How to find a business idea: 6 questions for you

You may find yourself excited to run your own business but held back by the first step: coming up with the right idea. Maybe you have hundreds of ideas, maybe none—both can be equally stifling when it comes to this stage of your entrepreneurial journey. Discovering how to find a business idea is a process. There are steps you can take which will help you refine all those ideas bouncing around in your head, all the while maintaining the joy and excitement of testing out new ideas. We’ve packaged these steps towards idea generation as questions for you to ask yourself. At this stage, before running your own business, self-reflection and external examination are crucial before going ahead with your business idea. We’ve also included several success stories of entrepreneurs at their initial stages of finding ideas to demonstrate how tiny ideas can grow into booming businesses.   

Above all else, entrepreneurship is about passion. Many may be drawn to it for the overnight successes of startups and the gargantuan wealth accrued by the world’s billionaire entrepreneurs, but it all begins with the desire to put your ideas out in the world. Begin your journey by clarifying your own desires: do you want to start a business because you want to show the world your artistic works and unique products? Or are you addressing an external need that you believe will help others? 

Help turn your desire into a business idea by asking yourself: what do I want that they need? In other words, what do you want to do for a living that may give others what they need? If you want to start an advice blog, what is the advice missing from the world that people need to hear? If you want to design a product, what unique designs have you never seen before? Marry your desires with the needs of others to give yourself a compelling reason to start a business. 

At this stage, try to give yourself the time you need to generate ideas. While online research is always good, reading too much and taking on too many ideas can clutter the mind. To a clear mind, ideas come fully formed. Take walks in places free of distraction: parks, beaches, forests, and other natural landscapes free from the noisy clutter of cities and neighbourhoods will allow your imagination to take flight. Keep an ideas journal: get a journal or open a word document exclusively for jotting down ideas. The great thing about a personal journal is, there are no bad ideas. Write down whatever comes to mind vaguely related to a business idea because you never know what an idea really looks like until it’s written down. Talk with your friends: share your ideas with family and friends (but don’t give away all your secrets!). Find out firsthand the kinds of things people wish existed in the world and which you might be able to provide. Some of the best advice and criticism you’ll ever receive of your early ideas comes from those who know you best. 

Separate from your desire but still equally important is what you actually enjoy doing. What would you be doing every day, even if you weren’t paid for it? Can this be turned into a business idea? It’s important to remember that an entrepreneurial pursuit is likely to take up more than the average 40 hour work week—this is a lot of time to be doing something you’re not passionate about. 

Your hobby may be grounds for a great business idea. Josh Wardle, creator of the 2021 word game sensation Wordle, initially developed the game for himself and his partner because they loved to play word games. He soon released it to the public and it was acquired in 2022 by the New York Times for a seven-figure sum. When considering your hobbies as potential business ventures, make sure you consider more than just their potential revenue. Do you want to turn your hobby into work? Are you sure it would sustain you 40+ hours a week?Is your idea more suitable as a side hustle? Would you grow to resent the thing you previously loved? 

Your business idea should be a combination of something you’re passionate about, something you love to do, and something you’re good at. Strengths can be your hands-on skills (are you a secret pottery master?), your depth of knowledge (are you always helping your friends make their own websites?), or your interpersonal skills (can you convince anyone to buy a pen even if they don’t need it?).

Strength in one area is important, but don’t let your lack of knowledge or skill in any one area deter you from developing an idea into something more. Heini Zachariassen and Theis Søndergaard developed the popular wine identification app Vivino precisely because they knew next to nothing about wine. The app appealed so widely because it wasn’t for wine aficionados—sometimes ignorance is the best inspiration. 

Perhaps you have a great idea but lack the software development skills to bring it to fruition. Or maybe your software development degree is going to waste in a boring desk job and your most creative friend is looking for someone like you. Many entrepreneurships are the result of joint labours because we can all bring something to an idea. Perhaps you and your idea can pay a visit to your persuasive friend in sales and your computer-whiz brother. The three of you will be sure to come up with something.  

Today’s ideas marketplace is all about niches. While there is always room for a new search engine, car sharing app, or food delivery service, the competition is fierce in these markets and will likely take a lot of capital and founder experience to compete. By contrast, the niche market is about creating new demand instead of competing with existing demand. If the proliferation of communication on the internet has taught us anything it’s that one person’s obscure interest is a million others’ favourite hobby. 

It’s unlikely that you would have such a niche interest that you can’t find a single other person who shares it, let alone a few communities online dedicated to it. Try to determine, within your niche, what service is still lacking for its audience. When Senh Duong created the review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes as a  side project while in university, his initial goal was to collect reviews of Jackie Chan movies for the US public to find. Simply because he was a fan of the actor’s movies which, in 1998, was an obscure interest in the Western world. Since then the website has become powerfully influential, affecting box office revenues of major blockbusters today. We don’t know the potential of our niche interests until we present them to the wider public. Do everyone else a favour and show us yours. 

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You might be reading this and thinking, ‘How can I generate ideas when I work a full time job?’ While being time poor certainly adds a challenge to finding a business idea, as an entrepreneur you ought to take inspiration wherever you can get it. The place you spend the majority of your time during the week could be a hotbed for ideas. The idea you come up with will likely require one or a few of the skills you need for your day job, so you’ve already done half the work of honing your skills.

Every job we work has its upsides and its downsides. For most of us, these are just things we have to accept if we want to stay there. But for entrepreneurs, these can be a useful collection of dos and don’ts when considering their own business venture. When you go to work, reflect on these aspects of the company you work for: 

Consider how you might do things differently: where are there possibilities for improvement? What might you like to replicate in your own business? Whitney Wolfe Herd went into direct competition with her prior employer Tinder when she created rival dating app Bumble. Wolfe Herd borrowed from Tinder’s interface and swiping feature, but she gave match control to women, fulfilling a need in the dating app space with her revolutionary innovation. She had critically observed Tinder’s product reception, marketing campaigns, and customer satisfaction to her considerable advantage, becoming the youngest self-made female billionaire.  

Surveying the current cultural and economic landscape is great for inspiration. Developing an understanding of what’s working and what’s failing will help refine your ideas by ruling out the ones that seem to be going out of style and focusing on the ones that are thriving. 

You might favour one way of trend-tracking, say, by reading competitors blogs, but one method is never enough. To maintain a broad scope across current trends, you need to tackle it from different angles, both online and offline.Useful online resources include:

Don’t limit yourself to online resources either. Sometimes the best, unfiltered opinions you get are through casual conversations with strangers and familiar faces. Useful offline resources include:

Entrepreneurs flock to new technologies because they smell the potential for new ideas. Fintech innovations have led to an explosion in banking service providers doing what traditional banks haven’t, and the consistent excitement around bitcoin has forced more companies to include acceptance of crypto payments. Outside of finance innovations, green and sustainable tech has meant that apps and businesses with environmentally friendly services are seeing huge success around the world. Sustainable tech is both economically and culturally in vogue, making it attractive for entrepreneurs. When Brad Bao and Toby Sun first founded the transportation company LimeBike (now Lime), there were plenty of other electronic scooter and bike companies to compete with. However, thanks to the popularity of the technology and room for innovation, they were able to enter the competition. Lime opened in 2017 and reached unicorn status (valuing over €1 billion) by 2018.  

There are many approaches to generating ideas, each of which will be more or less suited to you. But none of which you should avoid entirely. Finding an idea for your business is the time to be open, accepting, and most of all excited about the prospect of getting your idea off the ground. It’s the time for fruitful failures and weird ideas, of days spent researching odd topics and cramming to learn new skills. Hopefully, the above advice has given you some guidelines for this chaotic time of inspiration, and the stories of successful entrepreneurs have shown you that, ultimately, there’s no rulebook for success—just lots of good ideas waiting to be developed.