I have a day job in IT firm bulding "Enterprise Class Application" in Java/J2EE. There is a lack of innovation, creativity and challenges in my current job. I want to do something innovative, meaningful and challenging.
So, I am working to start a web startup. But, I am unable to find unique ideas. Whatever I think of, already exists in one form or other.
How do I find an idea?
You need to work on your it sucks radar. In my experience all software sucks (even what I've written). The user is typically looking for a piece of software where something works, anything.<p>So everything that you see can be improved. What you want to find our improvements which change the market? Sometimes you can see this before you start working on the problem. I can only see the possibilities when I consider the problem deeply.<p>So my suggestion is to find a problem that you have, and figure out what is the least that you have to do to solve it. (You really want this to be 1 weeks work). Then develop the solution and figure out how it sucks, and it does, all software sucks. Get feedback from your friends and make improvements.
Who cares if something exists? The important question is can you do it better?<p>Once you get the urge to do your own thing an important stage is to reflect upon your ideas and their feasibility. Once you hit on the right one, you should get a "this is it" feeling. Seeing other sites doing the 'same' thing should just spur you on.
If you are looking for something absolutely no one is doing then you are going to end up having to open up the whole market on your own.<p>I would suggest making something that exists, better. Something that people will want and will use because they are already trained to use it.<p>Go one step further and make sure that it runs on people's system tray as well as on the web, and on a mac, and linux.
Some people actually blog about ideas they'd like to see: <a href="http://blog.stevepoland.com/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.stevepoland.com/</a><p>One way might be to combine a platform (PC/Mobile/Voice) with a communication medium (RSS/Twitter/Video) and think about ways people could use a new combination. For example, Voice + RSS = people 'reading' the web from listening to a phone.<p>Another way might be if you are using a service already but there is a serious 'feature gap' that you could address, i.e. how to find out what Twitter users are linking to? Sure you would have to de-code tinyurl addresses, what else would you have to do to accurately report that figure? (Idea was suggested by Merlin Mann; he is another guy who frequently posts ideas he'd like to see).
Agree with timcederman. Pre-Google buyout, there were and still are tons of video hosting/sharing startups. BUT, why did YouTube ultimately take off and get purchased by Google? They did something different/better than everyone else.<p>In YouTube's case, I argue that they knew how to market themselves. Don't discredit your positioning and target audience. Write a kickass app tailored to what they specifically need. And hey, if it's another video app, how is your version better or more niche than YouTube?
Solve a problem, and don't look at how the competition tried to solve it until you've formulated your own solution, then start looking at how your competitors do it. Note that this doesn't mean that you should ignore your competitors; obviously you need to investigate the market potential before you draw up your own plan. Competitor analysis is part of that process.
As people have mentioned - who cares if it exists, everything exists in some shape and if it didn't exist, it probably doesn't have a market anyway!<p>If you can do it better, you can succeed. (though don't try, for example, to create a mail app like Gmail, you will probably never keep up with them!)
Paul Graham would say: "Build something people want."<p>And in your case, "Build Something You Want" (provided it doesn't exist) - and you'll have more energy to play with too.