How to Have a Great Startup Idea

If you’re a startup entrepreneur, or would like to become one, you’ve probably spent many hours trying to come up with a concept and a business proposition that’s compelling enough to change the lives of millions - and make you rich in the process. But have you found what you’re looking for? 

From the outside, great ideas look like lightbulb flashes of inspiration. But the reality is that they’re process-driven, and while there are no guarantees you’ll strike gold with a world-beating Eureka moment, there are ways to lay the groundwork to make your search for inspiration a successful one.

Where do great ideas come from?

Begin your search for a great idea with an analysis of your core principles – the values you live by. Elon Musk, for example, believes in ‘First Principles' thinking – boiling things down to fundamental truths, asking what we can be sure is true, and reasoning from there. Applying his approach to electric car batteries starts with identifying the material elements that go into making a battery pack, and finding innovative ways to combine them to reduce the cost of production. 

There are lots of electric car manufacturers in the market today. But Musk’s unique, value-driven approach wins him a loyal customer base of people who at least like to think they problem-solve in the same way. When your ideas are value-driven, they’re much more likely to appeal to partners, investors, and customers who identify with the same core principles, turning your particular product or service into a desirable one which attracts funding and builds market share fast.

What makes an idea great?

What turns a good idea into a great one is the combination of a vision rooted in inspirational shared values, combined with a substantial market you can gain a sizable share in and defend from imitators. It’s what we call a winning combination of ‘reals’ and ‘feels’

1. Market size. Potential market size is the first question any VC investor or angel will ask. Build a business to feed a market that’s big enough to sustain a significant revenue, or it won’t be worth the investment of time and energy it takes to get a startup off the ground. 

Use credible sources to estimate your market size either by customer base and/or the potential number of transactions in that market. Make sure you can demonstrate how your venture will grow market share over the first three years. A >$1 billion market is what you’re looking for as an absolute minimum.

2. Defensibility. It’s no good identifying a problem and a solution with huge market potential if as soon as the incumbents realize what you’re up to, they’re able to imitate what you’re doing and sweep you away. Complexity is one way to create a defensible moat - but not a sustainable one. It can, however, buy you sufficient time to build more defensibility into your product - acting as the thin end of a wedge. 

Can anyone learn to have great ideas?

You know what you’re looking to achieve, and you know your solution addresses a big market and is complex enough to defend. Now comes the hard task of turning your inspiration into something real that others (potential co-founders, customers, employees and investors) will look at and think: “That’s a great idea!”. Anyone can do this, and so can you – as long as you follow a process of development.

Here at Hofy, solving a very important problem for a certain group of people means getting IT equipment to new joiners remotely, which is a very important issue for HR and IT teams. 

In the beginning, the minimum viable product was a Typeform - with this we were able to secure a customer. The second version was a combination of Typeform, Airtable, Webflow, Zapier and an off-the-shelf route scheduling tool.  With this, we were able to secure more customers, prove our product and win investment to create the next version of Hofy.

From there, we change, change and change some more – and fast! Often launching products in under four weeks – in a slide deck or a demo, with a price tag attached, to get high quality feedback from customers. That’s how we constantly adapt and refine our product to make it better at meeting the needs of our customers. That’s how you make an idea great – by working it out, reworking it, and constantly refining it. There are no shortcuts to greatness.

How do you ensure your great idea has longevity?

At Hofy, we’re focused on the quality of the user experience. But the more functionality we add, the more complex our product becomes, and the harder it is to make learning and using it as smooth and intuitive as we want it to be. 

We put an enormous amount of time and energy into thinking about how to incorporate each new layer of complexity that we bring in to ensure our service remains easy to use. This is why we love SMBs - they have zero tolerance for crap user experiences.

Keeping your great idea fresh and relevant may require you to pay particular attention to different priorities. But whatever your product or market, I can say, without exception, that the best approach to keeping your startup growing and developing is to become very comfortable with discomfort. Yes, your mind wants to move to some sort of settled state where everything is humming along and all your customers are happy. You're happy. You're not having to do crazy things to stay alive and keep growing. But that's never going to be the case. Get used to it.

Superstar founders like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs make it look as though great ideas are moments of inspiration reserved for a small handful of individuals in possession of the Midas touch. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you’re prepared to put the time and effort into solving a complex real-world problem with a large potential market, then with a dedication to iterative development and a relentless focus on excellence, you, too, can be great.