Coming up with an idea is both deceitfully important, and unimportant. It's deceitfully important because it actually does matter what you choose to do. However, it's deceitfully unimportant because it doesn't matter that much, and [[pivoting]] should be fairly common. The most important part of choosing an idea is to choose an [[idea space]]. By choosing an idea space, you limit yourself to thinking in one realm, while keeping your options open. Ideally that idea space should primarily be an industry or a niche. We know that having [[Founder Market Fit]] is extremely important because it gives you unique insights into the thing you're building which other people might not have. This leads to massive time savings on research, testing, and validating, while also opens the possibility for finding untouched areas of the market that might not have been thought about. So, the order in which you go about generating ideas matters. You should: 1. Pick a realm/niche to focus on. This should be something that you and/or your cofounder(s) have [[Founder Market Fit]] (FMF) or at least some unique advantage in. For example, being a SWE or a content creator myself, I limited myself to the realm of either content creation, or maybe a developer tool. 2. The next thing is to lean on that FMF to think about problems you may have encountered on a day to day basis, things you've seen companies or your customer implement ad-hoc personal solutions to, or other pain points you may be privy to. These will be the guiding beacons for whether or not something is truly worth building around. Chances are, if there's no pain associated with something, it's not worth building since people will likely not seek out solutions to that problem, and/or be willing to pay for them. It should be noted, there's a 0th step. And that 0th step is choosing your goals. If you're trying to build a business that is on the scale of 1B+, the way you source and look at ideas becomes very different than if you were trying to achieve something smaller, like a lifestyle business, or something that might cap out at a 10M valuation in the market. If you're doing the former, you probably also need to take a 3rd step which is paying attention to the potential market for the problem. If something is a big problem, like tracking scrimmages in an esport like VALORANT, and the total market for that is around 150 teams that would pay $30/mo for a tool to help them, you can clearly tell it's not a billion dollar idea. Also, it's worth noting that there's a concept called the [[Edge of the Wedge]]. This is a concept that pretty much says that in order to tackle a big problem, you can first solve a tiny subset problem within it, which gets your foot in the door. It's like a door wedge, by targeting the edge which has a small surface area, you allow yourself to slowly build around it and force that wedge further and further into the space. So there's no harm in starting with something small, if you believe it leads you to a much larger market downstream. ## Past Mistakes & Learnings One common mistake is to focus on finding a problem for a solution, and not the other way around. You shouldn't be focusing on solutions at the idea phase, purely on PROBLEMS! The problems themselves are usually long term and permanent if chosen wisely, but solutions are ephemeral. That means if you can identify a great problem to solve, you'll have multiple at-bats with solutions to solving that problem, which gives you a much higher chance of success than choosing a random solution and trying to find a problem which it perfectly fits. Another common mistake is being married to an idea. Ideas at the beginning should be starting points. They're inklings, just a small scent trail, for what you're actually looking for. They should be used like breadcrumbs that help you walk down the right trail, but they shouldn't prevent you from taking a different path if you believe the roadmap to [[PMF]] requires it. One example is with RIB - we came up with a solution and we got a tiny bit of traction (often worse than no traction, since it fools you into thinking you have [[PMF]]) and we assumed that the solution was what was important, and not the problem. It blinded us for years, making us come up with excuses about the market, timings, and so forth. If we instead kept on the trail of identifying problems, our product roadmap would have turned out way differently, and so would our revenue. ## Next Steps Once you come up with a industry, and a few ideas, the next step is to move on to [[2. Idea Evaluation]] (which is different from [[2.5 Idea Validation (probably skip this step?)]])