Beyond the Obvious

Spending a lot of time hanging out at MatchBOX, VERGE, Lafayettech, and other entrepreneurial haunts I see a lot of people selling themselves short with the ideas they are working on.  A lot of people work on solving their problems.  This is typically a good thing, and the source of many good ideas.   The problem with these ideas are that if one is not careful then you can end up just going down the same road everyone else has.   There are many ideas that are just a broken record around here.

Things I am tired of hearing about:

  • Anything involving college textbooks.
  • Grocery delivery.
  • Laundry services.
  • Social networking apps.
  • Anything built entirely on the Facebook platform.

We all, myself included need to start going a bit beyond the obvious. Looking for problems to solve that do not include “I am too lazy to grocery shop”  or  “I want an app to make friends more easier.”   Yes there will be many big companies built in the future around these kinds of ideas.  Just ask yourself do you REALLY want to build this?  And ask yourself am I better than this idea?