How to pick startup ideas for your next project

I used to be really bad at coming up with project ideas for my startups.

But as I shipped more projects, I found a pattern that allowed me to be more successful with the ideas I picked.

A lot of startup ideas come from problems.

But not all problems are equal.

There are 3 main factors that I think of when picking a problem for my next startup:

• How often does this problem happen?

• How painful is this problem?

• How many resources are currently used to solve this problem?

I’ll also give an example at the end of this article.

Let’s dive into it.

Estimated reading time: 3 min 14 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.

How often does this problem happen?

You know that time when you forget to do something really important?

So you write it down on a sticky note somewhere you don’t forget.

The idea is: that we build systems around us so we become more productive or enhance our capability to do more.

This is the reason why software is built, it is used to create good systems. Software helps us experience fewer problems in our daily lives. Fewer problems mean less pain.

This is what inspired me to build Journey+, I didn’t wanna endlessly scroll through Discord just to find the AI image I generate everytime.

So if your startup idea reduces the number of times a problem happens, people would pay for that idea.

How painful is this problem?

Humans are inherently lazy and pain-averse, at least I know I am.

I don’t like to do more than I need to for a task and I try hard so bad things don’t happen to me. This is the main reason why humans have survived for a long time.

That’s why it’s helpful for me to always helpful to think how painful a problem is. If you make something go from 9/10 painful to 1/10 painful, people really value that.

For example, migrating thousands of notes from Apple Notes to Notion. I did something similar that took me 10+ hours to do, not fun. If you write a program to automate all of that, you essentially eliminate all the pain from doing this task.

This is also why subscriptions like Youtube Premium exist, so you don’t experience the pain of watching ads in the middle of the video.

Solve your user’s pain with your startup idea.

How many resources are currently used to solve this problem?

Resources like time and money are valuable to us, people don’t like giving them away.

This is why so many startups are created from the idea of saving a person/company time and/or money. It is a natural by-product of reducing pain.

If your startup idea saves more money than how much it is to pay for, that’s even better. This also applies to saving time, time is money.

Using Journey+ for myself has saved me tens of hours just trying to find old images I generated.

The bigger the savings there are, the better.

For example, the personal knowledge management tool I use, Readwise, saves me hundreds of hours organizing all the notes I get from articles, books, and videos. Don’t know what I would do without it.

You can figure out how much time/money is saved from your startup idea by looking at your potential customer’s current workflows.

Example

Let’s look at my favorite backend solution, Supabase (a 500m company!), and break down the problem they solve into these 3 factors I talked about earlier.

The problem they are solving is providing an entire backend (db, auth, storage, etc.) for developers who just started a new project that requires a backend.

Let’s take a look:

• How often does this problem happen: It happens whenever a dev starts a new project/startup

• How painful is this problem: This is 8/10 painful, no one wants to build authentication solution, APIs, and manage their own database from scratch.

• How many resources are currently used to solve this problem: Hundreds of hours of dev time and thousands of dollars are spent to maintain all of this.

They really hit a gold mine with this one.