How To Pick A Startup Idea

**Jon Xu** (0:09)
Hi, I'm Jon, and I'm a partner at YC. I often meet founders who have lots of ideas about what to work on and can't decide between them. Sometimes they're working on multiple things.
Often they'll say that they're waiting to find the best idea before fully committing. But it's extremely hard to make meaningful progress on a startup without committing to a single idea.
So in this video, I'm gonna give you a rubric for how to stop overthinking, pick an idea, commit to it, and then figure out fast whether it's actually working. The most important piece of advice I'd give to founders struggling to pick a startup idea is, don't overthink it. Overthinking a startup in the earliest days can take many forms, but here are a couple of the most common failure modes I see. The first is thinking that you need to find the perfect idea. In some ways, this is an understandable impulse.
Startups are hard, so shouldn't you figure out the best idea before committing? The problem with this approach is that it's impossible to figure out the perfect idea in the abstract. You can only figure out what you should be working on by making contact with reality and getting feedback from customers. The second overthink is, am I the perfect founder for this?
It's true that founder market fit matters. A non-technical founder likely won't be the right person to come up with a killer dev tools startup idea, for example. But often founders, especially second time founders, weaponize this line against themselves. They convince themselves that they need a decade of domain experience before they can start. The truth is, you don't. If you pick an idea you're curious about, go extremely deep, and most importantly, talk to customers, it's often possible to develop extraordinary knowledge in a short amount of time. We see incredible examples of this all the time at YC. Take Blake Scholl, the CEO of Boom Supersonic. Blake spent his early career working on ad tech at companies like Amazon and Groupon before deciding to work on commercializing supersonic flight. Lots of people probably thought he was crazy, but now Boom is a billion dollar company. So don't let the question of whether you're allowed to work on something stop you from starting. Once you've stopped overthinking your ideas, it's important to commit to just one. Often I meet founders who are working on multiple ideas at once because they believe that this is the best way to figure out which one will actually work. There are a couple of problems with this approach. The most serious is that it tends to produce bad data. If you don't actually go deep on an idea, but instead juggle it with several others, you won't get good signal about whether what you're doing actually works. And if you don't get good signal, then you could either prematurely talk yourself out of a good idea or convince yourself that a bad one is worth continuing. The solution to this is to go in depth first. If you're trying to decide between several ideas, all of which look equally attractive, pick one idea and go deep on it. What do I mean by going deep?
The first thing is that you should burn the other boats. That is, you should explicitly foreclose your other startup idea options. Stop working on them. Tell any customers that you've pivoted. And work with single-minded focus on the idea you've chosen. One way to think about going deep is that it should feel like wearing a new skin.
You should become an almost unrecognizable version of yourself. This could mean changing your company's name, your emails, your website, and even your internal narrative about why you're building a startup in the first place. For example, I worked with a startup called Govdash that helps customers win government contracts. They pivoted at least five times before finding this idea. And each time they explored something new, they changed their company name and how they talked about their mission. At one point, I forgot how to get in touch with them because they changed their email addresses with each pivot. By truly becoming domain experts in government procurement, their fifth idea worked so well that they could barely keep up with demand. They recently raised the Series B to scale the business and meet that demand. Once you've decided to fully commit to an idea and go deep, how do you know if you're actually doing it well?
The high watermark I use to help founders answer this question is could you actually run your customer's business? Say you want to build voice customer service agents for cleaning services. The question isn't just whether you've talked to 20 owners. The question is, if I dropped you into a cleaning business tomorrow, would you know how to run it? Do you know what their daily crises are? Do you know whether answering the phone is a top five problem? Do you know how much business they lose when a call goes unanswered? And what they would actually pay to never lose another one? These are the kinds of questions you need to be able to answer with very high confidence.