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Ask HN: What would you do if you had 2 months free time to find startup ideas?

by user0x1d on 12/5/23, 12:27 PM with 3 comments

I've been accepted into a programme called Entrepreneur First [0], which is basically Love Island for co-founders. The programme is quite cool; the sum of the companies coming out of the programme are worth over 10 billion dollars.

At EF, they go against the Ycombinator advice of only seeking tostart a startup if you have an idea. You basically start pairing up with a random person in the programme and try generating ideas together.

I'm starting EF soon, and I have January and February free, where I'd like to *do something that will help me generate ideas* and prepare for the CEO role of starting a company. If you were in my situation, what would you do?

I'm mostly thinking of "infiltrating" an industry I don't know much of, but *I don't know which industry*. I don't know which macro trend I should follow. I don't really know what my passion is and if I should even follow my passion first of all. Which industry would you infiltrate?

I thought of things like

- working for free for an early stage startup where I get to know an industry and a good CEO - working in warehouses, supermarkets, etc - looking at some macro trends like Climate and getting involved with people who are actually on the ground working with infrastructure for this.

What would be your way of using this time to generate ideas?

[0] joinef.com

  • by chiefalchemist on 12/5/23, 12:55 PM

    > where I'd like to do something that will help me generate ideas

    Get out and talk to people. If B2C interests you, buy people a coffee and listen. If B2B interests you, show up with a box of donuts and listen.

    There's no shortage of ideas. There is a "shortage" of two things:

    1) Products / services the market needs

    2) Successful execution on those

    But just ideas? Those aren't the bottleneck.

    Given #2 you can also do post-mortems of other start-ups that shuttered and look for "good idea, poor execution" or maybe also it was a product (or service) ahead of its time (and the market didn't get it. Yet?).

  • by altdataseller on 12/5/23, 8:25 PM

    A good source of inspiration are app marketplaces. Not the iPhone or Google play app stores but niche ones like the Shopify App Store, Grafana plugins, Atlassian apps, Visual Code Marketplace. Which Snowflake data sources are popular? Which Pagerduty plugins are popular?

    This won’t necessarily give you a concrete idea but it will spark the creative juices and might give you a starting point

  • by thehucklecat on 12/5/23, 12:47 PM

    I want a cookbook that only has recipes for my family ie: -gluten free -vegetarian -no mushrooms -no goat cheese

    I hate having to skip past 60% of the recipes in a book. Feels like this is a fun GPT project waiting to happen.