Need a good startup idea? Here are 5 ways to make it happen

How did you find your startup idea?

For those of us evolving in the start-up ecosystem, it is not uncommon to spend sleepless nights trying to find the right product idea that will find or create it’s own market in the so-called product-market fit.

There are tons of literature and excellent books on that topic, such as Eric Ries’ Lean Startup or The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki. All offers valuable advices on starting and managing a startup from idea to the first million dollars revenue.

However, finding your startup idea does not happen at night reading books, whatever practical advice they might give you.

One of the single most important phrases I’ve read that has helped us find our product idea comes from startup guru Paul Graham. As he famously put it in his essay How to get startup ideas, founders need to “Live in the future and build what seems interesting”.

This single sentence can become pretty scary for those of us who don’t have a time machine available. However, Paul Graham words provides at least five resounding advises for founders:

1. Build your startup around real-life problems that need to be solved

The only way to do so is to actually DO things and feel the pain doing them. Stop think, live your life and feel the pain.

2. Question inefficient patterns
They come in the form of recurrent manual processes; useless intermediaries or boring repetitive tasks. Identify those goals that could be reached faster and better with new tools, technology or software. Go create them.

3. Be visionary
Now that you know the current problems you want to tackle, find a solution that is realistic, but futuristic. This part is tricky as it involves the time machine. You probably should not think about a technological solution but more about behavioral ones. Devise a way to make like simpler. The less intrusive the technology is, the better your solution.

4. Keep your feet firmly on the ground
Whatever futuristic may the world be in 100 years, you need your startup to gain traction over the next three to five years. Habits die hard and most people don’t like changes. Do not try to change the world but humbly resolve one specific problem and figure out an implementation that makes sense (makes things easier, not worse).

5. Iteration is key to success
Even if some people are better at envisioning the future than other, no one has a crystal bowl. Getting to the point where user feel the gain from your product takes time. Build, Release and improve, indefinitely.

How did these principles apply to our company? Each time I walk into a bank, an hotel, an hospital or any government office, I know in advance that I will go through a boring and painful registration process, filling out lots of papers. At the hospital, I will be asked at the counter to fill in a form to register in case I’m visiting for the first time. At the bank, different forms will be available depending on the transaction I want to do. The worst is probably with official government forms where you need to reproduce exactly the same information on several papers that are supposed to go to different services…

The next step is even more hilarious. There’s a person right in front of me who is going to manually input all that same information inside the information system of the organization. In the process, she’ll asked me to spell my name because of my awful writing and she’ll probably do some data entry mistake because that’s such a boring task to do.

Can’t we simplify this registration at check-in? In 2013, is it okay to spend so much time on such an inefficient manual process? I believe that the check-in process at the counter should be breeze.

That’s it. This is how I decided to build a tablet application that could be displayed at any counter for user registration and check-in. I believe that the gains from a paperless check-in process are large enough for behavior to change.

As Paul Graham put it, Datafield is one of the things I see in my future as interesting. And I decided to make it happen.

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This article by Antoine Déroche originally appeared on e27.sg, a Burn Media publishing partner.