Stuck Without a Startup Idea? Build One That Fits You with Jonathan Greechan
Jonathan Grecian breaks down how to generate startup ideas by ditching the lightbulb myth and using practical frameworks like customer development, the 5 Whys, and bundling/unbundling. He emphasizes that your initial idea is just a seed; real value comes from execution and feedback. Spend 20% of your time ideating and 80% getting honest critiques from other founders.
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Welcome to this Founder Institute webinar. My name is Jonathan Grecian, co-founder and CEO of the Founder Institute, joining here from the United States. I know that we do have a very large international audience today, so if you are here, please do let us know where you're joining in from. And yeah, I'm seeing here some pretty cool locations. Looks like some people were already sharing where they were coming from. In the chat before, so this is, this is amazing to see. All of these Founder Institute webinars are all pretty international. Definitely something that we pride ourselves upon. But really, at the end of the day, the goal is to get you as an entrepreneur or as an aspiring entrepreneur to share your startup ideas, okay, in this event so that you can start to get feedback and start to create better startup ideas and really just start to gain the momentum that you need to get those ideas off the ground. So once again, just very thank you for joining us today from, from all these places around the world that I'm seeing. It really is amazing. So just as an introduction, my name is Jonathan Gritchen. I am the co-founder and CEO of the Founder Institute, and our agenda today is going to go through 3 main things. Number 1, I'm going to talk about some of the misconceptions that I have seen a lot of entrepreneurs have around startup ideas. The Founder Institute has been helping startups and aspiring entrepreneurs, employees turning into entrepreneurs, people that just have kind of back of the napkin ideas. We've been helping those people become successful startup founders now since 2009. So I've worked with a lot of different entrepreneurs and I've seen a lot of different patterns. And one of the biggest issues that I see is just a lot of the misconceptions that first-time entrepreneurs specifically will have as they start to go into this process. Second, I'm going to go into just some of the main techniques that we have seen that work when aspiring entrepreneurs are starting to come up with startup ideas. And then finally, the last part is going to be a— what we're calling this idea feedback lounge, where some of you were already in the lounge before this event started. It's basically kind of looks like an online poker room if anybody plays offline poker, but it's basically a series of tables and you can jump around to all these different tables. There are group chats. And the idea is that you go into those tables and you can share your ideas with other people in those tables to get feedback. Right. And then don't just share your idea and leave. Then you can stay and provide feedback on others. We're all here to give each other feedback because, as I'll kind of COVID here in the presentation, the more feedback you receive on your startup idea, the better off you are going to be. So the worksheet that we will use during those feedback lounge sessions is this link right here, and we're putting it into the chat. So bit.ly/idea_worksheet. Please do just go to that link now. All right, it tries to present a pretty simple structure to communicate the ideas that you have in a very, very simple way so that you can start to get meaningful feedback from other people. Okay, so with that being said, let's just get right into it. I know that probably the meat of this event is going to be sharing that feedback with other people, so all of this presentation is really just supposed to help you do that and help to just kind of break through some of these misconceptions that I see a lot of entrepreneurs have. So the biggest misconception that I see first is this idea— I don't know if— I feel like it was maybe ingrained in our minds as children with the cartoon or something that we would watch, right? It's this idea that amazing ideas, it's like a light bulb, it's like this lightning bolt that hits your head and it's like, aha moment, right? The perfect idea. And then that's like that's all of it, right? Like, it's— that's the end. Like, that idea is there, you've gotten it from the heavens or wherever, and now you're going to be successful, right? And really, that's what prevents a lot of people from starting businesses, because they always wait for that moment. And trust me, that moment is a myth. It will never happen. Successful businesses are almost never the exact idea that they started with, all right? So if you look back, like, Slack was a video game, Flickr was also a video game, Instagram was a location-based game. YouTube was a dating site, right? The number of businesses, like I would challenge anybody to find a company that is like super successful right now where literally the exact idea that the company is now in its super successful state is the exact same idea that it was when it sort of hit this person many, many years ago. It's pretty nonexistent. And I, to this day now working in startups for, 20 years, I've never seen that scenario happen. Okay? It is not this idea, this aha moment. Really what happens is that great ideas, they come, there is some aha moment, right? But that aha moment is just the seed. It just starts the whole ideation process because really coming up with the idea is just the first step. The creating an idea that's actually worth something is a very messy, a very long, nonlinear journey. And I also think kind of one of the things in pop culture that has sort of reinforced this notion that there's a hell of a lot of value just in the startup idea itself is the movie The Social Network. And, you know, you have the Winklevoss twins here, right? And they, you know, sued and got a lot of money from Facebook because they said, oh, well, we had the original idea for Facebook, right? But what was the original idea for Facebook? Like, let's just peel back the curtain here. The original idea that they had for Facebook was like, okay, we're going to take a social network. And there are a lot of social networks back then that weren't doing very well. They were all very advertising-focused and none of them had really figured out a sustainable revenue model. And they're like, we're going to take that and we're going to just give it to universities. Right. At the end of the day, that idea has not really any value. They were not the first people to do that. All of the value in that business, all of the value in Facebook was created by the execution and evolution of that idea over time by the founders, right? By Zuckerberg, by launching it at one place, by getting feedback, by not charging money at first and getting VC capital, right? By making it cool. All these different things are what created all of the value in that business. And that is almost always what happens, okay? The idea doesn't mean anything. It's all in the evolution. All value in a startup idea is created in the evolution execution of that idea over time in response to market and customer feedback. So really the only way that you can ensure that your idea won't be successful is to not share it, right? Because again, all of the value is created in the evolution and execution of that idea over time in response to feedback. So if you're not giving the feedback, if you're one of these people, and I have this picture here, somebody who's like living in their basement saying, oh, I have this perfect idea, right? But they're not gonna share it with anybody. If you're one of those people, trust me, you're going to fail. And/or you'll never start the business. Okay, there's no such thing as a perfect startup idea. There's only such thing as an idea that, you know, has some merits to it. There's probably a lot wrong with it, and all you can do is just start to put it out there, right? And this is a meme on the internet that I find pretty funny as well, where it's just like, look, it's— the idea has no value. All the value is created in the execution and the evolution of that idea over time in response to market and customer feedback. So again, Nobody's going to share, steal your idea. All right. So download this worksheet. We'll get to this a little bit, and you'll start to share your ideas with other people in attendance. Hopefully I'm breaking through some of the guardrails that a lot of you may have and saying, oh, why would I share my idea with somebody else that I don't even know on this, this Founder Institute webinar? The reason why you would do that is because you're guaranteed failure if you don't share your idea. Okay? Trust me, you have to get feedback to that idea. That's where all of the value is created, and we've created this worksheet here so that you can start to get feedback on that idea in somewhat of a structured way. Okay? But please just don't be one of those people that, again, here, Homer Simpson, right, that's just afraid that someone's gonna steal their idea. You have to share your idea in order to get the feedback, and all the value will be created in the feedback that you receive and how you react as a founder to evolve that idea over time. Okay, so the second misconception is that, you know, great startup ideas always come from thinking big. And this is sort of, you know, it happens a lot when people rewrite history, right? A lot of successful founders are like, oh, like, we just thought big, or, oh, we just did this and that's why we were successful. Right. And trust me, as you start to get some experience as an entrepreneur, you're always going to get a lot better feedback from people that are probably who failed and who weren't successful. And the most common feedback that you will find from those types of entrepreneurs is that they were targeting something that was too broad. Okay. And again, there's sort of this juxtaposition because entrepreneurs as, as a, you know, just in pop culture, right? We see these other really successful entrepreneurs that are sending ships to Mars and they're doing all these different things, and we just assume that, okay, well, here I am with an idea, I need to think that big right now, right? To be ambitious and to get people, you know, kind of, kind of behind me. But really, if you look at it, the big companies all started niches. Okay, Amazon started by focusing on hard-to-find books and delivering them over the internet. Okay, Facebook started— go back there, it was one dorm at Harvard University, not even all of Harvard University, it was one dorm. Apple was more of a, you know, kind of hardcore computer user, people that really wanted to do like mods and stuff like that. On the hardware of their computers when they started. Airbnb literally started as a place. I believe it was during the Democratic National Convention. So it was one conference in one city in Denver where people needed a place to stay. And Uber Cab, or Uber as it's now known, was a place to just connect kind of black car drivers with with other kind of rich people that wanted kind of the black driver, black car driver experience in places other than an airport. All these places kind of got their foothold in a small market and then expanded from there. So do you want to think big as an entrepreneur as you evolve? For sure. Okay. But that's more of a vision thing when you're first getting started. You need to really, really focus on solving small problems and doing it in a way that is super effective and that really kind of just creates a lot of delight in your consumers so that they'll start talking about what you do to everybody that they know. This is a phrase that's thrown out there a lot in the startup world too. It's like niche to win, right? Start small, then figure out essentially a playbook on how you can attack that market and then use that playbook to then get bigger. Okay, you, in that essence, you kind of think big by starting small. All right, so with that said, um, it's kind of a perfect segue into the first way that startup founders come up with their ideas, uh, in my experience, and that is through what I would call the scrappy startup method. But it really is just piggybacking off what I just said. It's that niche to win it's being super, super focused as a way to kind of break through the noise, right? Because if you think about it, entrepreneurs and startups that have no money, that have no marketing budgets, really your competition in a lot of cases are the big businesses, right? And at the end of the day, startups have two advantages against big businesses and two advantages only. So there's the speed advantage. I'm not going to talk about that today. The advantage that I really want to talk about today is really just this niche focus, because any big company, they literally have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders or whomever to say that if there's any market that's too small or any product that's too niche, like, they're not even going to worry about it because they have to really cast a very wide net in order to reach the kind of goals that the financial goals that they're trying to reach in the next couple of years, right? They have to target very, very wide markets, cast a wide net. And what happens is, is that when you cast a wide net with your products, you start to build products that are okay, sufficient for a very large number of people, but they're not perfect for any one individual user, right? Like, and the big companies will then shove it down people's throats with advertising budgets and things like that. But still, at the end of the day, there are products that are not perfect for any one user. And that literally is the gap. That is where startups win. That's where startups can come in and create a perfect product for a small subset of users, create that delight, just create this really fervent community, create organic growth, which is something that's super important for startups. right? And then they sort of have that beachhead with these customers, and then they can start to grow from there, right? That is literally the opening that is, that is there for you as a startup. So if you are not being niche, if you are not being super focused, if you're trying to kind of boil the ocean, so to speak, and attack a very large kind of set of problems and customers and things like that, then you're trying to compete with big companies on their playing field, right, with your $0 marketing budget and their hundreds of millions of dollars marketing budget, right? Probably not the best kind of battle that you want to partake in. So again, by startups can take advantage of that loophole in the market, right, by creating these perfect solutions to customers that are somewhat overlooked, you can create a critical organic growth. And there's something in the Founder Institute that we preach to everybody. It's called the rule of one, right? Because you can talk about, okay, like, look, you need to create these perfect solutions. You need to just be super, super focused on solving one problem for a customer, right? And the way that we kind of articulate this is through this: you have to solve one problem for one customer with one product that has one killer feature and one revenue stream. Okay, it sounds simple, which is why we, we kind of have it here, but it's very, very hard in practice. But this is the level of focus, the level of kind of niche that you need as a founder when you're starting to think about the ideas that you want to put out there into the world. All right, because if you aren't this focused, again, you're, you're trying to compete on this playing field over here against all of these marketing budgets. When you really just don't have any. And a lot of this too is that a lot of founders just kind of have this misconception that, well, if I'm solving this problem, can I also solve this problem, this problem? If my consumer is here for this feature, well, they also want this feature and this feature, right? And there's so many products out there today that we as consumers really value freedom of choice much more than choice. And the example I have here, I think this was from Dell, right? And look at all of these different options. You could probably have, I don't even know what the permutations of scenarios are here that you could select, right? But something that is simple, something that really speaks to the consumer would probably be a lot more something like this, right? Something that Apple is offering, where it's just like, okay, you can sort through, you know, literally several hundred, if not thousands of options, or here we have option 1, 2, or 3, right? And these are the kinds of things that you need to figure out as a startup. And it's not— I'm not saying try to take on Apple, right? But Apple has always been at the forefront of just understanding their consumers really well and creating an amazing customer experience. And that is something that you're definitely going to want to do as a company. And that usually comes down to figuring out that one killer feature. You— 100 features that are sufficient come nowhere near the amount of value that is created by just having one killer feature. And a big kind of shortcut that I see a lot of startups take is they think they know what the killer feature is, but they don't. Like it just doesn't seem to really resonate. So then they just start adding on more and more features, more and more things, right? And what they don't realize is that as you add more and more features to your product, and if you're not seeing really fast organic growth, all you're doing is diluting what it is that you're building. And again, creeping into that playing field where all of the big companies compete, right? Because you're just broadening and broadening and broadening kind of this, this space that you're trying to attack and losing and losing and losing the focus that you have. So, you know, you really need to find that killer feature and again, solve one product for one customer or solve one problem for one customer with one product that has one killer feature and one revenue stream. All right, that is the niche-to-win strategy. That is how you can be super, super focused and break through the noise and actually play on a playing field where a startup can win. And usually, I know probably a lot of you were thinking, well, yeah, like, that's easy to say, right? But how do you know what those features are? How do you understand the customer that well? And really, the first thing you have to understand is that customers, they don't know what's possible. This is a quote that's been thrown out there a ton. I like to bring it up because it is just a pretty accepted thing that, you know, just customers don't know what they want. So when you tell them something, they'll say, yeah, sure, maybe I'd want that, but it's going to be kind of an invalid response. And everything in startups is basically around this, this concept of customer development. And it's kind of a buzzword these days, but the way that we like to define this at the Founder Institute, at least for startups and people that just have ideas that are really at the first steps of building a company, the way that you should perceive customer development is that it's the process that you find a problem that's worth solving and then you learn so much about that problem that you can build that perfect solution. Okay, again, so that you can build that, you know, solve that one problem for that one customer with that one product, one killer feature, one revenue stream, right? It's just by talking to customers is how you can do that, and you really have to dig deep into their motivations. So one of the things is to just nail down the problem, okay? It, it's— there's a phrase in startups is that, uh, and this is something that a lot of investors will tell you, is that we want to find founders that are obsessed with solving the problem, not obsessed with their solution. Okay, and this is something where it really comes where you start talking about an idea, you start sharing with people, you start getting some validation. Sure, maybe some people don't like it. You, you just put a lot of work into this idea and you fall in love with the idea. And that's probably the worst thing that you can do as, as an aspiring founder is fall in love with your idea. Um, really you need to fall in love with the problem. And the first way to do that is just look Define your problem statement. I believe that a defined audience has this problem. Okay, if you think about it kind of like scientific method, and that's what a lot of lean startup and customer development is about, right? To start with step 1, that is, what is the problem that I define, right? Because you could say this problem, but you really have to get it as super, super specific as possible, and you have to say it in a way, and then the language that the customer would say it as well. And then once you have that problem statement, and that problem statement is part of the worksheet that you guys have as well. Once you kind of nail down that problem statement, then you just have to start interviewing people that are actually customers. Don't interview your mother, don't interview your cousin, don't interview anybody that has, you know, that wants to be nice to you. In the Founder Institute program, we literally have mechanisms that force mentors in our program not necessarily to be mean, but to just provide honest feedback to our founders, right? Because at any time when you're sharing your idea with somebody, especially if you have passion about the idea, they're probably going to try to be nice to you and just say, oh yeah, that's great, right? But that's not the kind of feedback that you need to hear. So when you are interviewing your customers, these are some of the questions that we have. And this is— there's a lot of things that you can find on the internet of customer development, customer interview scripts. But this one just goes in again, just finding out more and more about the problem. What's the hardest thing about this problem? Why was it so hard? Have you looked at solutions? Why or why not? If you found solutions, maybe why wasn't that a perfect solution? Or was it a perfect solution and why? And then would you be willing to pay to solve this problem? Now, one thing that you should definitely keep in mind with any, with all these questions is that not any of them mention your solution. Okay. A lot of entrepreneurs, they don't realize that when they start talking to people and trying to get feedback, immediately they're injecting their solution into everything that they're saying, which just totally invalidates any feedback that you'll best guess, okay? Dive into the problem, not the solution. The other thing is to analyze customer behavior. So this is something that we talk— we work with a bunch of corporations on innovation and things like that. And one of the biggest things that we tell them is that a lot of times they'll release some product internally, right? And people just won't use the product as they think the product, or at least as how they design the product to be used. Right. And then that frustrates them and it kind of leads them to give up on whatever the initiative was where they started to create this product and then they start to look at something else. And literally that is the exact opposite of what they should do. Right. Any time you could see, like, if a customer is using a product for something that it's not intended really to do, That is an amazing customer insight because that tells you that that problem is not being solved for that customer and they're resorting. It's such a big problem to them that they're kind of hacking and using other tools that aren't even meant to solve that problem in order to solve that problem. Right. So Airtable is a pretty good example of this. Airtable was formed because they saw that people were using spreadsheets as databases for different products, right? And that showed them, hey, like, clearly a spreadsheet was not meant to be a database for any kind of web product or any kind of app or any kind of service, but people are using it as a product. That tells us that there's a huge gap between all the database services that are out there and something that needs to be super, super simple that somebody can get off the ground right away. Again, maybe it's not anything that you see. It might not be any kind of product that you have or you have insider information, but just out there, if you see people are using a product that it's not intended to be used that way, that is a massive, massive clue. The next thing is to, again, Yeah, as I said, it's products that they weren't designed for. So Google Sheets was Airtable, and this other one was a company that we had that came through Founder Institute called Micromobs. And this was a company, they were building basically a Twitter but for groups, right? So this was back in like 2000, I don't know, 2012 or so, something like that. And they were saying, look, Twitter is growing really fast, but Twitter is sort of accessible. Which it still kind of is, just hate, negativity, and just, it's just too big, right? And we want to give people a Twitter that is for personal groups, right? So maybe it's for just a group of people in the university or group of friends or whatever, and they can use this kind of group Twitter to share stuff, plan things, et cetera. And what they found pretty quickly was that the vast majority of people that were using their product were using it to plan weddings. Right. So again, it's like they had this vision of building, oh, it could be like a group Twitter, a private Twitter. But they saw that everybody was using it to plan weddings. So they pivoted. They created, you know, kind of repositioned the product around something called Wedding Party, where it was for people to plan weddings. And they were pretty quickly acquired I believe it was by Instacart a couple of years later. So again, like, look at that customer behavior, things that people are using products for where they were not designed to be used for. Another concept here where you can really dive into customer behavior is something called the 5 Whys techniques. This is something that in Lean Startup is kind of big as well. And really the idea here is that you can really start to get to the core of what a problem is when you start to ask the question why 5 times and actually provide kind of honest answers, right? So let's say that you're working at some kind of agency or something that's delivering a product for somebody, or web development, whatever it is, right? Somebody may come to you and be like, what's the problem? And maybe you'll say, well, the client won't pay for the project. They're like, okay, well, why won't the client pay for the project? Like, that's not really the problem, right? That's, that's kind of a result of something. So why, number one, why won't they pay for the product? Well, they won't pay for it because we completed it late. Okay. Well, that's not good. Well, why do we complete it late? Well, it took longer than estimated. Alright. Well, why did it take longer than estimated? We couldn't produce enough of this product. Why couldn't we produce enough of the product? Oh, well, we just couldn't get the materials in time. And then finally, like, alright, well, why couldn't we get the materials in time? Well, we didn't properly foresee the schedule. Right? So here, like, just by those 5 whys, you find out really the root of what the problem is. And even right here, right, let's say it was some agency or something. They're saying, okay, well, client won't pay for this project, that's a problem. Let's create a product around that. At the end of the day, the product that would actually help solve this problem is that is what would allow the service provider to properly foresee their schedule so that they can put in the orders for the materials that they need in time to deliver the product to their customer, right? So this is the 5 Whys technique that I'm sure there's a lot of frameworks online on how to use this. But it's something that, that I use pretty frequently, to be honest. And it's especially useful when you're working with people across many different teams. Right? Because I know it's on here and maybe it looks somewhat obvious, but when you're working with people across many different teams, like, they, they sort of have blinders on. Right? They're only focused on this thing. So they're just not going to connect those pieces together. So 5 Whys is a super, super handy thing. The other thing is just to look at customer journeys. So upstream downstream opportunities, this is something that we see a lot because, you know, if somebody in your space or somebody in a space that you're interested is really killing it with any product that they have, there's probably an opportunity of getting to those customers before they reach that product, before they're ready for that product. And however that customer lifecycle works, however that, kind of consumer experience works, right? So understanding what they do, who, what places they're hanging out, what products they're starting to use and research, what problems they have before they're kind of ready to get to whatever product it is that you're kind of analyzing is a super, super, you know, useful way to not only just kind of find a gap in a market, but just to better understand the product the problem that they have, right? And then similarly on the other side of things, okay, well, they've used this product that's super successful and they've solved this problem, right? So what state are they in there? What are the new problems that they have there, right? And again, you know, this is, these are all just things that are always going to be opportunities for the same reason that I showed you before where, you know, there's going to be a lot of startups that are super, super focused. right? And when they're super focused, that means that there's going to be other opportunities before them and after them, right? So again, try to find those niches. The third technique is the bundlings and the unbundling. So there is a bunch of quotes out there, right? And Jim Barksdale, pretty famous investor, he said the only way to make money is through bundling and unbundling products. And Marc Andreessen of a16z Similarly, like the business world is constantly being taken apart and put back together again. So literally the early days of the internet, and this is when I started working in startups, Craigslist was huge, right? And literally I got my first job on Craigslist. I found my first apartment that I lived in like on my own on Craigslist. I found my dog on Craigslist, right? Like Craigslist was just the place that you went for kind of everything. At least it was in New York City where I was living. And if you kind of start to take apart all of the different things that Craigslist was doing, right, it was just opportunity, opportunity, opportunity for all startups to come in and just attack these niches and provide a better experience for people trying to, you know, solve those problems on Craigslist, right? That was kind of what was known. And in a lot of consumer startups, it's known as kind of the great unbundling, um, was this, because it's just a perfect personification of what has happened across the internet, right? It's the same reason why, um, you know, a lot of newspapers have struggled in the media industry, struggled because a lot of that industry was propped up through their classified section, right? Because there weren't a lot of options. But a lot of startups over time have just kind of chipped away at all those different revenue streams, and now they're, they're really just left with advertising, which is why the media industry as a whole, all around the world, is struggling. So, um, any place that you can see a company who is solving a lot of problems for a lot of customers is an opportunity for you to go in there and visualize kind of a Craigslist right? Like, what are the value propositions that they're offering with all of these different product lines that they're offering to their customers? And I can assure you that there are many, many opportunities in there to deliver, to deliver a much better experience and a much better product for that customer than they're getting by sort of these all-in-one solutions. Okay, so yeah, that is basically what unbundling comes down to. And then bundling is the other one. And it's kind of funny because at least here in the United States, what we're seeing is there was a great unbundling where all of us would pay one cable provider to get all these different channels, right? So now there's been a lot of different companies that have been parsing out all the different channels, right, and kind of splitting it up and saying, hey, why pay for 100 channels, you know, 95 of which you don't use? Just pay a couple dollars over here for the channels that you use. Right now it's gotten to the point where that's become so cumbersome because now we're paying for all these different services that people are literally putting them back together again into logical ways. Right. And they're starting to put together into more logical ways. Right. So in ways, okay, you're a sports fan, so this is probably a better bundle of services for you. Right. But literally, you're seeing it before our eyes, like the The interesting quote there was that the world, that this business was torn apart and now it's just being put back together again. So, and it's being put back together again because, you know, you have this one extreme, which is like they're not being served, like they're not, their problems aren't being served well. And then this other extreme is that like they're just being inconvenienced, right? And it's just like, look, this has become such a pain in the ass now. Just put it all together for me. I don't worry about it anymore. The fourth thing is these reactive intersections. So this is a concept that we have at FI where it's at any given time, there's a lot of different trends that are happening in the world. And it's pretty cool when there's one trend happening, right? But what we see is that when there is a combination of trends, they tend to kind of combine and create what we call these reactive intersections. Right. So one trend has a certain amount of energy, of power, and it's probably decent. It's okay. Right. But when it connects with another one, it kind of creates this exponential opportunity, this exponential power. And this really comes down to, I think, is when a lot of people just talk about timing. All right. I started— I was part of a company that we started trying to create social features in online games back in the early 2000s. We were way too early, right? Because literally once Facebook came out and kind of aggregated people together and then introduced their kind of gaming API and their gaming platform, it basically kind of shut us down like immediately. So, you know, it's— we saw that there was an opportunity of, hey, a lot of people are playing more games online now. It's a great way to get advertisers because you have these kind of captive audiences online. Right. That was one trend, but it was this whole other social networking trend that came a couple of years later that really created that reactive intersection, that created that amazing timing that then led to all of these other companies becoming huge. So my advice here is to try to find it. And sometimes it's trends, sometimes it's regulations, sometimes it's new technologies that have popped up, right? Large language models is the big one right now in AI. It's what are the combinations of these different trends that create these opportunities that are huge and that it's kind of never been seen before in the world. And one example that I like to give here is that a lot of you probably never heard of a company called Pixlr. Okay, I used to use it all the time because Pixlr was essentially saying, hey, you have Photoshop, you have Illustrator, you have these Adobe products, right? They're super expensive. You got to download them. They're sort of web 2.0 versions of web design. Pixlr took it, put it all in your browser, right? That was a pretty cool opportunity. Canva has taken that and they kind of combined it with this other opportunity that came up, which was really the creator economy, right? Social networking, all this stuff. Pixlr, it's like, hey, here's a blank canvas, create an image. Canva was like, hey, all right, are you posting to LinkedIn? Are you posting an Instagram story? Are you doing this? Here are all the different, you know, here are the templates, here are all the different things that you can do, right? It was the combination of those two trends, the creator economy and just kind of services moving to cloud computing, that really made Canva go nuclear. And we have a spreadsheet here that I recommend you take a look at. It's just a, it's a Google spreadsheet, and literally it's just these two axes, right? It's like, look, on the left axis, start to just list different things that are becoming trends right now, right? Trends or technologies, industries, customer problems, things like that, right? So here, generative AI, CRISPR, sustainability are some things that are, you know, really kind of growing in the public consciousness right now, right? And then on the top, just try to see, all right, well, how could maybe an industry or a customer problem interface with that. So how, what would be a B2B sales approach to generative AI, or a generative AI approach to B2B sales, right? Similar procurement, home repair, things like that, right? And we had a spreadsheet there so that when you start to put these things in, it'll just show you, okay, well, you can do this plus that, right? And it kind of gets down to the concept of saying like, oh, okay, we're building an Uber for this, we're building an Airbnb for that, right? It's taking these different concepts and applying them to different industries. And again, here, this is where you can just kind of give it to a different application to say, okay, similarly, Airbnb or Robinhood, right? And try to think at its core, what really are these businesses doing? ChatGPT is automating stuff, right? So what would happen if you automated education? What would happen if you automated Airbnb is creating marketplaces. What would happen if you created a marketplace of education? You're probably going to get things like Udemy and stuff like that. That's literally that opportunity space. Robinhood, again, it's not saying, hey, what if you sold stocks to education? What Robinhood did for their industry was they basically tried to democratize finance. They tried to democratize the stock market so that anybody you just start to trade and buy socks. So what would happen if you democratize education, if you democratize transportation, right? And you could just think about all of the opportunity spaces that you can find the more and more you build out that spreadsheet. So take a look at that spreadsheet, throw it in the chat there if you wouldn't mind as well. I see it already is in the chat, so that's great. But, um, but yeah, like, honestly, I think the further and further you build out that spreadsheet, the better. And trust me, a lot of them are probably going to be so stupid that it's funny, and that's fine, right? But, you know, it's just trying to find those kind of, you know, interesting opportunities is where you'll find the diamonds in the rough here. So another way, another technique for coming up with startup ideas is to roleplay, right? And it's Again, it's kind of a similar dynamic as that spreadsheet that I just showed you. But now we're kind of just getting you into a different mind space and getting you to not just look at the theme or kind of the way a business is disrupting an industry, but really looking more at kind of what the brand does for the industry, right? So here, like Richard Branson Virgin is all about customer service, right? That's what they've been doing since day one. They go into industries, that usually are kind of hard and cold and have crappy customer service, and they come in and just say, okay, what if we solved this problem but did it with amazing customer service, right? Apple is, what if we solved this problem and did it with amazing design, right? An amazing user experience, which is why they combine tech, the software and the hardware, right? Is to create that amazing experience. Look at Patagonia, right? What is the feeling of that brand? It's like, what if we did this but in a way that's good for the environment, that's for the planet, right? So just kind of putting on that hat and role-playing can find a lot of opportunities as well, kind of in the same way that I showed before, is if you look at emerging trends and if you look at technologies, regulations, or even the way other startups are doing it. And then finally, doing the exact opposite or the extreme. So the perfect example here is with the Wii. The Wii and Nintendo basically decided, okay, all the other big video game companies are basically going into an arms race on who's going to create the best graphics, who's going to be fastest, and all that kind of stuff. And we said, you know what, let's do the opposite. Let's not really care about graphics. Let's just make these things fun and enjoyable. Let's make it fun, accessible, that somebody can pick up a remote and start to play right away. right? And that's what they did, and essentially creating this more like casual and social gaming, and, you know, just, just kind of creating experiences, uh, versus, uh, trying to compete, uh, on, you know, speeds and realism and things like that, uh, with some of the other video game makers. Um, and the other one I would say here is the extreme. So BuzzFeed is a company that's, you know, struggling these days, not doing great, but they really were at the forefront of their time because they started to see, like, hey, a lot of the articles that Forbes and a lot of these other online news channels are putting out there that are getting the most traffic. And this is an unfortunate thing, right? And it's kind of led to the demise of a lot of our journalism out there. But they were just seeing, look, if the articles that are getting the most traffic these like, hey, top 10 lists and just slideshows and things like that. What if we just built an entire business but just doing slideshows and top 10 lists, right? And listicles and that kind of stuff. And that's what BuzzFeed did, right? They just did that and they were totally a social media first distribution, you know, just journalism, if you call it that, right? Media company. They just took it to the absolute extreme, and they built a very, very large user base and a very large business as a result. Okay, so I know I see here a couple of people in the chat have asked, are we going to share these slides? Yes, we'll share these slides with you. We'll share the video with you as well. But we're about to get into the part of this event where you're going to join these different rooms and start sharing your ideas with other people. To get feedback. Okay, and the warning that I want to give you as you go out there is, look, I've given you a bunch of techniques, right, that you can use to, to start coming up with startup ideas. But trust me, um, do not spend more than 20% of your time coming up with the ideas. All right, it needs to be a cycle. As we have said, you know, great ideas are raised, not born. All right? Take 20% of time. I don't know. Take, take a couple hours. Use some of those tools. Use that spreadsheet we gave you. Do some research online. Use some of those techniques that I just laid out and literally just take a piece of paper and just throw out ideas. All right? And then start talking to people about those ideas. Okay? 20% about ideating. And 80% getting feedback. Because again, it's not trying to find that magical aha moment, that lightning bolt that's gonna hit you from the sky, right? It's just saying, you know what, this idea, yeah, just maybe this seems okay. There's gonna be problems with it for sure, right? But the only way that you're going to know is when you start sharing it with other people. So download the worksheet. Here's what the worksheet does. It's super simple. Number 1, it says, look, what is your problem state? Be as specific as possible. I believe that a defined audience, all right, and be specific. Don't say I believe women, all right? That's half the world, half the planet, give or take, right? Try to be a little bit more specific on who the person is that you think has the problem. And try to state that problem in a very, very clear way, okay? And then if you do have an idea for a solution, put it in this format that we give here, because one of the problems that we see a lot is that aspiring entrepreneurs love to talk about their problems and they love— or their ideas, and they love to drone on and on and on and just start talking about features and different ways ways it can work and at the end of the day, like, you have to be able to describe it in one sentence. Okay? Keep it simple. When you say, "I am developing," like, literally what comes after that phrase, "I am developing," should be, "I'm developing a website, a mobile app, a, you know, I don't know, service for businesses, a piece of hardware," right? It needs to be super, super simple. Do not say I am building an all-in-one solution that utilizes AI and da da da, like, like, no, right? Be super, super simple. I am developing a website, right, to help a defined audience solve a problem, right? And this is what you would define in the problem statement above, and with secret sauce, right? And secret sauce is essentially, you know, your unique value proposition, just the unique way that you think you are going to to solve this problem. And then if you have time, we have some of these custom development questions here, right, that you could ask other people in these rooms to just get more and more feedback on the ideas that you have. So I'm going to end the event here in a minute, this video portion of the event. You're going to get Zoomed right back into that feedback lounge, and you can join different tables I'd say that make sure that you're on a desktop or a laptop with Chrome or Firefox. That's going to get you the best experience. All right? It sometimes works on the mobile app, sometimes it doesn't. But please do, you know, best— your best chance is to join on a desktop or a tablet in an actual web browser. Download that worksheet, jump around these different tables to give and provide feedback. And again, state the problem, describe your solution, and get feedback from others. So I wanna put out some ground rules here because we're not gonna be able to join every single room and police things. Okay? But just understand that we're all in this together, right, to provide feedback on other people's ideas and to get feedback from others. So, you know, number 1, don't be a jerk. All right? Nobody likes a time hog. Let's try to self-police, limit it to about 5 minutes per person at a maximum. All right? And again, try to stick to this format: state the problem, describe your solution. Right? Don't start talking about your life story. Right? Here is a company or an idea that I have, right? And here is the problem. Or what I'm trying to solve. And then finally, listen with the intent to learn, not argue. This is something that we see a lot where, especially when aspiring entrepreneurs have ideas and they're starting to throw them out there into the world, they, for whatever reason, get the idea that it's like a perpetual debate club anytime they share their idea, right? It's just like, oh, this person doesn't get it. I need to convince them to get it. And the only thing that you're doing there is ensuring that you're talking more than the other person, which means that you're not getting the feedback that you need to make the idea better. So listen with the intent to learn, not argue, all right? Even if you— what the person is telling you makes absolutely no sense, it's the dumbest thing you've ever heard in your entire life, that's fine, right? Just listen to it, maybe probe a little bit more, but do not argue, right? Because Maybe you hear the same exact feedback from 3 other people, and maybe then it's not the dumbest thing you've ever heard in the world, right? And then similarly, when you're providing feedback in these rooms, don't be a jerk, right? But also don't sugarcoat things. Provide constructive feedback, all right? In the Founder Institute, what we do with our mentors is we have a scale of 1 to 5. That mentors use to rate and review every idea that they get from our founders and our programs. But on that 1 to 5 scale, there are no 3s allowed. And the reason why I removed that 3 is because when we had that 3, we found that give or take about 70% or so of all ratings were a 3, right? Because people want to pick that neutral thing and say, oh, it's okay, it's all right. You know, I think you can do better here, you know, but I really like this, right? It's a neutral answer. So instead of trying to pick that 3, try to give feedback around a 4 or a 2, right? It's not telling anybody that they're stupid. It's not telling them it's the worst idea you've ever heard. It's saying, look, you know what, I think this idea— here are the reasons why I don't think the idea might work, right? Give them honest feedback, but again, you don't have to be a jerk about it. All right, so in all these rooms, again, about 3 to 5 minutes per person is what I would recommend, and then everybody try to self-police and kind of keep it moving along. And then state your problem, describe your solution, and keep it moving. All right? If somebody is hogging the time, if somebody is just giving their life story, feel free to just, hey, chime in like, hey guys, remember what Jonathan said, like let's just try to keep it moving. Okay? So yeah, with that being said, Have fun. You can learn more about the Founder Institute at fi.co/join. And I hope, you know, I hope you go into those rooms, go in with an open mind, go in, share your ideas. Don't be afraid that somebody's going to steal your idea. All right. Your job is to get feedback. So go out there, throw the idea out there, see what comes back, take that feedback, and then go and try to improve it. And keep going from there, because again, the idea itself is just the seed. All of the value in any startup idea that you create will be built over time in response to customer market feedback, and here you just start to get that feedback. All right, well, thanks everybody. I hope, I hope you enjoyed the event, and I hope I'll see you in some of those feedback rooms. We're going to leave those feedback rooms open for as long as people hang out. So have fun. Don't be afraid of people sharing your idea. Don't be a jerk with your feedback, but be honest. All right, and thanks everybody, and I hope I'll see you soon. Bye.
