“The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.” These are the words that kicked off a blog post this month by Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator and among the best known funders and advisers to entrepreneurs.
Reading the piece, I was struck by how similar the genesis of a startup, as he describes it, was to my experience starting EasyBib.com.
EasyBib started as Paul would describe “organically.” My friend and I thought there was a better way to create a bibliography for research papers, so as fun project, we built a tool for ourselves to automate the process. Bibliographies were certainly a random thing to build a business around, but we recognized an immediate pain point that students alike would feel. Additionally, as Graham characterizes of many startups, we didn’t build EasyBib from the get-go to be a startup with a clear business plan. Years later, EasyBib would grow to 40 million yearly users, and we found ourselves thinking of various strategies and opportunities to build a legitimate business from what once was a simple hack.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Students most often cite Wikipedia in their bibliographies. Why that could kill future startups - Quartz
