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Once you get into the “coming up with ideas mindset”, you start to see ideas everywhere.
It’s addictive. I know because I spent a decade doing it.
Coming up with ideas is fun, it’s easy, and it gives you a nice dopamine hit when you think of a “good” one.
Maybe you even buy a great domain name to go with it.
That’s progress, right?
Hmm…. not really.
Unfortunately it’s easy to get stuck at this stage and never progress past it.
How important are ideas anyway?
Back in 2005 an entrepreneur called Derek Sivers wrote a 134-word blog post which would go on to become one of the most quoted startup posts of all time, titled Ideas are just a multiplier of execution.
His premise is that even the most brilliant idea executed poorly is virtually worthless.
But an average idea executed brilliantly can be hugely valuable.
He illustrated it with this table.
The value of your business = Idea value x Execution value
The weighting of the scales is the important part.
A brilliant idea with weak execution is worth $20,000.
A weak idea with brilliant execution is worth $10,000,000.
My interpretation of this advice is:
- Don’t waste time waiting for a brilliant idea to come along, a good idea is enough.
- Focus efforts on learning to execute well.
In other words, just launch something.
The problem with most startup idea advice
There are thousands of pieces of content online about coming up with startup ideas.
Most of them advise you to identify problems in your own life and build a startup to solve them.
Sadly this approach often leads to bad ideas.
- “I wish there were an app that could catalogue everything in my fridge and make recipe plans.”
- “It would be cool if there was a way for me to know which of my friends are travelling to the same places as me so we could meet up.”
- “What if there were an app that let me rent out tools from my shed and rent other people’s garden equipment?”
These are all ideas I’ve personally had.
And so have thousands of other people.
You’ll notice they’re all:
- Aimed at consumers (a tough market to sell to) rather than businesses (a much better market to sell to)
- Not clear how you’d monetise them
- The last two have the classic marketplace problem - they would be useless without a large number of users (i.e. very hard to get started)
This is why I believe identifying problems in your own life, unless you’re specifically looking within your work life, is not a good method.
The quickest way to come up with ideas worth building
I recently joined a build challenge on a platform called Build The Keyword.
The concept is this:
People are looking for solutions and not finding them.
Build those solutions.
Obvious question: So how do you find these ideas?
Answer: Use search engine data to identify opportunities where search volume is high AND keyword competition is low i.e. there are not many good results for their search.
The idea stemmed from this tweet thread by legendary solopreneur Danny Postmaa.
In it he describes how you can use free tools to identify search keywords with a high volume of monthly searches (more than 500) and a low keyword difficulty (less than 20).
He gives an example of a Figma Components site he built which makes him $1200 a month without doing any marketing.
My clever friends Katt and Lee took this tweet thread and turned it into a product called Build The Keyword.
It does the hard part of finding keyword opportunities for you, meaning you just have to pick one you’re excited about and build it.
For people like me who love to build but suck at marketing this is solid gold.
Unlike most ideas I have, these are actually things people want.
And if I follow the simple process described by Danny in his tweet, it should market itself more or less on autopilot.
What am I building?
I chose the keyword “AI Productivity Tools” which is a topic I’m interested in. I saw the idea in the Build The Keyword newsletter.
It ticks the boxes, although the monthly search volume is still relatively low.
My plan is to launch a simple directory site, likely using Softr and Airtable, and see what happens.
One of the great things about finding ideas this way is there are many different ways to monetise them.
- Start a newsletter
- Build a directory
- Start a blog
- Build a SaaS
I noticed in the Build The Keyword build challenge Slack group there are a huge variety of different products being built.
The one thing that unites them is they’re all building pre-validated ideas, which in my experience is unheard of!
If you’re interested in joining the challenge or just finding some ideas, please check out Build The Keyword.
Full transparency - that’s an affiliate link. I wrote this post genuinely because I’m excited about it, but then figured I’d be silly not to become an affiliate.
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