Common Mistakes When Coming Up with Startup Ideas
Michelle Marcelline • 2021-10-28
Startup ideas change over time. So, the thing you want to do is to pick a good starting point.
Mistake 1: Believing that you need an amazing idea to get started
A lot of people believe that the key to having a successful startup is starting with a brilliant idea. So, they're waiting to have a brilliant idea before they start anything.
However, when you look at successful companies today, like Google, they were like the 20th search engine when they started. What made them successful was not a brilliant idea. It was a good enough idea, combined with great execution.
Mistake 2: Jumping into the first idea that comes to mind, without really stopping to think critically about whether it's a good idea at all.
Startup ideas change over time. So, the thing you want to do is to pick a good starting point. If you have a good starting point, then even if your initial idea isn't great, it just needs tweaking to get to a great idea.
To avoid this mistake, do not skip the Idea Validation stage: find a few people in the space and share your idea. Interview them:
What's missing from the current solution
What they did to hack the current solution to achieve what they want
If your tool exists, would they pay for it
Did you know?
When we wanted to make Typedream, we interviewed 200+ Notion to Website users to dig deeper on the problem.
Why Notion, a note-taking app, and not other NoCode website builders?
We like Notion's "What you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) approach
Left: Notice that to edit a text block, you need to edit it using the left menu bar/"form"
Right: With a WYSIWYG editor, you edit on the block you'd like to edit
Anything missing from Notion as a website builder?
Yes, making navbars and buttons, the 2 most important components of a website, is not intuitive on Notion since Notion is not a website builder.
Typedream's built-in navbar:
Mistake 3: Start with a solution instead of a problem. "Solution In Search of a Problem" (SISP)
For example: I want to build Uber for plumbers. Is it really hard to find plumbers? I don't know.
Did you know?
The idea behind Typedream came from a problem in the NoCode community where people were using Notion to build websites because they love Notion's interface so much.
However, Notion is not a website builder so the important features of a website builder were missing. This was where Typedream jumped in to fill the gap.
