All startups begin with an idea. But where do those ideas come from? 

The idea for Bubble struck Bubble co-founder Josh Haas while he was working at another startup as an engineer. He kept running up against an idea: 

What if there were a platform where someone could build their startup without an engineer?

“The internet makes it so powerful and so easy to start a business and deliver real value to people. When working with my non-technical founder, I kept thinking, ‘I wish he could have the means to do this himself,” Josh said. 

And thus, the idea for Bubble — a no-code, full-stack development platform that would allow founders of all backgrounds to develop and build digital products on their own — was born. 

Many great startup ideas begin organically like this: 

  • While you’re working at another startup and notice an opportunity 
  • When you run into a problem yourself that doesn’t have a good solution 
  • When you see something in your job or industry that could be better, but no one is working on a different way to fix it 

But what happens when you haven’t had such a clear idea come to you? There aren’t any silver bullets for coming up with a surefire idea, but there are plenty of things you can do to make it easier. 

Start with the right questions, not a list of startup ideas

So, how do you‌ come up with a good business idea? 

Don’t start with a list of ideas. Start with the right questions instead. 

What can you do?

A full self-inventory is a great place to start. Ask yourself: 

  • What am I good at? What specific skills do I have (i.e., app development, graphic design)? 
  • What’s my professional background? What other jobs have I worked at? 
  • What do others ask me for help with? 
  • What do I enjoy doing in my spare time? 
  • What specialized training or certifications do I have? 
  • What things do I know more about than the average person? 

Make sure you include everything you can think of on this list, even if it doesn’t seem relevant. Sometimes the ideas that don’t seem like “startup material” can be the best source of inspiration! 

If you’re working to come up with ideas with a team or a co-founder, have them do the same exercise, then combine your lists. 

What do you have? 

You’ll also want to think about what resources you have. 

Even small businesses with low startup costs require some level of funding to get off the ground. Whether you decide to bootstrap, raise funding, or look for another funding option, consider in advance what resources and assets you have available. 

This could include things like: 

  • Personal savings 
  • Family and friends who might be willing to make an investment 
  • Good credit for potential business loans or personal loans 
  • A strong network or audience who might be a resource for crowdfunding 

This may not give you specific startup ideas, but it can help you find out what types of startups might be best for your current resources and money. 

Who do you know? 

As the adage goes, “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” 

Ask yourself: 

  • What industry connections do you have? 
  • What audiences are you familiar with? 
  • Who do you have access to? 
  • What companies or teams have you worked with in the past? 
  • Where have you studied? 

An inventory of your network and connections can unveil problems that you’re uniquely aware of and suited to solve. It can also help you see where you might have valuable resources to help you get your business off the ground, connect with your audience, or find business partners. 

What does your audience need? 

Finally, consider your audience. 

You may think, “But I don’t have an audience yet!” 

That’s OK. Consider groups you’re a part of, or deeply familiar with (i.e., industries you’ve worked in, skill groups, etc.). These are audiences you know well that you can develop solutions for. 

  • What do the people in these groups struggle with on a regular basis? 
  • What are the daily or weekly struggles they face? 
  • What trips them up big-picture — in their careers, in their own startups, in their personal lives? 

When Josh came up with the idea for Bubble, he was thinking about how he could meet the needs of people like his non-technical co-founder. 

Considering these questions can help you brainstorm problems that you might be able to solve. Great startup ideas aren’t just great products — they’re great solutions that come from important problems. 

Great startup ideas aren’t just great products — they’re great solutions that come from important problems. 

If you’re not sure the answers to these questions, go talk to people in your audience or network and see what’s on their minds! When you start to notice common problems, you’ll be on your way to a great business idea. 

When you look for problems and solutions, you stumble upon great ideas. Start with a problem to solve, then brainstorm solutions. 

How to come up with (actually) good startup ideas

Now what? Use the brainstorming you’ve done to look for profitable business ideas. Here’s how: 

Form connections

Look at all the inventories you created in the brainstorming steps above. What connections exist between the lists? 

For example, maybe you’re great at programming and you’ve worked at an accounting firm and a fintech startup. You might consider: 

  • What problems do accountants and finance leaders often face in their day-to-day work? 
  • What solutions currently exist, and how do they fall short? 

You also might look at surprising or unusual connections, such as: 

  • What audiences are you connected with who might be less experienced with your skills or background, or underserved and unrecognized by a field you understand? 
  • Who do you have access to that might be surprising for someone with your background? 
  • What problems do you see in your audience that others accept as “the norm?” 
  • What resources or skills do you have that are unique to your background? 

Sometimes a great idea can come from a surprising overlap or an unusual connection. The question to ask yourself here is: 

What existing model or idea might I be able to apply to a more specific audience or problem that I understand? 

You might be able to take a successful idea and apply it to: 

  • A certain audience, role, or group of people 
  • A certain city or geographic location 
  • A certain technology or skill 

Some examples could be things like Turo (“Airbnb for cars”) or Doordash (“Uber for food”). Wellness startup Cuure also followed this pattern. 

Cuure co-founders Jules Marcilhacy and Hugo Facchin recognized the success of startups selling personalized wellness supplements in the US. They wondered, “Could a similar model work for a European audience?” 

Using Bubble, they built a homepage and an acquisition funnel to test interest, and when things took off, launched and iterated quickly to meet growing demand. 

Study what other founders have done

Understanding trends is a really important task for entrepreneurs to improve their market sensitivity. Many startups succeed because the founders carefully observed and predicted market and consumer trends. 

However, you don’t need to be a mind-reader to have a great startup idea. The most important thing when creating your own business is to fulfill your target market’s needs. 

Trends come and go. A truly valuable startup doesn’t just jump on the shiniest new trend, but solves an enduring problem. 

Studying examples of what other founders have done and what has been successful for other startups can give you ideas and examples to follow. 

A great starting place can be looking at Bubble’s startup stories. For example, you can learn from: 

Adapt an existing solution to a new audience 

Sometimes the best way to come to a good idea is to just start building and tinkering with an idea or project that seems interesting to you. 

You can start with a proven idea or template — for example, a social media platform or a marketplace. As you build and experiment, you’ll often come upon other ideas and problems that you could build solutions for. 

Bubble is a great way to practice building and experimenting with proven models. With our no-code development platform, it’s easy to get started building and experimenting with clones of successful ideas. 

This is the approach Mack Grenfell took with Byword. He was experienced with AI and LLMs and used them consistently in his work as a performance marketer. Eventually, he realized he could productize his own methods to bring LLM tools to a new industry (SEO and programmatic content) that hadn’t yet capitalized on them. 

Bubble allowed Mack to build a platform and bring it to his audience with a low technical barrier and low development costs. Even though Mack isn’t a programmer, he had the technical skills needed to build with Bubble’s no-code platform and combine an untapped audience and technology to create something promising. 

When you put all of these tactics together, you’re creating the right environment for a great startup idea to find you. 

How do I know if my startup idea will work? 

There aren’t any hard and fast rules to determine if your startup idea will work. In fact, there are a lot of factors that go into a successful business (i.e., timing, execution, market needs, resources, etc.) besides the idea itself. 

That said, here are eight questions to ask to get an understanding of if your idea is worth pursuing further. 

1. Did your startup idea emerge naturally and organically? 

The best startup ideas usually come up organically. Sitting down and trying to come up with a startup idea usually generates “solutions in search of a problem,” as Jared Friedman from‌ Y Combinator puts it. These startup ideas offer a solution to a problem that isn’t keenly felt by the audience. 

On the other hand, an idea that emerges organically usually comes from a felt problem in your own life or in the world of an audience you’re familiar with. That’s a great place to start. 

2. Has it received positive feedback from people in your audience? 

Once you have an idea, share it with some trusted people in your target market and gauge their responses. 

  • Are they excited about such a solution? 
  • Do they agree that the problem in question is a big problem for them? 
  • Do they have positive feedback and further ideas for you, or is their response more like, “Oh, that’s nice?” 

The more positive feedback you get from your audience, the more likely that you’re onto something promising. 

3. Does it have strong founder-market fit? 

That is, are you the right person to work on this project? If you’re working with a team, is your team the right team to work on this? 

This could mean having the right overlap of background, skills, experiences, and audiences for the problem and solution you’re working on. 

For example, if a team is trying to build a digital product that’ll match users with the perfect pair of jeans for them, it’d make sense if one co-founder had worked in the fashion industry and one was a developer or had experience with digital products. That’s the perfect overlap of skills, experience, and backgrounds to build such a product. 

4. Is the audience overlooked or poorly understood by those outside of it? 

If you have a niche audience that’s often overlooked or misunderstood by the larger market, you have a great opportunity to build a more specialized solution to a common problem. 

The more niche your audience is, the more customized your solution can be. Even if a similar solution exists for the general market, building something completely customized to an underserved market’s unique needs can be an effective way to build a successful startup. 

5. Is it a difficult problem to solve? 

This one can go either way. Sometimes problems are difficult to solve, which means that creating a successful business based on them can be almost impossible. 

These are problems that often seem common and easy to solve on the surface. However, if you dig deeper, you’ll see that there have been dozens of failed startups in this space over the years. However, if the problem is too easy to solve, users may not need a specialized solution for it. 

You want to strike a balance of a problem that is difficult to solve without being too big and nebulous to solve efficiently with a single solution. 

6. Does it solve a real problem in your audience that doesn’t yet have a solution? 

Wanting to build a task management tool is great, but the competition will be fierce. 

If your product is going after a problem that already has a number of existing solutions, you need to ask yourself: 

What will my product do that no other products on the market will? 

Serving a niche market or target audience, solving the problem in a completely unique way, or solving the problem while eliminating other points of friction that currently exist are all key ways to distinguish yourself. 

Bubble is‌ a great example of this. 

Early-stage founders and aspirational tech entrepreneurs were desperate for an alternative to the long development timelines and engineering-heavy model of startup culture. Current solutions to product development were mostly regulated to writing code from scratch, which required expertise and/or resources that many founders didn’t have. 

Bubble offered an affordable alternative that didn’t require them to hire a team of developers or learn how to code themselves. It solved a real problem in a way that wasn’t yet available. 

7. Is there demand for your solution? 

That is, do other people have this problem besides you? Sometimes you may have a great business idea for a very niche problem, but there isn’t enough demand to scale it. 

That may be fine for you — not every small business needs to become a VC-backed unicorn. 

However, if your goal is to scale and grow, do a good amount of research upfront to make sure there will be meaningful demand for your product based on your goals. 

8. Do you have the resources needed to build this startup? 

Every startup requires different resources in terms of time, startup costs, initial investment, team resources, and so on. 

Ask yourself: 

  • Do you have the funds or funding sources needed for your business idea? 
  • Do you have the right team? 
  • Do you have the background and experience necessary to build this? 

If yes, then you’re in a great position to bring your idea to life. If not, you may want to focus on gathering the right resources and people first before trying to build and launch. 

Bring your startup idea to life on Bubble

When you’ve got a startup idea you’re ready to test and bring to life, Bubble is the easiest way to build your MVP. 

With Bubble’s no-code, full-stack development platform, you can build web apps quickly, affordably, and without a lot of programming knowledge or background. Once you’ve launched your MVP, you can test and iterate — directly on your MVP — to release future versions and keep improving your product. 

Best of all? On Bubble, you can build for free until you launch, which makes it easier than ever to test out new business ideas and prototypes risk-free. 

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