Four stories that answer the question where do startup ideas come from?

You've probably heard that Steve Jobs got his ideas at night, dreaming about technology. Or that Mark Zuckerberg sat in front of his computer, typing out code, before making a fortune with Facebook. In reality, however, these stories are more myth than reality. They tell a narrative that fits the personality of entrepreneurs like Jobs and Zuckerberg, who were both considered to be workaholic geniuses who revolutionized their respective industries.

Even if those myths are just that, the fact remains that most startup ideas do emerge from some combination of daily observations, thoughts about the future and feedback from many different sources. So as tempting as it is to believe that great ideas always spring into existence out of thin air two weeks before your ship date…it's just not true.

Ideas come from pain.

It's a question that every entrepreneur has heard before: Where do startup ideas come from? There are many answers to this question. Some entrepreneurs say ideas come from pain. Others say they come from inspiration. And some say they just happen by accident. Here are four stories that answer the question where do startup ideas come from? Ideas come from pain.

This is how it happened for me. I was working at a big company, and I saw a problem with how we were doing things. There was a lot of wasted time and resources, but nobody wanted to change anything because they were afraid of losing their job or being embarrassed if they made a mistake or something didn't work out right away.

Ideas come from knowledge and experience.

I've been a designer and developer for over 14 years, and I've seen hundreds of ideas come and go. Now that I'm an entrepreneur, I'm surrounded by people with new ideas every day. It's amazing how many of them don't know where their ideas come from. I've done my best to answer that question for myself, so I thought I'd share some stories about where startup ideas come from.

Ideas come from knowledge and experience. You know the saying "garbage in, garbage out"? Well, it applies to startups too: if you don't have a deep understanding of your audience or market, then your product will be garbage. Only after you've spent hours researching something can you build something useful for people who need it.

Ideas don't have to be big.

Ideas don't have to be big. The last time I was at a startup weekend, the theme was "Ideas worth spreading." This made me think about where startup ideas come from, and what makes them spread. There are two kinds of stories we hear about the origin of ideas: the ones that start with someone sitting alone in their room and thinking, "I wonder if anyone else has thought about this?" And then there are those that start with someone noticing something that wasn't working and thinking, "Let's do something better." The first kind of story is more romantic, but it's also less common.

The second kind is more common because it requires an active response to something you see in the world around you. It's also easier to tell because it doesn't require references or citations or footnotes — just a general sense that something isn't working as well as it could be.

Ideas come from other ideas (sometimes).

The first of the four stories is about how ideas can come from other ideas. It's a truism that ideas are built on top of other ideas. But it's also true that sometimes new ideas are created by combining old ones in new ways. In fact, this is a common way for scientists to innovate: they'll take two existing fields and find a way to put them together so that each field explains something about the other in a new way.

One example of this is evolutionary psychology, which combines evolutionary biology (the study of how organisms change over time) with cognitive psychology (the study of how people think). It helps us understand how humans evolved over time as well as how our minds work today. The second story is about how ideas come from observation and experimentation.

Albert Einstein once said: "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." This idea has been popularized in recent years as "thinking outside the box," but it's actually an ancient idea that goes back thousands of years to Socrates, who said: "The unexamined life is not worth living.

In Brief...

Now, every startup is different, and there's no way to know exactly where your next idea will come from. But I hope that you walk away from these examples feeling inspired and a bit motivated to find new ways to generate ideas. The most important thing is to keep trying new things and remember that valuable startup ideas can come from anywhere.