How to find business ideas

Most business advice tells you to find a hot market, move fast, and scale hard. That advice has killed more companies than it has built.

Here is what I have learned after twenty years of building things.

Your biggest frustrations are your best starting point. Not every annoyance is a business idea, but the problems you live with every day are the ones you understand better than anyone. That understanding is worth more than any market research report. Most successful products were built by someone who was sick of the problem existing.

Chasing trends is a trap. Crypto startups during the Bitcoin boom. Uber for X. OpenAI wrapper apps that got wiped out by a single GPT update. The pattern is always the same. Someone spots a wave, hundreds of people rush to ride it, and almost all of them wipe out. By the time a trend is visible enough to chase, it is usually too late to build anything durable on top of it.

Copying successful businesses is equally pointless. Me-too products enter crowded markets with no differentiation, no story, and no reason for anyone to switch. High failure rates in these businesses are not bad luck. They are the predictable outcome of doing what everyone else is doing and hoping for a different result.

Focusing on profit from day one sounds responsible. It usually isn’t. It pushes you toward shortcuts that feel good short term and poison the product long term. The lean startup framework exists for a reason. Validate the idea with real people first. Build the smallest possible version that tests whether anyone actually wants it. Iterate based on what you learn. Product-market fit is the only metric that matters early on, and you cannot manufacture it by optimising for revenue before you have it.

Rapid scale is the most overrated goal in entrepreneurship. It leads to burnout, bad hires, shortcuts in the product, and a customer base you never had time to understand. Slow, steady growth lets you actually learn the business you are building. It gives you time to serve people well, adapt to what you find, and build something that lasts longer than the next funding cycle.

The most sustainable path to building a business is also the least glamorous one. Start with a real problem. Build something small. Talk to the people using it. Grow at a pace you can manage. Repeat.

It’s not a sexy conference talk. It works though.