Startup idea generator: find spreadsheet tasks and build something better

Need an idea for a viable startup company? Try this:

1) Pick an industry
2) Ask someone in that industry what they use spreadsheets for
3) Build something better

To which I would add:

4) Charge for it

You could even modify #2 slightly and replace “spreadsheets” with “email”…Slack did that generally and is reaping the benefits.

This reminds me of Marc Hedlund’s advice for entrepreneurs from 2007:

One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn’t yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn’t get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that.

To which I added:

A slightly related way of thinking about how to choose web projects is to take something that everyone does with their friends and make it public and permanent. (Permanent as in permalinked.)

• business
• Marc Hedlund