Generating business ideas can be fairly difficult. I thought I would share 5 recipes to generate them - accentuating of each ideation method so you know which one is right for you.

In a quick note-like fashion:

Leverage Business Domain Expertise

Downsides: Requires years of domain expertise to ensure founder has good insight into this problem.

Dead-simple. Spent 7 years as a real estate agent? What was terrible and is automatable with software / AI?

Questions to ask yourself:

• Think of every job or internship you’ve had (and internships and life experiences)?

• What are problems or opportunities you’ve been in a special position to see?

Consumer Ideas

Downsides: You should ideally have unique insight into the problem. Otherwise - it can potentially become a tarpit idea.

If you are in a unique position to observe a consumer phenomenon, you might be able to build this new idea. For example - VetCove was started by 2 brothers whose dad was a veteran and they wanted to provide supplies to veterans.

• What are problems or opportunities you’ve been in a special position to see?

Ideas you wish existed

Downsides: Can be tarpit ideas. Requires enormous effort to get started.

Examples: DoorDash.

Observing Changes In Reality + Providing Solutions

Downsides: There’s a law in business that says something that’s existed before for X time will continue to exist in the future for X time.

One example is GatherTown - where office people in Covid wanted ways to simulate being in the office again despite being remote.

Variants of Old Ideas

Nua Cargo - which is FlexPort for Latin America.

Borrowing similar ideas from popular countries’ business models into your country can be a promising angle. These tend to do well for logistics-based start-ups like Grab (Uber for Asia).