Unique ideas seem bad #startups #podcast

1. DADalton0:00

   Everyone has a filter for startup ideas, and because we have very similar filters, if, if your, if your ideation process is to find an idea that is both good and no one's ever thought of it before, you're gonna have a bad time.

2. MIMichael0:16

   [laughs]

3. DADalton0:17

   You're trying to discover something that no one has ever thought of before.

4. MIMichael0:19

   Yeah.

5. DADalton0:19

   And there's a lot of people in the world. I don't know if you heard, Michael.

6. MIMichael0:21

   Yes, yes.

7. DADalton0:21

   There's billions of them, and so most likely what you actually need to do is to find an idea that has already been discarded by others, and it's been discarded for some reason. Do you get what I'm trying to say? Like-

8. MIMichael0:32

   Yes

9. DADalton0:32

   ... like instead of trying to find something no one's ever thought of, find something that everyone's thought of and thinks is bad.

10. MIMichael0:36

    Yes. Classic examples of that, Instacart would be maybe a very classic example.

11. DADalton0:40

    Yep.

12. MIMichael0:40

    One of the things that I see a lot of people do when they're in this kind of ideation stage is talk to their friends and look for things that all of their friends think are good ideas.

13. DADalton0:49

    Yep.

14. MIMichael0:49

    And I might advise the exact opposite in this situation. Like, what happens if you talk to your friends and, like, you got maybe not universal bad, but like-

15. DADalton0:59

    What if they told you-

16. MIMichael0:59

    ... controversial.

17. DADalton1:00

    Yeah, what if they're like, "Look, I'm worried about you"? [laughs]

18. MIMichael1:04

    [laughs]

19. DADalton1:04

    If that, if you explain your idea [laughs] Isn't that, isn't that what happened with the founders of Airbnb, Michael?

20. MIMichael1:10

    I mean, I think-

21. DADalton1:11

    Is that the story?

22. MIMichael1:12

    It's... I would say this.

23. DADalton1:13

    Like, their parents were worried about them. [laughs]

24. MIMichael1:16

    The many successful YC companies, every one of their friends and family members thought the idea was bad. We keep on saying the way you get a unique idea is is you have to move away from consensus, right? So we gotta move away from the consensus of startup founders, away from the consensus of investors, away from the consensus of your friends. And it's really interesting 'cause, like, another way that I like to think about how do you move away from consensus is doing things that are just hard. Saying that you wanna do something that takes 10 years, especially when you're a young person, that just seems really intimidating. So it's, like, easy to tell yourself, "Oh, yeah, I know the numbers say it's gonna take 10 years, but, like, I'll figure it out in two." And then you cut down all of the things that might take longer than two years to work, and I feel like if you wanna cheat, just imagine ideas that might take longer than two years to work [laughs] and the, the, the, the, the likelihood of success could be way higher. [laughs]

Episode duration: 2:10