Ideas & Opportunity

How do I turn a vague hunch that something is broken into a sharp, testable idea?

A starting point

A hunch becomes an idea when you can name the person, the moment the pain hits, and what they do today to cope. Follow the workaround: every ugly spreadsheet, WhatsApp forward, or manual hack is a signpost to a problem someone already pays to avoid. Write your idea as a hypothesis you could disprove in a week, not a mission statement.

Go deeper

Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time.

3 resources 3 link-checked Watch Read

Watch

▶️ Video
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it Kevin Hale is a YC partner and cofounder of Wufoo, so this is both the investor lens (what makes a bet worth backing) and the operator lens (someone who built and sold a company). His core move is treating an idea as a hypothesis about why the company will grow fast, which is exactly the question to ask before you sign up for years on it. Use it as a starting point to pressure test your own idea, not as a verdict.

How to Evaluate Startup Ideas

On Y Combinator Startup School by Kevin Hale ~50 min

How to Evaluate Startup Ideas
  • An idea is a hypothesis for why the company will grow quickly, made of a problem, a solution, and an insight, so be honest about whether the growth story holds.
  • You need an unfair advantage, a concrete reason you will win and reach people faster than everyone else, before the years of commitment make sense.
  • Evaluate your own idea the way an investor would, since that is the same lens that tells you whether it is big enough to be worth your life.
Watch on YouTube youtube.com →

Read

📖 Book
✓ Link checked Paid Intermediate

Why we picked it When you feel that something is broken but cannot name it, Christensen's Jobs-to-be-Done lens gives you a way to describe the actual progress a person is trying to make in a specific situation. That reframing turns a fuzzy hunch into a concrete job you can go test with real people, which is exactly the move from vague to sharp. It is the canonical text on the idea, and it is a starting point for thinking in jobs, not a formula to follow blindly.

Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

From HarperBusiness by Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, David S. Duncan ~288 pages

  • People do not buy products, they hire them to make progress in a specific circumstance, so define the job, not the demographic.
  • A job has functional, social, and emotional dimensions, which is often where the real, unmet problem is hiding.
  • Once you can state the job clearly, you have a testable claim you can validate or kill by talking to the people who have it.
Open amazon.com →
✍️ Essay
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it The definitive essay on where good ideas come from: notice problems you personally have, don't force it. Use it as the lens for judging whether your idea is a real problem or a solution in search of one.

How to Get Startup Ideas

From paulgraham.com by Paul Graham ~20 min read

  • Live in the future and build what's missing.
  • The best ideas look like bad ideas at first (schleps and hard-to-explain).
  • Start with problems you have, in a domain you actually know.
Open paulgraham.com →

People also ask

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