-changing field, and your judgment on what you like and what is weak, how much will be associated with the Value embodied in practice, the older you are, the more experience you have, the more obvious this will be (that is, your subjective judgment on the Quality of things may help your entrepreneurial practices ). In addition, if you think something is awesome, you will be more active and energetic at work.

Tips

As I mentioned earlier, the best way to start an idea business is to become the kind of person who produces this kind of idea, and then develop things based on interest. But sometimes, your condition is not enough. What do you do now?

Next, I want to talk about how to find a startup idea. Although from my experience, the native strategy is more effective, but the method discussed later is also feasible. When you use native methods, unless something is obviously missing, you will not be aware of the existence of an idea. However, if you take the initiative (deliberately) to start an idea business, you have to use self-training to replace this natural constraint-you will see a lot more idea, but most of them are terrible, you need the ability to filter them.

The biggest danger of not using native approaches is that people will be influenced by native approaches. The native idea is like inspiration. There are many examples: the Founder has a seemingly crazy idea, But he "knows" that it is playful, so we have a successful startup company. If you feel the same way when you start idea, you may already be wrong.

When looking for idea, please look for it in areas related to your expertise. If you are a Database Expert, don't think about what chat applications you want to do for young people (unless you are a young man yourself ). It may be a good idea, but why do you think your judgment is correct? So skip this step. There are also a lot of other idea related to databases. Because you know, these idea are good or bad, and you can make a lot of judgments. Do you think it is difficult to find reliable database-related idea? That's because your expertise improves your standards.

Find idea. Start with your own requirements. There must be something you need.

One trick is to ask yourself, in the last job, did you say, "Why no one is doing X? If someone makes X, I will definitely buy it !" And so on? If you think of any x mentioned by others, you will probably have an idea-you know that the demand exists. If X cannot be done completely, no one else can tell.

To put it more broadly, ask yourself if you have anything different from ordinary people and your needs are different from those of most people. You may not be the only one. If others will "Follow up" your differences, it would be better.

If you are changing the idea, the idea you have been fighting for is something different from ordinary people. On that idea, have you found any other requirements? Several well-known start-ups started in this way. Hotmail is the idea produced by the co-founders to discuss with each other when they started idea.

Being young is a major advantage different from ordinary people. Some of the most valuable new idea's come from teenagers in their twenties. Young founders have shortcomings in some aspects, but they only know the world of their peers. It is hard to imagine what Facebook would look like if someone has never been to college. Therefore, if you are a young founder (for example, less than 23 years old), what do you and your friends want to do, but cannot be achieved by existing technologies?

In addition to your unfulfilled needs, the unfulfilled demands of others are also a good source of idea. Have a good chat with people around you and hear what they have discovered is missing in the world? What do they want but cannot do? What is boring or unpleasant, especially at work? When chatting, you can't just think about how to find your own startup idea. You are actually looking for the Mars that ignited your thoughts on others. Maybe you will notice the problems they didn't realize in the conversation (because you know how to solve them ).

When you find a non-self-satisfied requirement, it may be vague at the beginning. People who need it may not know exactly what they want. In this case, I often suggest that the founders become consultants-if they focus on solving the problem of this user, they will know how to act. People have similar problems. Almost all the code you write can be used repeatedly. Even if some Code cannot be reused, it is only a small cost for you to dig a well. (That is, solving a user's problem is equivalent to solving some of the problems of a class of users .)

If you want to solve the problems encountered by others, you can make them your problem. When Rajat Suri, founder of the iPad ordering system e la carte, decided to write software for the restaurant, he became a waiter to learn how the restaurant operated. This may sound a little too bad, but starting a business is radical. We especially like the founder of this process.

In fact, for those who need idea, I will give a suggestion: Do not just close the two filters (schlep and unsexy filters), but take the initiative, find out the idea that you did not care about, or that will make you dislike, and then make the thing you did not care about, and collect money from the user.

One of the best ways to bypass the dislike filter and (to some extent bypass) despise the filter is to think about what you want others to do and you will use it? What are you willing to pay for now?

Because declining companies and industries are often replaced by entrepreneurial companies, you can use your brains in companies or industries that have been exposed to defeat. Think about it, which companies will benefit from their destruction? For example, the news industry is declining rapidly, but it is still profitable. What kind of companies (in part) will replace the news industry in the future?

Put your imagination in the future, not the present. If a company or industry replaces another company or industry, it usually starts from the inside. Therefore, do not look for a replacement for X, but find something that will change to X in the future (that is, replacing X takes a long time and the process is complicated, currently, it is impossible to directly determine what is definitely taking X, and there may be a substitute that nobody sees in the process ). Please also think about what will happen in substitution. For example, the traditional news industry provides readers with a way to get information and pass the time. The author can also make money and gain popularity from it, and it is also a carrier of several different advertising forms. All the above aspects of the news industry may be replaced (in fact, this replacement is already happening .)

When startups swallow existing companies, they usually serve small but important markets that are ignored by giants. If the market is a giant who does not want to participate, it would be better, because such a disdainful attitude often misleads them. For example, after Steve Wozniak created a computer that later became Apple I, he felt obligated to communicate with his employer, Hewlett-Packard, to see if they were interested in producing it. Fortunately, they rejected Steve Wozniak's good intentions. One of the reasons is that apple I treats TV as a display, which is too embarrassing for HP's high-end hardware company.

Like the "hobbyists (who indulge in a hobby)" in the computer age, is there a group of senior users ignored by giants now? An ambitious startup company can easily take a smaller market, and the effort is not limited to that small market (that is, it may continue to grow bigger and deeper ).

Similarly, most successful start-ups are developing in a greater wave than themselves. Now, start-ups can also find out what trends can be used. The prices for gene sequencing and 3D printing are continuing to decline according to the molar rate. After a few years, what new things can we do? What will happen in the near future if we are unconsciously determining as impossible?

Native

Basically, looking for trends in the tide is a way to stimulate native approaches. If you are at the forefront of a rapidly developing field, you cannot find any wave, and you are the wave of yourself.

Looking for entrepreneurial idea is a subtle learning, which is why most people are born. Failure is mainly because you are too deliberate to start up idea. If you do this, it will produce some ideas that seem reasonable but actually dangerous. The best way is not so straightforward: If you have a suitable background (that is, preparing your brain), good entrepreneurial idea will become apparent. It usually takes time to discover something missing, and these gaps are not suitable for startups, but just interesting things. You are willing to spend time and energy making them interesting, which is very valuable.

Live in the future and make interesting things. (Live in the future and build what seems interesting.) It sounds strange, but this is the real secret.

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