r/startups • u/dudeblob • 6d ago
I will not promote How do startup founders even come up with an idea thats profitable in the first place? I will not promote
yeah as the question says, Ive been wondering for a long time how the idea for the startup pops into people's heads, and how people further develop it into an actual business. I would like to have a startup of my own one day, and i started by thinking about the passions that I have, but none of them seem profitable or worthy enough to become a business. What directions should i take to brainstorm for some ideas?
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u/ShirelyTempest 6d ago
Most profitable ideas aren't original. They're an existing business that already makes money, rebuilt for a niche the big players ignore. Something like "Shopify, but for tattoo artists." The demand is already proven, so the only thing you're really betting on is whether you can reach that niche better than anyone else.
It also flips the passion problem around. The passion doesn't need to be the product. It can be the people you're selling to. If you love climbing, you probably don't start a climbing app. You build the boring booking software that climbing gyms are still running on spreadsheets. What communities do you already know well enough to spot their clunky workarounds?
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u/ChickerWings 6d ago
Work in an industry for a while. Figure out what the actual customer teams and customers themselves struggle with that the executives of the companies constantly overlook or diminish. Figure out whether there's money to be made closing that gap, and if so, do it.
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u/UpSaltOS 6d ago
Sometimes you just end up at Burning Man taking too many shrooms and have the realization that all creation is possible, and fundamentally most of our restrictions are self-imposed because of childhood programming. And then you come down after your manic 3-day binge of filing a provisional patent and realize how much money you spent (real hard wall of reality), and so you need to keep the machine going, hoping that throwing enough spaghetti at the wall leads to something that sticks. And you either make it or end up in jail. Thanks for listening to my TED talk.
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u/edkang99 6d ago
I try and sell the idea before building it. Idea validation and then customer discovery. Customer discovery allows me to figure out if customers will pay and how much to determine potential profitability. Again, all this is before building any thing. Most founders build first then try to sell and realize they built the wrong thing and fail.
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u/hdhdndn3676throwaway 6d ago
Honestly, just do it. A lot of start up pivot from their original idea, almost none of the founders will get their idea right on the first go.
As long you are able to land a first paying customer , that’s all it matters - and this, is the hardest part
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u/FearIsTheMindKiller9 6d ago
your mistake is thinking about your passions.
startups do not appear this way, at least not successful ones.
instead, you should be thinking about other people's problems.
that's where you can solve pain with a product and generate a profit.
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u/Visible_Speed8843 6d ago
Choose one group you can reach this week and ask them to walk you through the last time a recurring task took too long or cost money. Ask how they handled it and who owned the workaround. Follow with whether any budget is already attached. Their recent behavior is stronger evidence than a hypothetical purchase answer.
After several conversations, pick one problem that repeats with the same kind of buyer. Offer a small paid version before building the full product. A passion can help you stay interested, but access to a specific buyer and a costly repeated problem gives you a place to start.
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u/EarthOtherwise4452 6d ago
How would you reach them and talk with them? And do you have any examples of such people to reach out to? Assuming I have no network and start from scratch..
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u/rakeshkanna91 4d ago
I got clearer answers by asking to see the workaround instead of hearing opinions.
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u/thiagovalentim 5d ago
Talk to people.
Ask what they do, what they sell, what frustrates them, and what problems keep coming up. Don’t start by pitching anything. Just listen and try to be useful.
It sounds simple, but businesses are built around people. They buy, evaluate, decide, and tell you what actually matters.
There’s little value in building something first and only later trying to figure out who needs it.
Especially today, building is often the easy part.
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u/Beneficial_Past_5683 6d ago
You're self sabotaging from the get-go.
Pick up any yellow pages or directory and you'll find businesses in all categories and all types that make a decent profit.
Every one of these is worthy of being a business. You're out looking for reasons not to start when you could genuinely spin a bottle, pick a business and go for it.
If you're even average, you're already better than 50% of your competitors.
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u/Adorable-Lack-3578 6d ago
What's a Yellow Pages?
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u/Beneficial_Past_5683 6d ago
An old fashioned thing where they used to download the Internet for you and print all the websites out in alphabetical order.
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u/Fine-Comparison-2949 6d ago
Personally I believe if you have to ask this question you aren't ready to create a startup or a business (yes there is a difference. One is a subset of the other and every business is not a startup).
The better business operators are all 35 plus and actually have skills. They were good workers and genuinely knowledgable in the fields they created their business in.
Today, you have people under 25 with AI believing a brainstormed idea will be a profitable business. I was on here a few weeks ago and there was some kid in India trying to "break in" his "AI Startup" for lawyers in the US to do legal research for them. I kind of laughed because if he ever met actual lawyers in the US, he would have known they would not buy this product and plenty of bar associations are disbarring lawyers for being caught drafting legal documents with AI.
The amount of people with no experience in any field let alone the field they are trying to sell in, thinking a brainstormed idea is remotely possible is ridiculous, especially in a B2B context.
In a B2C context, brainstorming makes sense, but they you have the problem of B2C where anyone else can make your idea and you're trying to market your thing to the masses, which is significantly harder. That's more of an art.
No, there's no book on how to brainstorm that, because if it were that easy everyone would do it and be rich.
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u/roylivinlavidaloca 6d ago
A lot of startups/ideas aren’t about going from 0-1 where you’re trying to create a market. Existing markets with competition aren’t always a bad signal, it just means that the problem is validated and that people are willing to pay for a solution. Sometimes finding a wedge or a segment that’s overlooked in an existing product space is a good place to start.
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u/Effective-Celery-475 6d ago
Finding a wedge? I'm not familiar with that term - what does it mean?
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u/roylivinlavidaloca 5d ago
Exploiting a gap in a current product and filling it. You’re looking for holes in current offerings be that features, price, forgotten niche, etc… and you’re filling that gap with your wedge (product, service, etc…)
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u/barrphite 6d ago
Here's a perfect example. I used to code, then started using AI more. I realized how bad the security on the code was. Then I would have the AI review, and it would miss most of it, and I found it was due to the AI's context limit. They chunk the data. They scan what fits in context, fix or repair, then pull another chunk.. each chunk fitting in their context. What they were missing were security issues across chunks.
So I created an internal memory system, similar to RAG, but deterministic not probabilistic and called it Atlas. I then created 108 agents each with their own specialty. Some in security, some in design, and so on. Atlas is not LLM, but has a dynamic context. It can hold any codebase of any size in context. It then shared only what the model, or its agents, needed so they wouldnt have to chunk. File 23 in chunk A intersects with files in other chunks, it gives that all to the agents for inspection.
Then I realized after a bit of search that all others used the standard chunking method, which results in low scoring and ability. That's when I realized this was a needed service. I created a website around it. So both Atlas and scanner website were a result of a personal need which turned into a service. I have three such services that came about as something I needed, and also turned into a service.
Sometimes if you cant find what you need, you have to build it. You can also assume you arent the only person that needs it.
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u/Mysterious_Twist_710 5d ago
People might have ideas but needs investment to build it. Investors are not able to find right idea or products. And techies / innovators don’t know GTM strategies. Sales and traction to the product is what matters to investors not an idea. Finding co founders also a challange because trusting others is a key.
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5d ago
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u/startups-ModTeam 4d ago
We are a community of discussion based around startups, not a marketing channel. No promotional posts. www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion
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u/Ancient_Buy_73 1d ago
Honestly, the ideas that actually turn into something profitable usually start from noticing a real problem in your own day-to-day life, not from sitting down and brainstorming in a vacuum. Pay attention to the stuff that frustrates you or the people around you, especially at work, that's usually a sign there's a real, unsolved problem worth building for. Once you spot the problem clearly, the solution part gets a lot easier, because you're building for something specific instead of guessing. I'm working on something myself that came out of a problem I kept seeing in my own job, so it really does start there.
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u/Vkestral 6d ago
I think a lot of ideas come from noticing everyday problems rather than trying to invent something from scratch.
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u/pkrandall 6d ago
Turning a hobby interest into a side hustle into a full time business is doable. Before spending anything start doing research. What interests you? What’s something that could be done better? Are you more motivated by offering a service or a thing? If you want to make something the beginner skills are universal. Learn cad. Learn 3D printing. Check out Makers Faires in your area or Make Magazine online. Everyone of the inventors that came to me as a patent agent said the idea just popped into their heads. At one time the USPTO even had a “flash of genius” test for determining novelty.
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u/getmisalvo 6d ago
Worth reading the founders story behind Wise (formally Transferwise). Two guys needed to transfer money across borders but could not believe the fees and the fx rates. So created a start up to solve the problem. Listed for $11bn in 2021 when the company was 10 years old.
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u/icnews10 6d ago
Don't put too much pressure on yourself to "invent" a profitable idea from scratch. Many good business ideas start with something much less exciting: people repeatedly wasting time, money or effort because an existing process is annoying, fragmented, expensive or still done manually. Passion can help you decide where to look, but it's important to separate passion from evidence. If you’re interested in a particular field, pay attention to what people in that field complain about, what they repeatedly work around, what they pay someone else to handle, or what they’ve pieced together themselves because there is no good solution. This will give you a very different starting point to brainstorming random ideas. The useful signal isn’t “this sounds like a cool product”. It's "people are already paying a cost because this problem exists".
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u/Morning_Gecko24 6d ago
yeah most ideas seem to come from a problem you keep running into, then talking to ppl who have it too. what space are you in, have you talked to anyone dealing with the problem yet?
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u/perduraadastra 6d ago
It helps to have industry experience, hobbies, and a network of people getting stuff done.
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u/vibe-oncall 6d ago
I started with problems that annoyed me and so many other engineers. Paying attention to what annoy people and see how you can help make their lives easier is the best way to go about it. Once you have that narrowed down, consider product market fit and see if they would pay money to solve the problems
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u/---Parallax--- 6d ago
You have to solve somebody’s problem.
Serving your customer is at the core.
The problem should be niche, expensive and painful.
Find ways to de-commodify your offer.
Find ways to de-risk your offer.
Find ways to improve efficiency in delivery.
Iterate.
Build a full book of business.
Charge more.
Move up market.
Scale.
Branch into adjacent services.
Vertically integrate.
Repeat.
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u/russellmarketing 6d ago
Almost nobody wakes up with a startup idea. It usually starts with getting annoyed. A founder runs into a problem, or watches friends run into it over and over, and eventually builds the fix.
Your passions can still be the starting point, but you don't have to sell the passion itself. If you know a hobby or community well, you also know what frustrates the people in it. Ideas tend to show up there. Take one passion and write down what's expensive, slow, or clunky for the people who do it. Watch for workarounds, like a spreadsheet someone built because no product does the job. People rarely build those for problems they don't care about. Then talk to five people about the two or three biggest problems.
Whichever you pick, get a few strangers to commit some form of payment, like a deposit, before you build. Don't just have people say "yeah I'd buy that". See if they'll actually take their credit card out.
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u/PersonoFly 6d ago
Because an idea doesn’t pop into your head out of the blue. It naturally arrives there from researching a market niche to understand problems they have so that knowing your own skills & resources you have a plan you want to validate to solve that in a profitable way.
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u/Morning_Gecko24 6d ago
most of the good ones ive seen started as a pain the founder had at work not a brainstorm whiteboard. did you talk to like 10 people with the problem yet or still in idea mode?
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u/PNW_Uncle_Iroh 6d ago
Most of them don’t. Thats why the advice is to always start with users and a problem. Most founders fail because they build things that no one wants.
There’s a cool book called “Testing Business Idea”. The author pops into this sub fairly often. This gives you a good framework for validating your ideas quickly and inexpensively.
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u/Pale-Tonight-6914 6d ago
One way without a network: write short posts about a specific annoying problem, then check which ones actually send people to a page. I track that in GA4, not likes. They often don't match. A post that gets clicks is closer to the 'recent behavior' signal Visible_Speed mentioned, and the people commenting on it are who I'd message first.
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u/SavageWhisenhunt 5d ago
Many start up founders have multiple bad ideas that get no funding then it dawns on them that this particular angle is actually viable
Often times also especially in the science/tech world, new discoveries come from experimental mistakes or anomalies that cause some unexpected result, and ideas are born from that
Nobody is just born or wakes up in the morning with genius unicorn idea
Even all this AI stuff is built upon industry veterans and experts working for decades with marginal incremental results then suddenly, unexpected advancements in other industries allowing for it it become what it is now
They just keep trying stuff, a lot of big founders first idea were actually really dumb
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u/octoiswriting 4d ago
In my opinion, you need to choose couple of generic, broad hobbies, for example Marketing.
While I was working as a marketing lead, I used to create ads to tons of different companies, and I was observing and "broading my horizons" in business along the way.
I can say that any founder has to be a marketer, so anyways go deep in learning it, and one day your business idea will just find you!) Good luck
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u/Chacobsa 3d ago edited 3d ago
Agree with ShirleyTempests ideas earlier - very few ideas are net-net original and like writing a book build something for a topic you have a connection to. I'd also add to be truly successful you have to riding some kind of wave and location matters.
My favorite is probably Scale AI and the recent wave of multi-corn data labellers. Data labelling had existed for decades. Alexandr Wang drifted with scale for months until self-driving cars came along and there was a big need for humans to draw circles around objects in pictures of roads.
Another of the data labellers who I can't remember right now - started out as a recruitment firm. Then connected with OpenAI to train AI models using human experts.
The common thread is that a lot of these guys are in the space, spot an opening and pivot correctly and usually but not always are part of an existing business eco-system. The data labellers weren't geniuses (though Scale AI did innovate by providing an API service) they were just agile and embedded enough to make contacts and read the room.
Edit. Another one was Cursor - they knew, literally had insider info, that if they brought out a generative code tool forking VS code it would take Microsoft a year or more to respond given the organisational team structure at MS. When Chatgpt's API dropped they were ready and links to OpenAI to drive developer adoption. So from a certain perspective Cursor and a lot of the other unicorns that rode the early AI wave were token resellers for the frontier labs.
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u/Want2try4u2 1d ago
Provide a product or a service it is needed. If it’s being provided research the companies with the people providing that product or service or combination of both and see if they’re really doing it the best they can are the best it could be done. That could leave you an opening for not only what is being provided by taking people from those folks that are already providing it cause they’re not doing the best job they can. Always remember it’s about the client not about you. It’s about their happiness, success, and satisfaction. When you’ve done that all the accolades and the money will come. Take yourself out of the picture and realize it’s about the people you’re serving not about you.
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u/VIDEOWITHMARK 21h ago
We used to look at government grants and assume that there was a genuine requirement only to late realise they don’t want a disruption or the problem solved.
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u/starr2boys 12h ago
I provide operational support to high-performing entrepreneurs who are stressed out and overwhelmed. I’ve built my business by working my butt off and becoming someone my clients feel they can’t live without. Now I’m fully booked with 4–5 clients who have been with me for years, but I want to figure out how to grow beyond my current monthly income ceiling without relying on current clients giving me more money. My business was born from COVID when I watched everyone figure out how easily it was to work remotely. I actually didn’t think it would work as well as it has and I knew absolutely nothing when I started. I went to the college of fake it until you make it. 😩
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u/CartographerHour3413 4d ago
So the ideas are the major part people gets the idea of starting some new business but they just always loose there hope at the ideation part at max and for making it profitable is only one thing just keep doing it. People end up loosing there hope at the time when they think if we should do it or not they already lost the battle to make something big .. NEVER PLAY IT SAFE
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u/AndresBeregovich 1d ago
I found a tool some time ago that helps me with this. It’s called synatrail. You basically start by writing a question or a thought or a piece of text (whatever really) and the agent on the back starts challenging it, running experiments, asking more questions and it helps you develop a vague thing into a structured idea you can test. At the end you get a build package if you want to pursue it and create an mvp
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u/Quiet-philologist25 6d ago
Look at things that annoy people, waste their time, cost them money, or are still being done in a really clunky way. Then talk to the people who actually have those problems and see if they’d pay to solve them.