Startup Corner #17: What If Startup Ideas Were Just... Obvious?
Do most ideas look like ideas at first?
Hey friends,
Let’s talk about startup ideas.
But let’s do it without jargon, without hype, and without pretending we’re all pitching Y Combinator tomorrow.
Because honestly? I think we overcomplicate this stuff.
The best startup ideas — the ones that turn into real businesses — usually don’t feel like “ideas” when they show up.
They feel like:
Something broken you keep tripping over
Something annoying that no one has bothered to fix
Something useful you made for yourself, and now five other people want it too
That’s it. That’s the spark.
No “market map.” No 50-slide pitch deck.
Just something small, real, and slightly too painful to ignore.
We tend to think startup ideas should be clever.
But in reality, most clever ideas don’t work.
Because they’re built backwards — from the top down.
“What if we used blockchain for grocery delivery?”
“What if meetings were NFTs?” *shudder*
“What if we made Uber for X but with machine learning?”
You can almost hear the pitch deck forming in the background.
But good ideas — the ones with real traction and stickiness — are almost always bottom-up.
They come from living in the problem.
Seeing the friction up close.
Knowing where the edge is because you’ve run into it.
That’s why so many great companies start as side projects.
They weren’t created to be companies.
They were created to make something easier — and then someone said, “Hey, could I use that too?”
So how do you find one of these “obvious-in-hindsight” ideas?
Here’s what I tell myself (and friends) when we’re stuck:
1. Notice what people are duct-taping together
If someone’s stitching together five tools, spreadsheets, Slack messages, and 2 hours a week just to do something basic — there’s a product there.
Especially if they’re not complaining.
Especially if they’ve normalized the pain.
Especially if it happens across multiple teams or industries.
2. Watch for the weird workarounds
The most interesting ideas often show up in the “hacks” people invent for themselves:
Custom Notion setups
Copy-pasting between platforms
Shared Google Sheets that function as inventory systems
Every workaround is a clue: “this isn’t working as designed.”
And where things don’t work as designed, opportunity lives.
3. Listen to what people do after they say, “It’s fine”
“It’s fine” is where pain hides. It’s where energy is being wasted, time is being burned, or money is slipping through cracks.
Ask someone what they do all day. Then ask them what part they’d happily give up.
That’s where ideas start — not in the brainstorm doc, but in the part they’re quietly tired of doing.
4. Don’t ignore your own patterns
One of the most common traps is assuming “well, if I figured it out, it must not be that hard.”
But that’s exactly what makes it useful.
If you’ve solved something in a clean, repeatable, low-drama way — there’s probably someone one step behind you who’d happily pay to shortcut their learning curve.
That’s the startup. You just have to let it exist.
Startup ideas don’t have to be flashy.
They don’t have to impress anyone.
They just have to do something surprisingly well, for a group of people who feel relieved to have found you.
That’s what makes an idea good.
Not because it checks boxes. Not because it looks like the next unicorn. But because it makes something that used to be annoying... no longer annoying.
If you’re thinking about building something right now, don’t start with “what’s a good startup idea?”
Start with:
“What’s annoying?”
“What’s slow?”
“What’s still being done manually?”
“What do I wish existed 6 months ago?”
You might be closer than you think.
— RB
Startup Corner