Watch: startup ideas and picking an industry
Study 20+ YC companies with over 100 staff or companies that Sam Altman has invested in or Bill Gates or Peter Thiel.
Read news articles about each company. Google for “company name tech crunch”. If the news article is behind a paywall, put the url into archive.vn to read it. Study the companies website. Think about why this company’s product is unique or 10x better than alternatives? And why did VCs decide to fund them?
What are you passionate about? What are you good at? What are the biggest problems you’ve personally faced? What do you think is the biggest impact you could have?
Post your learnings on Linkedin / Twitter, comment on 3 other people’s posts.
Share your Linkedin post on Discord #goals
Every month we’ll pick $100 USD prize winners for great research
Keep going, study 500+ companies before you decide.
Are you as good at picking break out industries as Sam Altman or YCombinator or Peter Thiel? I'm not. A good way to get startup ideas is to study companies that the best investors in the world have chosen. Look at lots of business models that have worked and combine the best ideas to form something that is a 10x better solution to 100bn+ problem.
The average VC looks at 1000+ companies a year and invests in 2-4. You are also an investor. You are investing your time. 10+ years of your life to work on a startup. It’s fine to spend a few months deciding. You wouldn't get married to the first person you meet. So date a bunch of startup ideas first across different industries. Picking what to work on is very important. 50%+ of YCombinator's returns is Airbnb and Stripe. All the other 6000+ YC companies combined aren’t worth as much as these 2 companies.
Are you working on an idea that can be worth $100 billion dollars? Because it's a lot easier to succeed on big ideas. You have more room to screw up, if you get 1% of the way to a $100 billion dollar you'll still have a $1bn business. Verses if you start a restaurant and your maximum upside is $10million dollars. You get 1% of the way there you only make $100,000.
My first startup Deals Extra was a coupon site. Lots of competitors, low margins, small market limited to Australia. I worked 4 years on this and the biggest it ever got was $200,000 revenue. With ContactOut I picked a bigger problem: lead generation. It’s a multi billion dollar industry and we’re now at $11million+ revenue.
If you are selling software, are you targeting a global market from day one? Because USA / European consumers have 10x more purchasing power. There hasn’t been a single billion dollar company that sells software to South Asia exclusively, they all sell to a global market.
If you are targeting South Asia, the biggest industries are primary industries: finance, jobs, ecommerce, manufacturing, agriculture, insurance etc. The startups here tend to be tech enabled but don’t sell software. E.g Grab is tech enabled food delivery. Or fintech like Razorpay, or marketplaces like Meesho. For example take a look at the startups that Sequoia India has funded, and request for SE Asia startups from Brian and Hsu Ken
