Paul Graham’s “Ideas For Startups”

I realized many undergrad student entrepreneurs are having frustrations over coming up with good start up ideas because of our limited experiences and domain knowledge. Paul Graham, the founder of the incubator start up Y-Combinator mentions some interesting ways to tackle this problem at http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html.
Heres the geist of the story:
One way to make something [...]

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I realized many undergrad student entrepreneurs are having frustrations over coming up with good start up ideas because of our limited experiences and domain knowledge. Paul Graham, the founder of the incubator start up Y-Combinator mentions some interesting ways to tackle this problem at http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html.

Heres the geist of the story:

One way to make something people want is to look at stuff people use now that’s broken. Dating sites are a prime example. They have millions of users, so they must be promising something people want. And yet they work horribly. Just ask anyone who uses them. It’s as if they used the worse-is-better approach but stopped after the first stage and handed the thing over to marketers… Of course, the most obvious breakage in the average computer user’s life is Windows itself. But this is a special case: you can’t defeat a monopoly by a frontal attack. Windows can and will be overthrown, but not by giving people a better desktop OS. The way to kill it is to redefine the problem as a superset of the current one. The problem is not, what operating system should people use on desktop computers? but how should people use applications? There are answers to that question that don’t even involve desktop computers… Everyone thinks Google is going to solve this problem, but it is a very subtle one, so subtle that a company as big as Google might well get it wrong. I think the odds are better than 50-50 that the Windows killer– or more accurately, Windows transcender– will come from some little startup…

Another classic way to make something people want is to take a luxury and make it into a commmodity. People must want something if they pay a lot for it. And it is a very rare product that can’t be made dramatically cheaper if you try. This was Henry Ford’s plan. He made cars, which had been a luxury item, into a commodity. But the idea is much older than Henry Ford. Water mills transformed mechanical power from a luxury into a commodity, and they were used in the Roman empire. Arguably pastoralism transformed a luxury into a commodity.
Often to make something dramatically cheaper you have to redefine the problem. The Model T didn’t have all the features previous cars did. It only came in black, for example. But it solved the problem people cared most about, which was getting from place to place. One of the most useful mental habits I know I learned from Michael Rabin: that the best way to solve a problem is often to redefine it. A lot of people use this technique without being consciously aware of it, but Rabin was spectacularly explicit. You need a big prime number? Those are pretty expensive. How about if I give you a big number that only has a 10 to the minus 100 chance of not being prime? Would that do? Well, probably; I mean, that’s probably smaller than the chance that I’m imagining all this anyway.

 

Making things cheaper is actually a subset of a more general technique: making things easier. For a long time it was most of making things easier, but now that the things we build are so complicated, there’s another rapidly growing subset: making things easier to use… So if you want to start a startup, you can take

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