3 Ways to Find Your Winning Business Idea

What product or service do you want that doesn’t exist yet?

This is the quintessential question to answer when thinking of launching a startup venture. The advice is often given that entrepreneurs need to “start with the problem” before coming up with a solution and, while this is sound advice, it often leaves entrepreneurs wondering which problem to solve. From preventing the next pandemic to paying bills, there are endless problems that could be solved.

The question is, what problem is the right one for you to solve?

Make a To-Do List

What action items have been on your To-Do list all week? Perhaps “buy dog food” is on there or maybe “cancel YouTube TV subscription” is long overdue. There are entire businesses that have been created to get these things off your to-do list (Chewy.com for the dog food and TruBill.com for subscription monitoring and canceling). Take the time to go through your to-do list and think of ventures that could be created to get these items off your list.

This simple exercise will help open your innovation imagination. You can and should come up with ideas that might seem infeasible or that you don’t know how to create. The best ideas are ones that solve real problems in an unrealistically awesome way.

Take Inventory

Every night, I write down the hardest part of that day. Sometimes it’s sitting through too many meetings and not getting outside enough, other times it’s the difficulty of aligning my schedule with my partner’s, and sometimes it’s getting to the gym. It feels good to vent a bit on paper at the end of each day, but I actually go through this exercise because looking back on these pain-points helps me think of new startup ventures that might be created to solve these problems.

Unlike the To-Do list exercise, these problems are more abstract and require some high-level creative thinking to try and solve. For example, sometimes I don’t get to the gym because I don’t have the mental energy to switch gears and go…