You hear it all the time.
- “I have this great idea!”
- “If we build something that does this and that together, it would be awesome!”
- “This is going to be so cool!”
Lots of people have ideas for startups. Not all of them are good. So how do you know if your idea will fly?
Stop calling it an idea. An idea can be anything. “Let’s go fishing” is an idea. “Let’s build a cheap water filtration system” is another idea.
Call them solutions instead. By definition, a solution must solve an existing problem. If your solution doesn’t solve an existing problem, it’s not a solution. Startups should be brainstorming solutions, not ideas. And if you continue down this chain of thought, at the core, you’re really brainstorming problems. Customers pay to fix problems.
Find a problem, build a solution.
At SnapEditor, we didn’t just decide to build a fancy new WYSIWYG editor just because we thought it was a cool idea. We saw the frustration that seethed out of users. The instability, the bad HTML, the “Why is it doing this?!?!”. We started with the problems and are committed to fixing them. If you haven’t already, play around with SnapEditor and let us know what you think.