No More Waiting for a Lightbulb Moment! The Top 8 Methods for Generating Startup Ideas, Ranked

#1: Domain Expertise

Start from Your Field of Expertise

Being at the cutting edge of technology is the best way to come across startup ideas.

The best startup inspiration comes from naturally "noticing" it. Being at the frontier of your industry puts you in the best position to find it, whether that means:

Current inefficiencies or painfully slow processes that could be dramatically improved
The latest techniques in your field — can they be applied elsewhere?
Pain points or unmet needs in the market that your expertise could address

Perfect Founder/Market Fit

Deep knowledge of a field, a clear understanding of its pain points — you and your team are the ideal people to solve the problem.

What If You're a Student With No Expertise? Find What You're Good At.

What you're good at can also become a startup idea. Even if you're fresh out of school, there are things you do better than most people. Maybe:

You take beautiful, well-organized notes → try selling them?
You're top of your class in medical school → share your systematic study method through a personal media channel?
You're great at planning travel itineraries → share your planning process and logic, document everything, and offer free advice to a growing audience?

The definition of "cutting edge" is broad here. Being even slightly better than average — better than 70% of people — means someone can benefit from what you know. When someone benefits, it means your idea has value.

If you still feel you have no expertise and nothing you're particularly good at, then I recommend:

Try to become the cutting edge in some field.

If you have no ideas or abilities that exceed the ordinary, how can you profit from them? Never stop learning.

Example: AmazingTalker, Taiwan's Leading Online Tutoring Platform

Co-founder and CEO: Jay Chao

Sales experience at TutorABC, where he became Taiwan's top-performing salesperson in his first year
Noticed the pain points of traditional language courses: high price points and the requirement to purchase tens of thousands of dollars' worth of lessons upfront
Dramatically lowered the barrier to entry — students could start learning for as little as one or two hundred dollars, buying just a single hour of class time

Example: Valtec AI — Combining Drones, AI, and Multi-Sensor Technology to Dramatically Improve Tuna Fishing Efficiency

Co-founder and CEO: John Keh

Former geospatial analysis and drone applications expert in the U.S. Air Force
Was the third employee at U.S. food delivery startup Caviar, responsible for expanding the West Coast market
Led the market expansion strategy team for Uber Eats in the U.S. and Canada
Combined his experience in the food supply chain, food delivery industry, and drone technology to identify a niche market with enormous profit potential: deep-sea fishing

#2: Solve Your Own Problems

Hard to Lose Passion

A problem you've personally experienced is a great starting point. The emotional connection gives you deep motivation, and successfully shipping a solution brings tremendous satisfaction.

Even If No One Else Needs It, You've Still Solved Your Own Problem

If you've already done research and found that nothing on the market addresses your pain point — or that existing solutions aren't good enough — that situation is usually self-validating. Your problem is a valuable one.

Example: PostBridge — Schedule Posts Across Multiple Social Platforms Simultaneously

Founder: Jack Friks

Was spending an hour every day manually posting the same content to different social media platforms
Existing tools required monthly subscriptions ranging from $50 to $150, an enormous cost for individual creators
Decided to build an app himself to solve the problem, then discovered many others had the same frustration

#3: Things You Wish Existed

Danger: These Often Become "Tarpit Ideas"

Tarpit ideas: common ideas that appear easy to solve with a startup, but actually have deep structural problems that have remained unsolved for years.

A classic example: "Making plans on a Friday night is so inefficient — I should build an app for organizing outings with friends."

Ideas you come up with sitting at a desk are usually tarpit ideas
Ideas you spend a lot of time brainstorming aren't just bad — they can even give you a false sense that they're viable

Before Pursuing It, Ask Yourself: Why Doesn't This Already Exist?

Possible reasons:

Nobody else in the market wants it — just you.
It requires a significant change in user behavior and habits, making adoption extremely costly and unlikely to succeed.
The technology isn't mature yet, or is prohibitively complex and expensive, making a reliable and scalable solution very hard to build.
There are regulatory barriers or legal risks that are difficult to overcome.

The Fix: Google It.

Find out whether anyone has already tried something similar
You can even reach out to others who have attempted to solve the same problem and dig into what the real sticking points are

#4: Recent World-Changing Events

Recent Examples: Covid, AI, Web3

These new technologies and trends may have displaced old jobs, but they've also created entirely new opportunities.

First Mover Advantage: Capture market share quickly before competition floods in
New pain points emerge: Urgent demand for immediate solutions (Covid)
Old pain points shift: AI solves many tedious problems → but integrating AI is hard; how do small and mid-sized businesses adopt it?

Watch Out for SISP (Solution in Search of a Problem)

The classic example:

AI looks really cool. What can I apply AI to? Let me find a problem that AI can solve.

This approach seems reasonable on the surface, but it misses a critical point: the pain point doesn't actually exist.

Excessive enthusiasm → wasted resources: You invest enormous amounts of time, money, and energy building something with no real demand, and ultimately create no value.
Lack of empathy → failing to truly connect with users: Starting from technology and product, you inevitably neglect a deep understanding of your target users' expectations and pain points. The result is something that works technically but falls short in practice.

"Fall in Love with a Problem": Choose a Problem You Genuinely Care About Solving

Learn to think from the outside in — dig deep to uncover the core pain points that truly exist and remain unmet. Whether it's a problem you've experienced personally or an opportunity you've spotted through careful observation, finding the problem worth "falling in love with" is where your journey and contribution begin.

#5: Variations on Successful Companies

Find a Recently Successful Company and Copy Their "Core Concept"

Successful companies succeeded for a reason — whether it's their business model or the pain point they chose to tackle. Copying a successful company also signals something important:

This idea has already been validated. It has proven value.

This lets you bypass one of the biggest hurdles in startup validation. As long as you carefully select a niche market and transfer the core concept, you have a strong chance of success.

When selecting a niche market, keep two things in mind:

Is this market underserved? Look for gaps in market demand → find the opening where the core concept can break through
Does this market have unique complexity? Look for barriers to entry → protect your market position and differentiate yourself from other imitators

Example: Nuvocargo — Applying the "Tech Platform + Traditional Freight" Concept to US-Mexico Cross-Border Trade

Drew inspiration from Flexport's core concept of using a tech platform to modernize traditional freight forwarding.
Applied it to a more focused and specialized domain: US-Mexico cross-border trade.
Flexport aimed to solve global trade's pain points: complex processes, documentation, customs clearance, and coordination between many different parties.
Nuvocargo optimized specifically for the unique complexities of the US-Mexico corridor, such as specific border procedures and regulatory differences on each side.

#6: Directly Seek Out Other People's Problems

Choose a Lucrative Industry

First, an important concept: Idea Space

Idea Space: the broader collection of potential startup ideas and opportunities within a given domain.

Over the past decade, startups in fintech have had an exceptionally high success rate. This tells us something important: "choosing the right space matters more than working hard." Picking a rich idea space dramatically increases your odds of success.

Talk Directly to People in the Industry

Two types of people worth reaching out to:

Potential customers

The most common approach — by understanding and researching potential customers' pain points, opportunities naturally surface.

Founders in that idea space

They know the industry inside and out and have unique insight into which ideas are genuinely worth pursuing. Learning from their past failures and successes is one of the most valuable ways to grow within that space.

Example: AtoB — Fuel Cards (A Specialized Credit Card for Truck Drivers)

AtoB's founders were, like most of us — young, with no domain expertise. So how did they pull it off?

Select the idea space
1. Initial interest was in software for trucks
2. No knowledge of the trucking industry
3. Believed it was a rich idea space worth hunting in
No expertise? Become an expert.
1. Drove out to truck stops and talked directly to potential customers
Talked to other founders in the space
1. Essentially talked to anyone with any knowledge of the industry who was willing to speak with them
2. Developed a mental map of the space — knowing where the good ideas and bad ideas lived
Evaluated many potential ideas and ultimately chose fuel cards as their starting direction

Carefully choosing your idea space has another advantage: it makes pivoting much easier. Pivoting may be the single most important thing in the startup world. Staying flexible in your options lets you find the direction truly worth pursuing, rather than blindly sticking to your original plan.

#7: Find a Broken Large Industry

Any large industry that looks like it's on the verge of collapse is ripe for disruption. These traditional industries have several advantages:

Enormous Valuations

Even capturing a small slice of the market yields extraordinary returns.

Outdated Processes, Easy to Improve

Bureaucracy keeps processes antiquated and makes adopting new technology difficult. Startup talent can readily identify alternatives and dramatically improve operational efficiency.

High Barriers to Entry

Without specific connections or inroads, it's hard for startups to break in. This looks like a drawback, but it ensures competition remains scarce — making it worth hunting in.

Example: Tracle — Waste Pickup on Demand

Recycling and waste collection is an industry most people shy away from — but according to Taiwan's Ministry of the Interior, nearly 6 million households across the country have no shared garbage facilities.

Tracle saw this opportunity and moved in by introducing LINE membership, building a fleet management system, and using algorithms to improve order-batching efficiency — replacing the traditional model of phone bookings, manual paperwork, and even pen-and-paper route tracking.

#8: Find a Co-founder Who Already Has an Idea

Everything Is Ready — Just Add Execution

The idea has already been carefully thought through by someone else, and you can validate it through your own research. While this strays slightly from the spirit of this article, it's the simplest method of all.

Best Candidates: Developers and Marketing Talent

If you're someone with specific technical or marketing skills, this method is an excellent fit. It not only takes the pressure off generating ideas — your presence also makes the early execution phase run far more smoothly.

Combining your skills with an already-existing idea is one of the best starting points for building a startup.

After Reading All This and Still Can't Find an Idea?

Learn Something New and Become an Expert

Becoming an expert and staying at the frontier means you'll naturally start to notice pain points and opportunities. This is the most reliable method — it never stops working.

Work at a Startup

Startups are the easiest places to meet fascinating people who spark more startup-style thinking in each other.

Learning the processes and fundamentals of how a startup operates will also build a solid foundation for your own journey ahead.

Build Things You Find Interesting

You can't lose passion for things you genuinely find interesting. Build those things — and enjoy the fun and experience that comes with it.

Experience. Experience. Experience.

Beyond learning, there's so much more worth experiencing.

Travel: The mix of different cultural backgrounds — is there a model somewhere that you could bring back home?
Develop hobbies: A niche hobby might help you identify a pain point and build a market around it.
Socialize: Join communities related to your interests or in entirely different fields. This expands your network, sparks creativity, and helps you avoid the danger of filter bubbles — getting stuck inside the same daily frame of reference.

Don't Stop to Think — Go Out, Experience, Learn, and Observe!

Ultimately, it always comes back to this:

The best startup inspiration comes from naturally "noticing" it.

So keep moving forward and seize every opportunity to try. Always remember: only action creates the possibility of success. If you keep stopping to think and hesitate, your chances of success will always be zero.