A playbook for Generating Business Ideas

Service Automation
Some companies have been highly successful simply by automating a process
that was previously done manually by humans. Here are a few of many
companies and products providing such solutions:
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Quickbooks for accounting
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Assembly line for factory workers
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Cars for horseback riding
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AxialMarket and Angellist for investment brokerage
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Codecademy for teaching
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Vacuum cleaners for manually cleaning
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Lighters, matches, and stoves for fire
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Light bulbs for candles and matches
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Faucets for wells (water is an essential need)

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Motorized fans for hand fans
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Wealthfront and Betterment for personal financial management
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Rocket Lawyer for law
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Wordpress for software development
Key Takeaways
As you can see from all the above examples, some of the most successful
companies in history started by meeting known needs. They didn’t have wildly
new ideas. They just had highly innovative solutions to pre-existing problems.
To mitigate the risk of building a solution that nobody wants, start by solving a
problem that you know someone has.
As society and technology evolves, I suspect basic needs will be sufficiently
solved, but people will have more ambitious needs. For example, it’s fairly easy
to find food right now, so people can spend more time worrying about luxuries
such as making more money, entertainment, dating, etc.

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Chapter 7: Do What’s Working
“At a time when so many Internet entrepreneurs are running around Silicon
Valley trying to do something no one else has ever done, [Evan] Williams
believes that the real trick is to find something that’s tried and true” – Wired
quoting Twitter Co-founder, Evan Williams Anything you do to determine what
customers want is a form of customer development. Most people think of
customer development as in-person interviews or product experiments. I think of
it as anything you do in order to gain insights about what people want.
Analyzing what they are buying is a way to learn about what they want.
If people are spending their time or money on a given product or service, it is an
indication that the product or service provides something that they want.
“Do what’s working” means supplying, or testing, something you know people
want. It could mean (1) providing the validated solution to the same problem
(replicating), (2) supplying a validated solution for one problem to a different
problem, or (3) providing a variation of a validated solution to the same problem
(differentiating).
By supplying something that has at least some validated demand, you increase
your chances of meeting a market demand. By starting with something with
validated market demand, you decrease your customer discovery time and can
get to customer validation faster. The following chapter describes each of the
three variants of “doing what’s working” mentioned in the previous paragraph.

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All or in Part
To generate a new business idea that meets customer demand, you can “do” all
or part of “what’s working.” “All” would mean directly competing with an
existing company. “Part” would mean differentiating the product, target market,
or business model. Following is a deeper analysis of each these strategies with
examples of successful companies cited to provide illustration.

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