How to get startup ideas

Jared Friedman's Y Combinator Startup School talk explains how founders can avoid bad startup ideas, evaluate promising ones with concrete criteria, disable filters that hide good opportunities, and generate ideas through expertise, personal problems, market changes, and customer research.

4 sections ยท 14 lessons

Course outline

Avoid Traps

  1. Start With Problems
  2. Detect Tar Pits
  3. Choose Morphable Starts
  4. Avoid Traps

Score the Idea

  1. Match Team to Market
  2. Size Timing Acuity
  3. Read Competition and Proxies
  4. Choose Fertile Spaces
  5. Score the Idea

Invert Filters

  1. Do the Schlep
  2. Value Boring Markets
  3. Use Existing Competitors
  4. Invert Filters

Generate Ideas

  1. Prepare for Organic Ideas
  2. Exploit Team Expertise
  3. Mine Personal Problems
  4. Search Systematically
  5. Generate Ideas

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