Paul Graham asserts that startup ideas aren’t what’s important – and, in fact, thinking you need an “idea” is a major roadblock.
Convert your thinking from “idea” to “question”, and you have a potential curiosity to explore, tweak, develop, and deliver.
Your best work is going to come when you’ve thought about the problem but didn’t know you were thinking about it.
So stop trying to get an idea – ask questions, and chase them down.
1. Like having a car instead of riding a limited seated bus on established roads, what if we each could have our own ISP? 2. High literacy is still rare when you consider the world population, yet we force educated people out of jobs after a certain age, why can’t the surplus of the literate be leveraged? 3. Language barriers exist, but people understand images. Could everything be translated into pictures? 4. How do people actually make money? Would people pay to see details how people make money and be inspired? Would anyone be willing to be that transparent if they were compensated? —That’s just 4.
Question 3 and 1 intrigue me.
A) What if femtocells were included in every wifi router – and owners acted as local mesh networks to boost cell phone coverage, especially in areas that have weak/limited coverage and/or high-density usage regions that sometimes have antenna/tower outages?
B) What if the FAA opened “channels” of airspace, like the FCC does with transmission frequencies, for specific flight usage?
C) What if developments, communities, apartment complexes, etc had private/regional highspeed networks built-in to them? And then individual residents/businesses paid for levels of access: this branches from your #1, and offers a chance for private companies to compete for add-on value from ISPs
D) How can we turn http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/02/999ideas.html into 999 questions?