What do you do when every possible business idea is already taken?

Question

I have a bit of free time and lots of enthusiasm for software and the web.

I want to make a start-up, to sell kind of product or online service, but I'm having a hard time coming up with business ideas that haven't already been implemented.

For example, I thought of making an e-ordering website for ordering food from restaurants online.

Good thing I typed it into Google, because the market is already full of hundreds of websites doing the same thing and competing heavily.

The same thing has happened with so many other business ideas I've become excited and passionate about - they're all taken.

What's your response to this? Do you agree that all the good ideas seem to be taken? Or do you think there is room for new businesses, and that I'm just not thinking (or looking) hard enough?

Have you ever tried idea after idea, only to find that it was already being done, and you had to move onto something else?

Answer 1

Lots of things are already done. And lots of them are not done very well. Just look at stack overflow. This site had already been done-- we had experts exchange, after all -- but not very well.

If you can't do something new, do something that's already been done, and do it better.

Answer 2

You make something better. Look at facebook? Social networking sites have been done before tons of times... Myspace, hi5, tagged and all that stuff. But facebook drew crowds and now is more popular than all of those.

Answer 3

Creating a successful start-up is about finding a need and meeting it better than anyone else.

Most things have been done before...but if you think of a way to do it better than anyone else then you'll be a success....think google...heaps of search engines existed before google!

Answer 4

Maybe look for someone with a business idea that looks interesting or promising, who is struggling because he has too much work to do, and try joining him as a cofounder?

Now, how to find such a person, that would be a separate big question ...

Answer 5

check Paul Graham's blog (he calls it essays, since he's doing this before there was a 'blog' term), i especially like Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy, Six Principles for Making New Things, How Not to Die, and lots others.

Answer 6

Figure out a niche that can be profitable right away. That is unless you have connections with one of the top VC firms. It's a widely held misconception that starting an online business, or a website requires very little money. I think we're at a point where if you want an online business go local and small. Find a way to help businesses in your town via technology. I think a lot of businesses don't realize that some of them could really make use of mobile phones, or a presence or app on a social networking site like Facebook.

Answer 7

It's really hard to just sit, think and come up with a great idea that has not yet been implemented. Such ideas are often born as a result of your own problems and needs which you look for on the web and cannot find any or one that is really what you need.

Answer 8

A friend of mine knew someone heavy into VC (venture capital) and her catchphrase is "good ideas are cheap".

Some may argue it's flippant but its actually pithy. Fact is, most of the time it's not a good idea that succeeds, it's a well-executed idea.

Take Google. It is a search engine. Was it the first search engine? No. They'd been around for years earlier. Google just did it (and continues to do it) way better than everyone else.

Where do you find things that could be done better? Easiest way is to look in an area you already know. If you work in logistics, that's where you'll find your idea because you know (hopefully) something about the industry.

Your approach of wanting to make a start-up and then going looking for an idea is, well, backward.

Answer 9

In 1899, Charles H. Duell (Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents) claimed:

Everything that can be invented has been invented

In 2009, Jonathanconway claimed:

every possible business idea is already taken

Okay this was my attempt to humour. Seriously, i'm quite sure there are still big gaps. The art is just to find them.

Answer 10

Sometimes the trick is not just to find an idea for something that hasn't already been done. The trick is to find a way to do something better than the other. Or maybe even just different. A different approach to "searching" or "social media" (to take the examples set by @cletus and @John T). For example think of something you do every day, or at least very often, and you would want that done differently.

Sometimes great ideas exist, but are not at all what we would like to do. What I would suggest is to find something you like and try to work on that. If you want to be successful you have to be motivated, constantly wanting to work on the "thing" and give it more than your 100%.

( however, not having my own startup or success story, those couple of lines I just wrote may be totally useless ;-) )

Answer 11

Seriously "everything has already been done" is just a lack of imagination, it really hasn't all been done or it's a pretty bleak future.

It is very hard to come up with an idea apropos of nothing, but hen you look at things this isn't how the next big things happen. Almost invariably it's about seeing a problem and realising a solution. Just think about your personal day-to-day: Does nothing frustrate you? Is there nothing missing? It there something you wish you had?

If there's a problem you can solve for yourself it's likely you can solve it for others.

Answer 12

If your idea has already been taken, make a better service!

Even if it seems like that particular idea has already been done, you may be able to do a better job or market to a particular niche that hasn't been thought of already.

For example, here in Sweden a small webbased application started up called onlinepizza.se where you could, you guessed it, order pizza online. What would be the point of this? You can just call your pizzeria and order and have it delivered anyway? The thing with this was that suddenly you could pay with credit card even though you had it delivered, there was MUCH smaller room for misinterpreting your order, you could grade different pizzerias on their service, pizzas, etc.

Basically, it was just like calling the pizzeria yourself and ordering... Except much, much better.

If it makes things more convenient for people to do something they're already doing is likely a good idea.

EDIT: Also think of search services. In the beginning there were Webcrawler, Altavista, Yahoo, etc. Google blew them all out of the water by having a better service.

Answer 13

No, not all business ideas have been taken. If they were, you would never think "I wish there was a...".

Let me tell you a little story. I have come up with a lot of good ideas in my time, even some that nobody else had done at the time. However, I sat on them, thinking "One day i'll get around to that", until one day i run across that idea finally implemented by someone else.

Here's just two examples:

About 10 years ago, as I was sitting in a movie theater watching the slide-show of advertisements, I got the great idea to create a projected computer animated advertising system for movie theaters. About 5 years ago, someone actually did it. I kicked myself for years over that one.

About 5 years ago, I was playing poker in a brick and morter poker room in a casino. They had over 100 tables, and were keeping track of everyone on a big white board where they would periodically erase the names and recopy them down higher up the board. They had half a dozen people working on the boards just to manage things. So, i came up with an idea for a computerized system to do this... about 2 years ago I started to see such systems going into poker rooms. Again, kicking myself.

Now, this is not bragging (ok, well, maybe a little ;) about my great idea prowess. It's just a point that coming up with new ideas is a frame of mind. Not something you can just sit down and do. It takes creativity, observation, and most of all a willingness to see solutions to problems that already exist.

The internet is filled with solutions looking for problems. These are solutions people come up with for the sake of building something, and then they flail around trying to find a working business model because they weren't really solving anyones problems.

Your idea for a website to order food is, in some ways, that sort of a site. Most people don't have a problem picking up a phone and ordering what they want. Why go through a middle man? And more importantly, why does a restaurant want to give up some of their profit for something most people won't use? It's a solution looking for a problem.

You need to look for real problems, and find solutions. The easy problems have been solved. You need to solve the hard ones, or the ones that people don't even realize are problems that can be solved.

Talk to people. Find out what kinds of problems they have in their life. Maybe they're a truck driver, or a doctor, or a secretary, or something.. Find real problems that affect real people and find a way to make their life easier.

Answer 14

I would recommend learning innovative product design, startup and business strategy to you.

Learning innovation will give you an idea on how to innovate. By understanding startup, you will be equipped to manage yourself/your organisation to achieve your startup goals. And knowing business strategy will give you some protection from being crushed by competitors.

Starting from there, you will learn how to come up with something that provide you a sustainable profit.

Try search these topics on Amazon, you will find some good books on them.

I personally recommend you to find book list of these subjects in good and proven universities like London Business School or Harvard Business School.

Answer 15

In response the the question title:

They're not.

Answer 16

Sooner or later your competitors will be giving the same services as your own, but for free. What's your plan?

-Anonymous

Many have said, "make it better" then the existing concept, fair enough. But I wouldn't go that far, just make it similar and release it for free.

If you have something that's free and better then existing competitors, you have a pretty much guaranteed hit.

There are a lot of business models for a free concept, but that is another question.

Answer 17

Here are 999 business ideas. Maybe you'll find one of them interesting.

Answer 18

Trying focusing on problems not on solutions. People love to talk about their pain. 90% of problem solving is problem-definition. So, got out and talk to folks, ideally non-technical folks who are using computers, so they could benefit from a software solution but there aren't thousands of people with that problem who also think "hey, I'll write a problem to solve this."

Case in point: don't try to solve problems for software developers unless you can write THE best software solution because you're going to have competition from every customer, who figures "I'll write my own...".

Answer 19

do you want a quick trick?

just sit down and think on things that could be so useful FOR YOU and still don't exist or exist but with bad implementation (take a good research on it). there is no need to create another gmail just find some everyday taks that can be improved and if you will find useful your idea, it is very probable that some people will like it and use it.

on another hand nowdays there is still a lot of offline taks that you can implement online, just stop thinking in terms of e-commerce, social networks and trendy stuff.

Answer 20

You're putting the cart before the horse!

The best business ideas don't come from someone who thinks "today I will start a business, now what type of business will I start?"

They usually come from someone who has a problem, and thinks of a solution to it. Eg they have a problem doing something on their PC, they develop some software to do it, and then realise that software is useful to someone else. Or they can't find a shop selling what they want, so they see that hole in the market and fill it.

Answer 21

Make a facebook replacement, its time for one. Yes marketing will be important. Learn that too. If zuck-tard can do it, so can you. If you want to achieve greatness, stop asking for permission or approval.

Answer 22

Sometimes one business idea is not enough. If one doesn't work, you need to move on to next great idea.

Answer 23

My advice would be to write ideas down whenever they come to you.

What I've started to do is just write every Idea I have down on my phone just so I can remember it later. I'm not terribly creative so this helps me in the long run when I actually get to a point in my life where I have time to work on random projects.

Example: Was on a flight with a child screaming for an hour. Thought it would be useful if the parent brought a pillow for the child to scream in. So I wrote that on my phone as just something to think about when I'm a parent

Perhaps this pillow idea could even turn into some sort of business concept.