Reading the entire post by Paul Graham about startup ideas (<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html</a>) I summarize his thoughts more as pointing to problems that many people have, where the problems of the founder should act just as the starting point! for ideation (to get to a startup idea) - not being the end goal of a startup.<p>Here are some quotes from Paul Graham:
"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, but who want it urgently."<p>"When you have an idea for a startup, ask yourself: who wants this right now [besides yourself]? Who wants this [besides yourself] so much that they'll use it even when it's a crappy version one made by a two-person startup they've never heard of? If you can't answer that, the idea is probably bad."<p>"When you find the right sort of problem, you should probably be able to describe it as obvious (...) Which means, strangely enough, that coming up with startup ideas is a question of seeing the obvious."<p>"If Mark Zuckerberg had built something that could only ever have appealed to Harvard students, it would not have been a good startup idea."<p>Paul Graham wrote even more in this direction in another post that was titled:<p>"Startup = Growth"
<a href="http://paulgraham.com/growth.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulgraham.com/growth.html</a><p>Here are some quotes:<p>"The growth of a successful startup usually has three phases: 1) There's an initial period of slow or no growth while the startup tries to figure out what it's doing. 2) As the startup figures out how to make something lots of people want and how to reach those people, there's a period of rapid growth. (...)" "During Y Combinator we measure growth rate per week (...) A good growth rate during YC is 5-7% a week. If you can hit 10% a week you're doing exceptionally well. If you can only manage 1%, it's a sign you haven't yet figured out what you're doing." "The best thing to measure the growth rate of is revenue. The next best, for startups that aren't charging initially, is active users."<p>"The fascinating thing about optimizing for growth is that it can actually discover startup ideas. You can use the need for growth as a form of evolutionary pressure. If you start out with some initial plan [solving your own problem] and modify it as necessary to keep hitting, say, 10% weekly growth, you may end up with a quite different company than you meant to start [that only solved your own problem]. But anything that grows consistently at 10% a week is almost certainly a better idea than you started with." "You'll generally do best to follow that constraint wherever it leads [solving a problem that some users really have] rather than being influenced by some initial vision [like solving only your own problem], just as a scientist is better off following the truth wherever it leads rather than being influenced by what he wishes were the case."