How to come up with startup ideas

3 ways to do it better

Author

Miguel Sarenas
June 26, 2024

Sponsored by

Coming up with good startup ideas is hard.

There are too many ideas, but how can you develop better ones?

I’ll show you 3 methods I personally use to develop better startup ideas.

Estimated reading time: 1 min 30 sec

Background

Hey I’m Miguel!

I'm a new grad software engineer living in NYC and a part-time indie hacker. I built Journey Plus, an interface for Midjourney, that was recently acquired!

I used to be a pre-med student, but then I switched to computer science in the spring of 2021, my sophomore year. That's how I got started writing code.

I started with C++, and now I'm mainly building web apps with Next.js, TypeScript, and Supabase.

SEO Optimized

People are already searching for solutions to their problems.

Why don’t we meet them in the middle?

The best part is, all this search data is already available to you!

Here are the FREE tools I use to analyze keywords for my product:

Here’s what I generally look for:

  • Volume greater than 500

  • Keyword difficulty less than 20

  • More than 50 child keywords

Search data makes it easier to validate your product.

Reddit Optimized

Reddit is a great place to find startup ideas.

Reddit users are already complaining about their pain in Reddit threads.

Here are examples I found just now:

The best part is...

They’re already segmented via subreddits.

This makes it easier to find customers for your idea.

This way, you kill two birds with one stone.

Coming up with the idea itself and distributing the idea.

Solve Your Own Problems

It is much easier and faster to build a project if you understand the problem yourself.

You are the user of the project, so you know EXACTLY what you need to solve your own problem.

And you also know where to market this product.

Because you already hang out where your customers would be.

This is how indie hackers like Pieter Levels, Marc Louvion, and Arvid Kahl do it.

What’s one problem you have that you can solve right now?

What I’m Reading

If you haven’t, you can also find me on Twitter where I tweet about indie hacking, side projects, and code!

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