How I’ll Choose the Next Startup Idea
Have you spent weeks or months seeking a startup idea?
I understand that. You want to succeed and don’t want to waste time, but the opportunities out there drain your energy. Or even worse, you think if you spend more time researching, you’ll find the ideal startup idea.
I’m Wilbert, a solo bootstrapped founder. I made several products – one has sold, one is alive, and I’ll launch a new one soon. In this article, I’ll share my principles for choosing the next startup idea.
But first, let’s start with why.
Why it’s crucial to choose the right idea
Just ship it! — Indie Makers
If you have no experience in shipping and launching products, read the quote above. Instead of researching, make. Build anything you want to see in the world – an OpenAI wrapper, a macOS app, you name it – and launch it. And you should stop reading this article right now. You need to practice executing, not ideating.
But if you’ve launched a few products before, there you go. Taking time to research will save you months or even years of building the wrong product. Well, it doesn’t mean you’ll be successful tomorrow. And it doesn’t mean you’ll not pivot either. What I mean is: Decrease your chance of failure. Adjust your direction when you really need it.
At the end of the day, you must shorten the time to revenue.
I’ve learned about it for years. As I build a new product, I set the principles on how to choose the right idea. And it helped me to focus and say no. I didn’t waste days or weeks to research. The chance is, you’ll find it useful to choose your next idea.
Narrow the options
Setting boundaries is the main idea here. Without it, analysis paralysis will knock on the door in no time. That said, here are my criteria for picking a startup idea:
1. I can be the first customer
Marketing is hard – at least for a technical founder like me. And one way to make it easier is to use your product every day. You’ll be on fire to tell the world that your product is solving a valuable problem. You can tell your struggles, alternative solutions, or why you keep going. Telling your stories is easier because you have the full context.
And here’s the kicker.
Being the first customer makes you know what to build and not to build. Step by step, you are carving your niche. And that separates you from a dozen similar competitors. At this point, don’t let yourself get distracted by the impostor syndrome – a whisper of I’m not different enough. So long as you’re using the product, you’ll find a way.
So now the question is, are you trying to make a product for you? Or are you trying to make a product for some imaginary people that you don’t care about?
2. I can find competitors on Google search
It is one of my favorite ways to feel the market demand. If I find few or no competitors, I’ll throw the idea off. That is because you must make the potential customers aware of their problems. Not only that, you must convince them about your solution too. It’ll take some amount of time and money that indie makers can’t afford. Don’t underestimate it.
It’ll be a different story if I can find at least 10 competitors. Let me show you an example.
I’ll start by searching for the category name. For example: Let’s say I want to build a product in the web scraping category. I’ll search for web scraping software, or web scraping tools, you get the idea. Here’s an example of the Google search result for web scraping software:
Can you find 20 products there? We can see 9, but there are 11 more. So that’s a good sign – different people want this kind of product. And I can go on to see the details of every competitor’s website. But at some point, I’ll try to shut off my brain and see it as a validation to move forward with an idea.
3. I can grow the business as an indie
I know it’s a subjective matter – different people have different goals. There is no silver lining to decide whether an idea fits for me as an indie. But we’ll start to see some lights when we inverse the statement. Instead of answering how I can grow the business as an indie, answer how I can’t grow the business as an indie. Now we can find some things to avoid:
Entering the VC-funded territory
Following every footstep of venture-funded companies will doom your startup. They have teams and want to conquer the market. As they feed their ambitions, they’ll try to build features to please everyone. Instead of following them, build a simpler product to get your startup off the ground. And here is my rule of thumb: The product scope should consist of 3 big things – at most – to get started.
Neglecting your competitive advantage
Ask yourself, what am I good at?
Do you want to build an API-first business? Make sure you love to deal with AWS Lambda, API documentation, and so on. Do you want to build a user-facing product? Make sure you are comfortable tinkering with interface design and usability. You should be able to identify where you can excel or at least have some interest in learning more.
Pricing your product too low
It’ll be a disaster to sell a $5/month product forever. Do you want to reach $10,000 MRR? Good luck to find 2,000 customers, let alone in 2 years. In contrast, you should aim to sell at least a $50/month product – 10x the price of the former. And that means you must 10x the product value as well. If you don’t have any idea how to 10x the value, ask your customers. A variation of what can I do to make a $50/month product worth it for you will surprise you.
To grow our business, let’s make sure to avoid those 3 things. More often than not, we’ll position ourselves toward success 80% of the time.
Closing thoughts
The purpose of this article is not to assure success. Even if you choose the right idea, you still need to do the ultimate validation – people pay for your product.
As you can still get wrong about an idea, don’t delay execution. Build, launch, and find out whether your idea is what people want to buy. If not, think about the next direction you can hop into and pivot. As you go, you’ll revisit how you choose the next startup idea. Either to start a new product or iterate the current one.
As a thought exercise, can you see that choosing the right idea is recursive?
You are welcome to re-read this article again in the future.