Startup ideas in plain sight

It is so amazing to me that startup ideas exist right under our noses, yet we ignore most of them. A good idea typically involves the following format.

is difficult/time consuming/expensive.

We think that by applying , we can enable to do

But the idea is just one percent of it. Execution is the other 99%.

Some recent ideas that seem so obvious in hindsight

Ovuline - app that helps couples get pregnant. Based on tracking signs such as temperature, weight and based on technology  developed by Harvard scientists.

Change Collective - tools for change based on behavioral change principles. Books provide inspiration, but Change Collective provides the courses and reminders that enable change in bite sized chunks

Drizly - alcohol delivered. That really doesn't need any more explanation.

To increase my old idea generation rate, I maintain a separate notebook of startup ideas, and just common problems I see around me. I don't intent to work on them - I am already working on something new. The key thing is building a habit of coming up with new ideas.

So look around you - there are several ideas just waiting to be discovered.

Mark of a great idea

In my opinion, the mark of an idea is that it seems obvious once someone has done it/mentioned it. A great example is this - whenever I have gone to a Yoga class, I have always felt that I was one of the handful of guys in a class dominated by women. Did I really belong here?

Enter Broga Yoga - a Yoga class designed specifically for men. Now that I think of it - its an obvious way to solve this problem. But only now is it obvious - not before it was created.

Another similar idea is Hipmunk - why should flights not be displayed in a calendar format? I want to quickly see which flight will match the times I want to fly? But it took over a decade after online ticketing had gone mainstream before such a concept appears.

Great ideas are obvious in hindsight, but it takes a flash of brilliance to get the idea.

The diaper shift blog post

Ideas come to us in the craziest places. And the craziest times. Most of my ideas occur to me between 4 and 5 AM. What I am doing up at that time? Doing my duty on the diaper shift.

Every night, our daughter Simran gets up at this time from her first shift of sleep, to eat. Now I cannot feed her; what I can do is the 'diaper changing and putting her to sleep' part. She is awake some of the time; but then gets very sleepy, and as I rock her to sleep, my mind wanders.

For some reason, this is when thoughts start occurring to me - thoughts related to ideas that I was thinking about the day before. And its not just disjointed thoughts - thoughts often come in as a coherent whole. I try to jot down these thoughts in my notebook before I go back to sleep, as I can often translate them directly into a blog post. There is a blog post that I will write soon titled Skillshare vs. Sidetour - I have the entire outline, with all major points ready. And that thought came to be - on the diaper shift.