A generator that spits out random ideas is useless: usable ideas come out of your own material and problems you can observe. Work through these six exercises with paper beside you — twenty minutes is enough for twenty ideas.
List three things in each row: skills you are unusually good at, people who would take your call, and resources you can use for free. Ideas that start here are cheaper to test and harder to copy.
Which of these three lists surprises you most when you read it back?
Write down every workaround you personally used in the last two weeks — the spreadsheet, the group chat, the manual copy-paste. Every persistent workaround is an unpriced problem.
Which workaround would you pay to never do again?
Take a business model that clearly works somewhere else (subscription box, marketplace, done-for-you service) and apply it to a group you actually know.
What works for consumers that nobody has brought to your industry?
Find a group that is already paying for something adjacent. Demand you can observe beats demand you have to create.
Who in your network already has budget for this problem?
Take a candidate idea and make it ten times faster, ten times cheaper, or ten times more specific. Extremes reveal what the idea is really about.
What would this look like if it had to work in one day?
Name the thing everyone in the category assumes must be true, then design as if it were false.
What does every competitor do that a customer never asked for?
Do not pick the biggest idea. Pick the one you can test this week: do you know five people with that problem? Can you show something in seven days? What are you willing to lose to find out?
Then move on to validating the idea and prepare your customer interviews. Once it has a shape, lay it out on the Business Model Canvas.
Do not look for an idea — look for material. Start by listing your skills, your network and your resources, then the irritations you have personally worked around. Ideas appear where the two lists cross.
At least twenty before you judge any of them. The first idea is usually the most obvious and the most copied; the useful ones tend to show up after number ten.
You do not, until you talk to someone who has the problem. Pick the idea you can test this week with five conversations, not the one that sounds best.
Playground for Entrepreneurs trains the entrepreneurial reflex through games and exercises on your real idea. Free to start.