The difficulties of choosing a startup idea

Note: this piece has no solution (yet).

Startup ideas are everywhere. Not many days go past where my mind does not conjure another possibly “brilliant” startup idea, which I scramble to write down in a google doc or napkin. This has lasted many years, and at one point I even practiced this, by trying to force myself to formulate ideas whilst walking around, by picking out an item and thinking how it can be improved. A sort of silicon valley tech bro version of “I spy”. Me and a friend would play “app of the day”, a game where we shared an app idea each day about a problem we had noticed in the world around us. The game had three rules; the first rule is you do not talk about “app of the day”, the second rule is you cannot mention this already exists and the final rule is no negativity allowed.

Now I am in a different position, I have recently exited my first startup and am deciding what to build next. The first 3 months were pure creative bliss. I decided rather than worrying too much about starting something right away I would spend time to feel the grain of the material, basically coding up small POCs of some of my most promising google doc and napkin concepts. No investors, no clients, no one to manage, just me and the IDE, it has been a truly beautiful period of my working life and one that I feel extremely privileged to have been able to experience.

However in an abrupt shift in mental state, my mind has decided that dithering time is over and we must begin to accrue value in a single concept. The AI boom is here and we must ride it, or be left behind. Yet picking an idea has proven to be extremely difficult as a second time founder. The first time round, as soon as I had something semi-plausible and a few angels willing to throw me a term sheet, I was off! Only to pivot 3 months later after realising I forgot to check if the market required my invention. Being much older and hopefully a little wiser seems to be slowing down the selection process due to too much knowledge of the risks & schlep a startup can face. Aside from the external risk, there is also the even more pressing question of what one wants to spend their time on. I should default to an industry I know, but have interests in other industries which are more beneficial for humankind. I should build an application layer business, but have more interest in the lower-levels of the technology stack. Should I raise VC money or launch a bootstrapped business. And many more such tradeoffs…

So as noted at the beginning, sadly this piece does not yet yield an answer, but I hope a follow up in the coming weeks will. I am rectifying some mistakes made over the past 3 months by speaking to founders, investors and potential customers. Yet the final plunge to take will be a lonely endeavour but one for which I am excited, there is nothing better than the new startup smell. A newly minted domain name, logo and team members, everyone excited to write code to ship products that people will love. Focusing on those moments will hopefully push the mind to settle on the realities of the tradeoffs and take the final step into the unknown.

If you have faced or are facing a similar situation drop me a line!