Came across a 2012 article by @paulg about Startup ideas worth pursuing. It was quite long but was full of useful anecdotes so I took notes along the way. THREAD
1-The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems
2-The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common:
a. they are something the founders themselves want.
b. They themselves can build.
c. Few others realize they are worth doing.
a. they are something the founders themselves want.
b. They themselves can build.
c. Few others realize they are worth doing.
3-It sounds obvious to say you should only work on problems that exist. And yet by far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has.
4-By starting with an ‘idea’, you will most probably invent a model of the world that does not correspond to reality, and work from that.
5-It doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them.
6-When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they're making—not just people who could see themselves using it one day.
7-You have to compromise on one dimension: you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount or something a small number of people want a large amount.
8-You can either dig a hole that's broad but shallow or one that's narrow and deep, like a well. 
9-Choose the latter. Not all ideas of that type are good startup ideas, but nearly all good startup ideas are of that type.
10-But while demand shaped like a well is almost a necessary condition for a good startup idea, it's not a sufficient one. You have to have a path out of the initial niche.
11-Occasionally it's obvious from the beginning when there's a path out of the initial niche. And sometimes you have to see a path that's not immediately obvious.
12-If you're at the leading edge of a field that's changing fast, when you have a hunch that something is worth doing, you're more likely to be right.
13-“You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.” (Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
14-Being at the leading edge of a field doesn't mean you have to be one of the people pushing it forward. You can also be at the leading edge as a user.
15-If you look at the way successful founders have had their ideas, it's generally the result of some external stimulus hitting a prepared mind.
16-The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not "think up" but "notice". The most successful ideas that grow out of founders own experiences are “organic” ideas.
17-If you're not at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, you can get to one. Example: Anyone reasonably smart can learn to code in a year.
18-Knowing how to hack is not necessary (Bezos didn’t) but it certainly makes things easy.
19-Live in the future, then build what's missing.
20-If you knew about all the things we'll get in the next 50 years but don't have yet, you'd find present-day life pretty constraining, just as someone from the present would if they were sent back 50 years in a time machine.
21-So if you want to find startup ideas, don't merely turn on the filter "What's missing?" Also turn off every other filter, particularly "Could this be a big company?"
22-When you find the right sort of problem, you should probably be able to describe it as obvious, at least to you.
23-A good way to trick yourself into noticing ideas is to work on projects that seem like they'd be cool.
24-Just as trying to think up startup ideas tends to produce bad ones, working on things that could be dismissed as "toys" often produces good ones.
25-For college students trying to learn about "entrepreneurship.": Entrepreneurship is something you learn best by doing it.
26-Rather than wasting time learning about the easy part i-e Entrepreneurship, learn the hard part first – become the sort of person who can have organic ideas.
27-The clash of domains is a particularly fruitful source of ideas. If you're a CS major and you want to start a startup, instead of taking a class on entrepreneurship you're better off taking a class on, say, genetics or better go work for a biotech lab.
28-Beware of research. If an undergrad writes something all his friends start using, it's quite likely to represent a good startup idea.
29-Don’t be afraid of competitors working on the same idea. It's exceptionally rare for startups to be killed by competitors—so rare that you can almost discount the possibility.
30-You don't need to worry about entering a "crowded market" so long as you have a thesis about what everyone else in it is overlooking.
31-Your thesis has to be more precise than "we're going to make an x that doesn't suck" though.
32-A crowded market is actually a good sign, because it means both that there's demand and that none of the existing solutions are good enough.
33-So any startup that succeeds is either going to be entering a market with existing competitors, but armed with some secret weapon that will get them all the users (like Google), or entering a market that looks small but which will turn out to be big (like Microsoft).
34-There are two more filters you'll need to turn off if you want to notice startup ideas: the unsexy filter and the schlep filter.
35-Schlep filter keeps most people from pursuing ideas that are a little messy and tedious.
36-Example: Processing payments were painful and thousands of programmers were in a position to solve this. But when looking for ideas they didn't see this one, unconsciously they shrank from having to deal with payments. Stripe didn’t.
37-The unsexy filter is similar to the schlep filter, except it keeps you from working on problems you despise rather than ones you fear.
38-Though organic ideas are the best ones, sometimes we need to actively search for ideas and can’t wait forever for inspiration or external stimuli.
39-When searching for ideas, look in areas where you have some expertise. If you're a database expert, don't build a chat app for teenagers (unless you're also a teenager).
40-If it’s hard to come up with ‘good’ ideas in your own domain, it’s because your expertise raises your standards. Your ideas about chat apps are just as bad, but you're giving yourself a Dunning-Kruger pass in that domain.
41-The place to start looking for ideas is things you need. There must be things you need.
42-One good trick is to ask yourself whether in your previous job you ever found yourself saying "Why doesn't someone make x? If someone made x we'd buy it in a second."
43-One way to ensure you do a good job solving other people's problems is to make them your own. When Rajat Suri of E la Carte decided to write software for restaurants, he got a job as a waiter to learn how restaurants worked.
44-Since the most successful startups generally ride some wave bigger than themselves, it could be a good trick to look for waves and ask how one could benefit from them.
45-But if you're at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, you don't have to look for waves; you are the wave.
46-Live in the future and build what seems interesting. Strange as it sounds, that's the real recipe.
