One Order of Operations for Starting a Startup by Michael Seibel
One order of operations for starting a startup. More often than not, when I talk to a talented technical person who's thinking about becoming a Founder, their number one blockers is that they don't have an idea. At some point during their formative years, they learned that every great startup started with a great idea. If the idea isn't amazing, usually as judged by peers, parents, or other people with little startup experience, the startup will fail.
"All right, why'd you write that?"
"I wrote that I think... I think you did write that. Now I think I've read that before."
"I wrote this because this is the number one excuse I hear from people who want to start a startup, right? And it's so interesting to me. I think that like there are all of these old entrepreneurial rules and business best practices that I think people just want to apply hand and glove to a new industry. And I think tech startups might be a little different.
"And so interestingly enough, like I don't even think people are really taught how to find ideas. So I feel as though people are sitting there saying I don't have an idea, and they don't even really understand a process by which to get one. Yeah, they think that it's supposed to like happen organically. Like it's almost like out of the cartoons where like a light bulb goes off the top of your head, and like that's not really how it works.
"And so what I wanted to do with this essay was give people a framework that they could try to use to come up with an idea. So instead of this being a passive process, it can be an active process. I think one of the things that like might be hard for people to see is like now being in this world for so long, I have a lot of friends who wanted to do a startup and didn't know what they wanted to do, and then came up with an idea and were very successful.
"And so like I've seen this happen with a lot of people, and so that's kind of where I've come up with this thought. So you break it out into one, two, three, four, several steps. So this is I'm going to outline, and then we can explain.
"So, the order of operations—here's where I'd start: Is there any particular problem that you're passionate about? The next step, once you decide on a problem, find some friends and brainstorm potential solutions to the problem. The next step, at this point, the most important thing to make that spark turn into a fire is to work together and build and launch an MVP.
"Yes, and that's basically it."
"Yeah, yeah, it's not that complex."
"No, it's hard, but it's not that complex."
"No, it's not. So, let's start at the beginning: a particular passion problem you're passionate about. So I think oftentimes... I'll give you the conversation that I had with a Founder. I was at a conference over the weekend called Afrotech, and there were a bunch of young people who wanted to start companies. There, this woman walked up to me, and she said, 'I have an idea. I'm doing a startup that helps other startups.'
"And I call this like a meta startup. And this is startups that I kind of don't like because it's like in some ways I think it's like a cop out. It's like, 'Hey, I want to help give other startups advice and guidance, but I haven't really done a startup myself.' And like, I don't know, it's just... it's not great.
"So I dug in. I was like, 'Okay, so what's a problem that you have?' And it was interesting. So the woman was a mother, and she said one of the problems I have is that there are a lot of places, when I go somewhere new, there are a lot of places where I don't know if I can use my stroller with my baby because it's like hard to get around. Or if I'm walking on a street, does it have, you know, the proper sidewalks and so forth?
"So I'd love like some type of product that would tell me what path I should take that's like stroller friendly. And I said to her, 'Okay, that's... but we're getting somewhere right now. We're not in like this meta idea; now we're actually solving a problem directly. Great.'
"But I asked her, 'Hey, can you judge this by two things? First one—how frequent is this problem?'"