How to get Million Dollar Startup Ideas?

Here’s the actual worth of what you’d think is a Million Dollar Idea™ .

0 (ZERO).

Yes, you read it right. Zero.

People have ideas everyday. Sometimes in the bathroom. Sometimes in the shower. Sometimes during the commute. But, what separates an Entrepreneur from a regular person is the guts to execute that idea.

Ideas are worthless. Execution is worth millions and sometimes even billions.

So, now How to get a startup idea you ask? Most of the startup ideas usually come from problems faced by entrepreneurs themselves. They observe the world around them. They think about the problems around them and how it can be solved. Most of these observations come from personal experience and interests.

For e.g. A person who doesn’t like sports won’t get an idea in sports, A person who doesn’t have a hint of interest in real estate, won’t get an idea in real-estate (It’s a pretty low probability scenario). Because that just doesn’t come under their expertise and primarily interests. But, A person who likes music has a much higher chance of getting an idea in music.

There are many websites from where you can get thousands of ideas. But, those ideas are just sitting there waiting for some visionary to pick it up and EXECUTE.

That’s why I have created an ideation framework that I use when I want to brainstorm ideas. It’s pretty simple and straight-forward actually and I believe it will definitely help you in getting startup ideas.

List your interests down or field of expertise on a notebook or Google Doc. Things you can do better than other people.
List down all the ideas you got from personal experience or from one of the websites listed below. Start keeping an idea journal from now on.
Compare your interests with the ideas listed.
Add on a scale of 1-10 which of the ideas vs interest excites you the most.
Delete everything below 9.
Now, Mark ideas which you can do for at least 5 years and through which you can make a sound living.
That’s your Startup idea.

Optional: You can also go one step further and research on:

1. Market trends. Meaning, Has anything changed around the world that you can use a catalyst for launch. This is important because TIMING is the biggest reason why startups succeed. A good product with bad timing almost never succeeds.

2. Market size. Basically how big this idea can get. It only matters if you are looking for outside investors. Otherwise, a great idea for a small market is absolutely fine.

Some of the great websites with crowd-sourced ideas:

Another such great platform to find and test ideas are Hackathons. There are many hackathons keeps on happening across the world. You can join one, find an idea which interests you and join their team. It’d be a great learning experience. Not to mention, even if your team members don’t want to pursue the idea, you can ask for the code, since most of them are open-source, and build a company on top of that yourself. Hackathons provide a great opportunity for young or aspiring entrepreneurs to find idea, find team and test it at a bigger scale.

BUT, If you like, Wait for someone to execute and watch them becoming a millionaire or, Pick one idea based on your interest and EXECUTE.

Just do it and make yourself proud.