How to Come Up With Successful Business Ideas?

Good business ideas are all around you; you only need to think in the right way:

1. Consider different pain points in your life and how a product or service might solve them
2. Keep an eye on current events and trends, and investigate the opportunities
3. Launch a product, pay close attention to which elements work best, then focus on them
4. Think of something that seems like it should exist in the future because it will be useful and then work toward that.

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Solve a Problem You Face‍

Airbnb: Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky didn’t have money to pay rent, so they pulled their air beds out of the closet and rented them to travelers.

Snapchat: Reggie Brown wanted to send disappearing photos so he wouldn’t have to worry about accidentally sending his date a picture of his junk.

Calm: Michael Acton Smith found that meditation helped him with severe headaches.

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Follow Your Curiosity and Intuition

Duolingo: Luis Von Ahn sold his second company to Google and decided to focus on language education. He later got excited to see if he could build it into a business.

Musical.ly (aka TikTok): On a Caltrain ride from San Francisco to Mountain View, Alex Zhu noticed that teens were passionate about combining social media, photos, videos, and music. He gave up on creating an educational app he was working on and “went all in on fun” to make Musical.ly.

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Pay Close Attention to Which Elements Work Best

‍Instagram: The idea of Instagram was born through the creation of another social media platform called Burbn. Burbn was a check-in site. The idea wasn’t working until the founders chopped everything out except photos, built the filters in, and allowed for likes and comments.

Discord: Jason Citron found that his game business wasn’t working but that people loved its chat feature.

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‍Live in the Future, and Build What's Missing

‍Spotify: Daniel Ek realized that you could never legislate away from piracy. The only way to solve the problem was to create a service that was better than piracy.

Amazon: Jeff Bezos noticed that web usage was growing 2,300% a year and picked books as a product that would benefit from being sold online.

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