Target Idea Brainstorming at a Familiar Audience
I recently found a post on Hacker News entitled, “Why Ideas are a Bad Place to Start a Startup.” The post emphasizes a focus on finding an audience as a first priority, followed by understanding their problems, which ultimately paves the way for brainstorming good startup ideas.
As a graduate student in computer vision, I had an idea to build software to automatically apply makeup virtually to a woman’s face (the idea). Then we (a bunch of male engineering grad students) decided this could be a business, and we started doing customer discovery with cosmetic counters at local malls. We called it MesmerEyes. It took us 4 months to ultimately admit the obvious: we had no depth with cosmetics nor capacity to build a business for that market, despite our seemingly good initial idea.
I was drawn into this Hacker News post by this graphic. I think it’s a great representation of the ups and downs that happen during idea stage.
Founders should build for audiences with which they are comfortable and knowledgeable and should recognize when to stay strong versus when to move on.
What have you learned about the process of idea brainstorming? Do you target particular audiences with your brainstorming? Or do you think more broadly?