How to Start Building #2: Creating Startup Ideas

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder, and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. We're doing things a little bit differently this week. We’re dropping another mini-series, which means you're getting two episodes today, two episodes Wednesday, and two episodes Friday. You're listening to Episode 2 in the series. Be sure to check out today's classic episode as well. This week's theme for the mini-series is How to Start Building. We're going to talk about everything from idea formation, to the mindset and skills you must hone as you work to get your business off the ground. Today, I am talking about How to Think of Startup ideas. Let's hop into it. 

How to have ideas 

I have always loved thinking of business ideas, literally since I was a kid. I remember in second grade, I was in Mrs. Sachs's class at Harrison Elementary and one day, while writing in my black composition notebook, I had a brain blast. I was spending so much time going from pen to highlighter that I said to myself, why don't I just have one tool that does both of these things? I went home, literally cut a pen in half and a highlighter in half. I probably did it six times cause I messed up the first five.I taped them together. And for about a day, before literally all of the ink leaked out onto my pants, I  had a two and one pen and highlighter to use at school. And my brain has always been wired to think creatively and find interesting opportunities like this. This was definitely an interesting opportunity. And while some people like me were born with this muscle built up, it is a muscle that can be trained and learned by anyone. So that's what I want to spend the rest of this episode talking about, because being able to think of startup ideas is super important. As Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, said, “Having ideas is among the most important qualities for a startup founder to have. You will need to generate lots of new ideas in the course of running a startup.”So how does one cultivate the mindset of a business brainstormer? Here are four specific recommendations. 

Create surface area

First, create surface area for ideas to emerge. Remember a business idea, whether it's a startup or an idea within a larger company, it is simply a solution to a problem that a group of people do or do not realize that they have. And if that's the case, the best way to maximize quantity of ideas is by maximizing quantity of problems.

I've always found that the easiest way to do that is to make yourself part of the group of people that experience the problem you're trying to solve. So for me, I created surface area in college. Outside of my classes, I involved myself in as many extracurriculars as possible, some that very clearly fit my interests and others that I knew nothing about prior to signing up for them. This included an investment club, rock climbing, a magazine on campus, and a social fraternity. And just think about the diversity of experiences and viewpoints and people provided to me by doing such disparate activities. By immersing myself in the investment club, I had, the opportunity to identify inefficiencies with everything from Microsoft Excel to legacy trading applications, to how clubs operate in general. By immersing myself in a magazine on campus, which by the way, I had no relevant experience before that, I could see problems in how creatives work with quantitatives and I could see missing resources that could be really helpful for writers to write their pieces. The ironic part here of course is that the magazine is likely what gave me the perspective that I needed to think about and start Morning Brew and understand that it actually could be a better solution to things like the Wall Street Journal. So that's surface area of experiences, but that's just putting you in the arena to find problems. You also need to have the appropriate way of thinking to identify problems that exist. 

Take your brain off autopilot

That leads me to number two,: To think of many startup ideas, you need to take your brain off autopilot. We are constantly on autopilot. When you make coffee in the morning, are you constantly questioning why the coffeemaker takes so long? Or why Keurig coffee couldn't just be fresher? Or why coffee is the exact temperature that it is? When you put on your clothes and shoes to leave your place in the morning, are you actively asking yourself why doesn't your clothing fit you literally perfectly, or why don't your shoes tie themselves? No, you don't do that every day. And that's okay. All of us, even the most open-minded people, have filters by which we look through life in order to take the world for granted and accept things as they are. And it's a mental shortcut for us to be able to go about life without our mind constantly racing and assessing and calculating every move we make. And it's a helpful filter. Without it, we would probably be preoccupied with our own minds every minute of every day and not be able to interact with anything else. But then there's the trade off of this lens.

The lens also forces us to accept the status quo and by definition, thinking of a startup idea that solves a specific problem is most likely questioning the status quo, which means that you must switch your mind off autopilot, get curious, and start questioning even the most assumed activities in your life if you want to cultivate a fire hose of ideas. You can imagine the questions that successful entrepreneurs ask themselves while everyone else was in autopilot. Elon Musk asking, why do we drive cars that are killing our planet if there's a way to have cars that are as safe and perform as well, that are safe for the environment? Pat Kinzel from Notarize previous episode, I did a breakdown on their business.I'm sure he asked himself, why do people need to make the trek to UPS In-person to have documents like a mortgage or a paper for selling a business notarized rather than just doing it digitally in the comfort of your home? Austin and myself asking, why do college students read the Wall Street Journal if it sounds like a robot talking to you and feels like a chore? Once you've created surface area of experiences, you need to push your brain to get very curious and at times critical about those very experiences. Okay, so we talked about putting yourself in the arena. We talked about having the right mindset in the arena. The final piece to keep this analogy going is being in the arena with the right people.

It's simple: Human beings are mimetic. We tend to imitate the behaviors of those we surround ourselves with. If we surround ourselves with people that are creative, brainstormers, and supportive, we will more easily build this muscle of creativity and brainstorming while feeling the psychological safety to do so. If we surround ourselves with people that are critical, closed-minded, and judgemental, building this muscle to think of ideas will be so much harder. This is just a generally valuable lesson in being thoughtful about who you surround yourself with, but it is especially important in this context, because oftentimes the idea of businesses that ended up becoming massive, those ideas seem silly and small at first. 

Renting your couch to strangers probably seem silly to most people. Imagine if Airbnb founders had surrounded themselves with naysayers and critics, when having the seed of their idea. Now we put you in the arena. We gave you the mindset to think in the arena. And we made sure that you surrounded yourself with the right people in the arena. 

Focus on businesses, not problems

The final strategy for thinking of startup ideas is paradoxical, but bear with me. To be great at thinking of startup ideas, do not try to think of startup ideas. This is actually probably the most dangerous way to build a business. The issue with just thinking of ideas is you can make an idea sound great in principle, but if it's not actually solving a problem people want solved, it's not only bad because it won’t work, but it's also bad because the idea sounds plausible enough for you to spend years working on it only to find out that no one wants the problem to be solved. Here's a classic example. I feel like every college has a student that is trying to create an app that shows in real time what social events are going on on campus. It's not an obviously bad idea, but it doesn't necessarily solve a burning problem that a group of students has. Being an okay solution for many is no man's land. You want to have an incredible solution for few. Y Combinator calls these types of ideas sitcoms startup ideas.

Basically these are the ideas that would be created if a sitcom character was starting a business and the writers of the show had to invent an idea without thinking of a problem. The idea would have to sound good enough to not be stupid to viewers, but obviously the writers didn't come up with it by looking at actual problems in the world that people are experiencing. So instead of trying to think idea first, think problem first. The best ideas that typically turn into the best businesses typically have three traits. First, it is something that the founders want themselves. Second, it is something that the founders are uniquely qualified to build. And third, it is something that few others realize is worth building.

What I mean by that last one is the best ideas oftentimes seem tiny and non-ambitious until they're not. Reason being, if they seem big and ambitious, odds are someone else would already be building it or would have already built it. So just keeping the Airbnb example going that I shared a moment ago, hosting strangers on your couch probably seemed really small and constrained until it literally turned into a new market that displaced the hospitality industry. And that is the formula for thinking of startup ideas. 

First, create surface area of experiences so you expose yourself to problems. Second, turn your brain off autopilot and get really curious so you can identify the problems you're exposed to Third, surround yourself with people that accelerate your brainstorming muscles versus atrophy them. And fourth, always lead with problems versus thinking of ideas first as always, thank you so much for listening to Founder’s Journal. If you enjoyed the episode, make sure to pound the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. It is the number one way to grow a show. And finally, this is part of our mini-series on How to Start Building. There were two episodes today. There'll be two more episodes on Wednesday and finally, two more episodes on Friday. As always, thank you so much for listening, and I'll catch you next episode.