Phil Libin argues entrepreneurs should build around a "sufficiently epic" mission instead of trivial problems. Spend two weeks watching yourself and others, find frequent tasks people dislike, and make them much better. Most great startups improve something that already exists, not invent from scratch.
What? What should you build? Well, you know, when you're in a startup, you're on a quest, and you want to make sure that your quest is sufficiently epic. It really— there's nothing sadder than seeing a talented, young, energetic entrepreneur or wannabe entrepreneur, and you sort of get their idea. Hey, what do you want to work on? And they tell you the idea, and you're like, oh, that's like, oh, that's just insufficiently epic. Because you're going to spend your life on it. Whether you think you are or not, whether it's your entire life or 5 years, or 5 years is all you have left, it's going to be really hard. It's a long time. Why would you do it on something that's insufficiently epic? Why would you work on something that's optimizing how many people click on a certain type of annoying ad or something like that? Like, yeah, maybe you can make money on it, maybe you can't, but it's not worth your life. Don't work on it if it's not worth your life. Make something sufficiently epic. At Evernote, for example, our goal is to make the whole world smarter. We want to make the whole world a little bit smarter one person at a time. Why do we want to make the world smarter? Because the world is too stupid. And a stupid world leads to poor outcomes for the people in it. We want to make the world a little bit smarter. That is a sufficiently epic quest. But how do you do that? Well, there's a myth here. So there's good news here. The myth is you don't need a big idea. A lot of people think that the way that great startups are started is someone has this stroke of lightning, this brilliant genius idea. Like, oh, this is what we're going to do. And then they go do it. And it's this completely original thing that never existed before. And the reality is that almost never happens, virtually never. Almost all successful companies, even successful tech companies, did not start with a totally original big idea. They did something that already existed before. So looking at the world, beholding the world and seeing what's missing, like seeing this is the world and here is an important thing that should be here and isn't, that requires an act of imagination, an act of creativity that's almost godlike. and that's completely beyond me and completely beyond, I would say, most of you, statistically all of you, but you never know— really, really, really tough. But the good news is that almost never leads to a successful company anyway. So there's another way to think about how do you have your idea, which is this. If you want to figure out what should I do in my startup, do this. Spend 2 weeks carefully observing your own life. Be very mindful for 2 weeks of everything you do. You wake up in the morning, how you go to the bathroom, what you do afterwards. Just be really mindful of everything you do for 2 weeks. Just sort of force yourself to look at yourself in the third person and observe. And then do the same thing for other people that you know for a couple of weeks. And find something that you do all the time and that people that you know do all the time that isn't great. Find something that you do all the time already that you don't love doing. And then figure out a way to make it great. Figure out a way to make something small much better. That's actually most of the time the genesis of companies. You don't need to find something totally original. You need to find something that's already very common, so people already know how to do it. They're already used to it. They already understand the value of it. They just don't like doing it. And you fix it. You make it better. And when you start thinking of the world this way, dozens of things a day will spring to mind. Every day as you're walking around, you will find like a dozen things where you're like, yep, you know what? I do this all the time. Kind of sucks. Doesn't mean that you're going to run out and build the first one as a company. It needs to be sufficiently epic and all that stuff. But it's an easier and much saner way to figure out what you want to build.
