You can be making money in a year if you picked a half-decent idea (that enough people want) and just ran with it.
Want to start a business but don’t have any ideas? There are literally hundreds and thousands of business ideas floating out there today.
In fact, I’m going to give a bunch away for free in this post. The magic isn’t in the idea, but the execution. Often, the initial idea isn’t the winner, but it leads to something that truly changes the world. For example:
- the origin of Facebook
- the origin of Twitch
- the entire life of Edison
- Columbus
- the gold rush
- Standard Oil turning the industrial waste from kerosene into fuel (i.e. gasoline)
You probably don’t need a new idea—just an old idea executed with vigor.
If you do want a new idea, they are in abundance. Everyone has an idea. If you meet someone who has an idea and money, just ask them about their idea and then see if they’ll pay you to build it for them.
If you want an idea just for you, you’re in luck. There are many out there no one is acting on. For every 50 people that have a business or startup idea, maybe one is executing on it.
There is a lot of room for you to make your mark.
Ideas come from problems. Unique ideas come from innovative solutions to old problems.
30 Problems Worth Solving
Here are 30 very real, very current market needs for you to imagine a solution to.
- Fixing the supply chain backup in Los Angeles port
- Myopia is increasing worldwide (screens and long study hours). How might you prevent it?
- A restaurant chain or food service that avoids seed oils
- You can dollar-cost-average into a stock with just a few dollars. Why not the house you live in?
- Traffic
- Increasing academic pay, incentivizing good research
- Incentivizing good, non clickbait journalism
- Making it stupidly-easy to grow your own food
- Two-party system (yes, there may be a market solution to this, not just a legal one)
- How to drastically cut-down learning time of expensive skills (e.g. painting)
- Turning household waste into household energy
- Making Bitcoin even easier to use than cash or credit cards
- At-home health checks (cut down on doctors visits)
- Teach people like me how to cook in a time-efficient, healthy way that doesn’t taste like garbage
- Help startups do market validation in one month instead of one year
- Show college students what they can realistically make based off what they major in
- Investing in students for a return instead of making them pay to learn
- A way to scan a garbage dump for recyclables or valuables
- A way to recycle old computer hardware into newer, higher-tech machines
- Showing businesses how they can save money by switching from software tool to another
- Upgrade a company’s old tech stack to new hotness (via transpiler or by hand)
- Go tell 10 business you love something you can do to help them improve (marketing, sales, features, equipment, etc.)
- Helping unknown, quality writers with no network get discovered
- Coaching startups how to get free PR
- Helping crunchy moms get rid of all micro-plastic-laden foods
- Creating websites for people in _____ industry
- As the supply chain worsens, sourcing viable alternatives (e.g. material XYZ1 is out of stock but XYZ3 is 98% as durable and there’s a stock in the next town over)
- Helping people develop more energy naturally instead of drinking 6 cups of coffee a day
- Showing what one’s own body could look like at different levels of fitness (to help set both realistic and ambitious goals)
- Helping students and workers stymy distractions and facilitate real work
That last one was for me.
There are so, so many ideas. Too many. You literally cannot do them all. I actually wrote more than 30 ideas but decided to cut it down so it wouldn’t be overwhelming.
What’s your gut saying?
Maybe you hate all of these ideas. That’s fine. That probably means you already know what you want to do!
Get on it.
