How to choose your startup idea
You'll invest 1000s of hours into your startup.. spend 5m reading this to help pick your idea.
Choosing a startup idea is difficult. You’re choosing something you’re going to spend thousands of hours working on, and it all starts here.. your idea. The answer to how you chose your idea is more simple than you think.
The best ideas encompass something you love (your obsession), your strengths and experiences, and starting with an idea that will own a niche of the wider market you want to win. This post goes through these three key elements.
Find Obsession
Your idea must solve a problem you’re passionate about. You’re going to be putting significant effort into getting your startup off the ground, and you need to be constantly thinking about the problem you’re solving for users.
Its common knowledge that Steve Jobs was obsessed with making the Macintosh and iPhone, deeply thinking about every detail from the internal components, design, software and even box opening experience. What demonstrated his obsession to me was that on a Sunday evening Steve called Google asking them to fix the yellow colour in the second “O” in the Google logo shown on their iPhone app (full story here); he obsessed about the details and something as minor as the gradient of yellow on Googles logo is an example of how he strove for nothing but excellence.
He did this because every detail mattered to him, and this behaviour isn’t something you can fake - his obsession drove him to build the worlds greatest products, and persevere when Apple were almost bankrupt.
I’m obsessed with TryHackMe. My first and last thought in my day is about the product, people and company. I love what we’re working on, our mission and the users we get to help, making it easy to put in late nights and weekends. Without this obsession and love for what we’re doing, I’d have given up a few months into starting.
Play to your strength
It can be an advantage to leverage your existing skills and experiences. By focusing on what you already excel at, you can navigate challenges more effectively and build a product or service that truly stands out.
Here are a few examples of founders that have played to their strengths and experiences:
Bumble (a dating app) was founded by one of the original Tinder creators, Whitney Herd. She had experience building the largest online dating app, and took her knowledge to Bumble, that turned over $844.8M in 2023.
Before Tom Blomfield started Monzo, he worked at major financial institutions such as Citi and Capital One. The skills, knowledge and experience learnt whilst at these institutions was key in successfully starting his own bank.
The founder of the blogging platform Ghost, started at Wordpress, a competing publishing company; Ghost now turns over $6.8M annually.
However, this does not mean you should completely abandon an idea due to complete lack of experience or skills - everything can be learned. I am a prime example of this, having had no prior experience in cybersecurity (or professional experience) before founding a cyber training company that now generates tens of millions of pounds. I wrote a blog post about how young entrepreneurs have a big advantage and you’ll have much less experience the younger you are.
In fact, as I write in the above article, if most understood what it takes to succeed in starting a company, there would be far less successful founders.
Playing to your strengths should be a consideration, not strict criteria in choosing what to start. Do you think Elon Musk had built a rocket before starting SpaceX (the answer is no).
Bill Gates wouldn’t start Microsoft in 2024
Pretend someone else invented Microsoft, and Bill Gates is 20 years old looking to start a company. He wouldn’t re-invent an operating system as the problem and opportunity that existed in 1980s doesn’t exist now.
Just because you’ve seen someone you admire or follow start a service, product or brand successfully, doesn’t mean you should do the same. I have fallen into the trap of loving a product so much I want to create my own version - but there really isn’t any need to.
Start with a niche
A niche is a small, specialized market for a specific product or service. You want to find a small slither of the market you can completely dominate in first, and progressively expand. This is because:
You have less competition and can establish yourself more easily
You build credibility by being an expert in your niche
Have a clear valuable proposition and build a strong relationship with customers
You want to start by building a product 100 people absolutely love, rather than 1000 people sort-of like. This is only possible by starting with a small part of the market, and expanding. Here are a few companies that started with a niche:
Amazon - started by only selling books, then expanded to other product ranges.
Facebook - the social media site was initially only for Harvard students, before expanding to other colleges, states, then going global.
Lets say you want to start a meal delivery service. This is an incredibly crowded and saturated market. You should start the service aimed primarily at a subset of people to get your foothold; such as fish lovers, people with celiac disease, or purely for vegans. Then progressively expand.
You should dream big, but your initial startup idea should be a part of the journey that lets you start successfully. Do one thing insanely well, rather than a few things poorly.
For TryHackMe, we started by developing training content for a specifically small and niche area of cyber security (just for beginners learning offensive cyber). We did that really well, and now have training for all experience levels for a variety of different security areas; even today our biggest growth driver is word of mouth recommendations for how beginners can start learning cyber security (our original value prop).
Summary
If you take anything away from this post, let it be that your belief (and obsession) in your idea is what will keep you going during the difficult early days. Its not easy, but the difference is you, the individual; its common knowledge that people invest in the entrepreneur, and the idea is secondary, your perseverance and drive is what will make you successful.
This isn’t the only way to choose your idea - its my broad advice. You could also find a clear gap in the market in a really boring industry that has had no innovation; some founders have made millions modernising legacy technology, or building a competing product to a publicly traded company that customers currently hate (IPO with a low NPS).
As strange as it sounds, don’t spend too long on your idea - starting is the most important first step which allows you to validate it with users. Most people spend way too long on the company name, domain, branding, but starting is what matters and is most important. You want to fail fast, and be aggressive at executing. Everyone on planet earth has several business ideas, but little people actually start and persevere.
As Steve Jobs once said (albeit about product ideas):
“Its a mistake thinking that really a great idea is 90% of the work … there is a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. As you evolve that idea changes and grows, it never comes out as it starts because you learn a lot more as you develop it“
~ Steve Jobs (timestamped video below)