How I would choose my next startup idea:

1. It must be a product in a growing market. Startups can take years or even decades to fully develop, don’t risk creating an amazing product just to have the user base dry up.

2. The value of the product must increase over time. For example, as you upload more to a social media platform and make more friends, each month the product becomes more valuable to you. This will mitigate a lot of churn problems later down the line. Churn fucking sucks.

3. The product must have some growth flywheel. A product that inherently brings in new users is extremely powerful. Fintech companies do this very well where users can send their friends money, but they have to make an account to accept the money. Growth loops allows for exponential growth without any need for marketing hacks.

4. Must be scalable. Cannot be reliant on human labor, too capital-intensive, or requiring tailored solutions for each customer. I’ve made a mistake trying to make my life’s work an agency and I will never do that again. Agency as side-income is fine, but because the upside is capped, always go for a more scalable option.

5. Startup idea must be validated and have clear monetization. Even if the startup idea comes from a personal pain point, I would not make a company unless there were already other players in the market selling similar things, or I would need to get multiple user to pre-pay for the tool. Anyone can build anything with AI. The question now is are you building something valuable? The fastest way to check is to see if people will actually pay.

This step literally would have saved me years of my life, not hyperbole.

6. Go to every genius you know and continually badger them to join your new startup. If none of them will join you, reconsider whether this venture is worth it. If you cannot convince your friends to join you, perhaps they know something you don’t. Perhaps you need to improve on your communication skills to convince them of this opportunity. Either way, if not a single person whom you respect will join you, this is a red flag. Unfortunately, some great ideas are so revolutionary that even the smartest people you know could wrongfully dismiss it, so I'd say point is a looser suggestion than others, but still important imo.

7. The idea (or at least most the idea) must be bootstrappable. Trading $125k for 7% in the AI era is pretty bad imo (unless you have a capital intensive business or you are in a winner take all market). With LLM’s, magic is now an API call away and it’s pretty easy to get early traction with minimal resources. If necessary, I’d rather self-fund and/or ask co-founders to put up some cash. Absolutely no VC’s at the start, and I would only add funding if I were in a super competitive market.

This is coming from a SaaS bias though, if you're building rockets or something probably can ignore.

8. Consider whether you are the best person for the role of CEO, or you see a path to becoming the best. Could you face the top 1% of founders in this field and win? The answer most of the time is no. There are plenty of great startups in the world. I wouldn’t mind being CMO or head of growth or digital marketing specialist or intern at someone else’s company where I believe they are the absolute best CEO possible in their field. There is no shame in this at all. Tbh being CEO sucks most of the time.

9. The startup idea you are working on has to be so important to you that you’re willing to gamble all the blessings you’ve already received in your life. Remind yourself that you are about to have a really volatile and unpredictable decade+. I lost pretty much everything I care about in my personal life except for maybe a handful of friends and my parents. This could happen to you, or maybe it could be worse (I hope not!)

10. Reflect and choose an idea but don’t fall in love with the idea. You may think this contradicts 9, but it only furthers its importance. You will pivot several times before you stumble upon the winning product. As you pivot be sure to keep these 10 things in mind as you revamp your product and change directions.

Overall, I challenge the notion that “ideas are worthless execution is everything”. Execution is definitely more important than the idea, but a few months of ideating and making sure your startup actually is necessary could save you years later down the line.

David Park • Tweet