2 min read

Finding Next Business Idea

When Derrick found the business he has worked for one year may not be able to get anywhere soon, he reflected on the process of finding the next business idea and recorded his thought in this article.

Link: Finding My Next Bootstrapped Business Idea

Intro

Two years after the product Derrick built had been acquired by another company, he quit and started building his own thing: an open-source slack competitor. When he found this idea may not be able to get anywhere soon, he reflected on the process of finding the next business idea and recorded his thought in this article.

Highlights

Most business ideas are neither objectively good nor bad. The quality of an idea for you (as a founder) depends on your goals, your skill set, and your risk tolerance.
There’s a better way that I first heard articulated by Jason Cohen: instead of trying to rank your ideas, run them through a set of filters to eliminate those that don’t fit.

Interesting angle: instead of dreaming about how wonderful an idea is, questioning it with a list of concerns could help focus. After all, execution is also important.

My primary motivation is to earn a comfortable living for my family, with a bit left over to fund causes for which I have a passion. I want to achieve predictable product revenue that does not directly correlate with the number of hours I work.
I want the freedom to build products that are interesting to me as a maker. I love to strategize, design, and create. I don’t enjoy managing people. Eventually, I want the ability to take a month off of work without negatively impacting the business.
It’s glamorous to imagine coming up with a bold idea, wooing investors, and hiring best-in-class people to execute on the vision. And yet, the venture capital track comes with a high degree of risk (most fail), a strong growth mandate (fast-paced, long hours), and people management. I know I’m not interested in trying to build the next unicorn.

Finally, the author summarised the criteria for his next business idea:

Since I want to bootstrap my next venture, the market must already exist. There should be competitors attempting to serve the market (but perhaps not doing a great job of it).
I’m relatively risk-averse, so an MVP must be shippable within a few months.
The product should not be mission-critical. By mission-critical, I mean so vital that even a short period of downtime will have a significant impact on my customers’ businesses.
Making a sale shouldn’t require more than a few decision makers.
Native apps should not be a minimum requirement.
the market should overlap with my existing audience.
I have a handful of filters that didn’t make it on the list (at least for now). Most of these have to do with avoiding the annoying things I’ve encountered in previous businesses.

And, of course, there will always be compromises.

No business exists in a vacuum. There will always be parts that keep you up at night – but hopefully not too often!

Closing Comments

Starting a business needs a great amount of passion. But beyond the passion, a calm reflection on yourself is also crucial.

The dimensions of the idea are vast. There is always no lack of viable ideas. Knowing what you want and what you would avoid will help you pick a good idea. The good idea may not look extremely innovative, at least on the surface, but it suits you.

For example, after writing this article, Derrick worked on two new products: StaticKit and SavvyCal. The former has been sold to Formspree, as the website stated. The latter, SavvyCal yet another calendar service, isn't a super exciting invention. The market is already pretty crowded. However, he still made a lovable and differentiable product, and the company seems to be doing pretty well today.

Bonus

Here is a podcast episode where you can listen to Derrick first introducing the idea of SavvyCal (called Mighty Cal at the time): https://artofproductpodcast.com/episode-134