Organic Ideas, and Recipes When You Need Them

The whole essay privileges organic ideas: ones that grow out of your own life and expertise. But PG offers fallback recipes for when you need to search deliberately. Look for problems in areas where you have expertise. Ask what you wish existed. Ask what someone will be building in a few years and build it now.

Other prompts: look at dying industries and imagine what replaces them. Look for groups that are 'scruffy but sophisticated', like the microcomputer hobbyists incumbents ignored, because serious-seeming companies won't serve them yet.

One more counterintuitive rule: don't fear crowded markets. Competition is evidence of demand, and startups rarely die from competitors. Err on the side of doing things where you'll face competitors, and win by seeing something the incumbents miss, the way Google did in search.