We have run a lot of startup ideas through our evaluator. Some from founders actively planning to build. Some from famous companies in hindsight. Some from people who just wanted to know if they were onto something.
After enough of them, patterns start to emerge. The ideas that score well are not necessarily the most creative or the most ambitious. They share something more specific.
Here is what we keep seeing.
- Why the best startup ideas come from problems people already complain about
- Why a large market size alone will not save a weak idea
- How to assess platform risk and competitive defensibility
- Why narrow targeting beats broad targeting every time
- The one trait shared by the highest-scoring startup ideas
The Problem Has to Be One People Already Complain About
This sounds obvious. It is not.
Why invented problems fail
The most common failure mode we see in low-scoring ideas is a problem that the founder identified rather than discovered. They noticed a gap, assumed people would want it filled, and built toward that assumption.
Strong ideas come from the opposite direction. The founder was the user. They ran into the problem themselves, looked for a solution, found nothing good, and decided to build it. Or they talked to enough people in a specific industry and kept hearing the same complaint.
Quibi as a cautionary example
Quibi's team did not discover a problem. They invented one. "People want premium mobile video in short bursts" was a thesis, not an observation. Nobody was complaining about this.
The evaluator asks specifically: is there evidence that your target user experiences this problem regularly? If the honest answer requires explaining why they should experience it, that is a red flag.
Market Size Helps, but It Does Not Save You
Every failed startup in this series scored reasonably well on market size. Quibi: streaming is massive. Clubhouse: social media is enormous. Vine: mobile video was exploding.
The market size trap
A large market is necessary but not sufficient. It is also, frankly, easy to claim. Almost any idea can be framed as targeting a large market if you zoom out far enough.
What actually converts a high market score into traction
The ideas that actually convert a strong market size score into a strong overall score have something more specific: a clear reason why they can capture a piece of that market that the incumbents are not serving. Not just "the market is big" but "the market is big and here is the exact gap."
Without that, a high market size score just means you are walking into a crowded room.
The Competition Question Is Really About Platform Risk
Founders usually think about competition as: who else does this? That is the right starting question but the wrong ending point.
The real question to ask
The more important question is: could a platform that already has my users build this feature in six months?
Clubhouse's competition at launch was close to zero. No one was doing audio-only live social rooms. The problem is that Twitter, Facebook, and Spotify were all watching, and all of them had the engineering teams and the existing user bases to clone the feature. They did, within a year.
What durable competitive advantages look like
Ideas with durable competition scores tend to have something that is hard to replicate quickly: a proprietary data set, a network effect that compounds over time, a workflow deeply embedded in how a specific industry operates, or a switching cost that grows with usage.
"Nobody does this yet" is a starting point. "Nobody can easily take this from us" is what actually matters.
Narrow Beats Broad, Every Time
The lowest-scoring ideas we see are almost always targeting everyone. "This is for professionals." "This is for small business owners." "This is for people who want to be healthier."
These are not customer segments. They are demographics.
What strong targeting looks like
The highest-scoring ideas name a specific person with a specific problem in a specific context. "This is for logistics coordinators at regional freight companies who are still managing delivery windows in spreadsheets." That kind of specificity sounds limiting. It is actually the opposite. It means the problem is real, the solution can be precise, and the path to the first 100 customers is obvious.
How broad targeting killed billion-dollar startups
Quibi was for everyone who owned a smartphone. Vine was for people who wanted to share moments. Clubhouse was for curious, social people with interesting things to say.
All broad. All vague on the actual pain point.
The Ideas That Score Highest Solve Existing Behavior, Not New Behavior
People are resistant to changing how they do things. Even when a new way is better.
Capture existing behavior, serve it better
The ideas that score well in problem clarity are almost always capturing behavior that already exists but is being served badly. The behavior is already happening. The question is just whether your product serves it better than what people are currently using.
Vine: people were already trying to share short video moments. The behavior existed. Vine just made it easy.
Why creating new behavior is so much harder
Clubhouse: people were not regularly joining scheduled audio rooms with strangers. That behavior did not exist at scale before Clubhouse. They had to create it. That is a much harder problem.
When the evaluator asks about problem clarity, it is largely asking this: does your target user already do a version of what you are trying to help them do, and are they unhappy with how they currently do it?
Frequently Asked Questions