Transcript of a short interview/Q&A where Stewart Butterfield advises founders to look for startup ideas in their own experiences as consumers and, especially, by paying attention to other people’s frustrations. He emphasizes observing small, common annoyances (example: people not tilting umbrellas on narrow sidewalks) as low-effort design opportunities and recommends cultivating attention to spot solvable problems.
If you were starting a new company today, where would you look for ideas? What sorts of things would you be thinking about?
I don't know if this works for other people, but I would definitely look at my own experiences as a consumer generally, because it's very easy for me to see things that are frustrating. I complain about stuff a lot, like, my life is really good, and yet every time I have to fly somewhere, I have at least 10 significant complaints and 50 minor complaints. And every one of those is an opportunity. And some of those seem like they. Someone else should see them and it should be really obvious, but they're often not. There's this story I tell in our internal onboarding process of me and our head of product design going for a walk in Vancouver. And our office in Vancouver is in a neighborhood that has really narrow sidewalks. The sidewalks have sandwich boards from vendors out, so it's very crowded. And it starts raining while we're on this walk. And people are. Maybe two thirds of the people had umbrellas with them and we didn't. And people are walking towards us on the sidewalk, and almost no one would move their umbrella out of the way so that the pokey things wouldn't get us in the eye. And like I said, the sidewalks are very narrow, so we had to keep on ducking. There's only really two explanations. One is that they just walk through the world and they don't see that we're going like this to get away from their umbrella, even though inevitably they've had that experience themselves, or they see that this is happening, and they're like, I just can't think of anything I can do to ameliorate the situation, despite the fact that it's this. Like, it's tiny, like a hundredth of a calorie worth of effort and a tiny amount of consideration. And the point of telling that story is this is a sad way of looking at the world, but that's what most people go through the world like. They're just. They're oblivious to the problems that other people have, and if they notice the problems, they're unable to come up with any kind of solution. Which means that if you're the kind of person who's willing to tilt your umbrella, there's a whole world of opportunity out there.
Do you have any tips on how to notice that you should tilt your umbrella?
Pay attention. I mean, that is the biggest thing, but pay attention, especially to other people.
This has actually worked in the Y Combinator history when people need to come up with a new idea on the fly, it doesn't usually work. But when they really just commit to paying attention to other people and sort of what seems broken, that has worked.
