Here's an idea: get a job. After a year, you'll have plenty of ideas, maybe even one of your own.
I hate to rain on anyone's parade, but the thought of begging for ideas in an on-line forum is just so alien to me. The best predictor of your success in any endeavor is your own determination. With someone else's idea, you're much more likely to bail at the first sign of difficulty. Once you get a little real world experience under your belt, you'll find plenty of opportunities to encounter something for which you'll have real passion.
Your chances of success increase astronomically when you're working on something you "have to do". The only way to know if you "have to do it" is to have a little background and experience with it. Trading ideas like commodities in a place like this seems like the least likely way to find something you'll be passionate about.
OTOH, a "boring job" can be an incredibly fertile environment for start-up ideas. You'll learn what people want, see what works and what doesn't, and be much more adept at identifying opportunities. Oh, and get a chance to bank some money so that when you do start working on your passion, you can concentrate on that instead of begging for funding.
Sometimes the easy way out is just that: the easy way out. Get a job and pay your dues. You'll probably be very glad that you did.
I'd like to add a caveat to this: If you go out and get a job, do yourself a favor and live as lean as possible while working it. Save every dime you can. That cushion will make startup life significantly easier.
Plus, you won't have a huge overhead draining you when you do finally make the leap. It's very easy to spend up to your income level when you start making decent money... but it's a trap! Keep your eye on the prize if you really want to start up.
Can't emphasize this enough. I've talked to countless people unhappy in their career that can't get out of it because of a family and an addiction to their current lifestyle. They continued to expand their spending as their income incremented, leaving them in a risk averse position.
The lesson I take from every conversation I have with these people is live simply and lean even as your income grows, and when you have that great idea or urge to try something radically different, you can.
As someone who followed this advice excessively, I have to counter it a bit. Through most of my 20s I lived in the cheapest, shittiest apartment I could find, ate cheap (which in the US means extremely unhealthy) food, rarely went out partying with friends, never went on a vacation, never dated, etc. This kills your network and your health. Frugal is fine, but don't be so freaking cheap that when you're 30, you hate your 20s, and need to spend 2 years fixing your life.
I'm curious the specifics that you did in the last 2 years to fix your life. Specifically, how did you transition from your frugal ways to your current living? Expand your network and improve your health? This would be very helpful to the rest of us who are going through the same thing that you have accomplished.
Absolutely. Its always a balance.. I'm speaking more towards avoiding the lavish lifestyle of club bottle service, expensive cars and other luxuries. Its the expensive car payment and mortgage or rent that gets you in trouble.
There's a huge time cost to preparing your own food from raw ingredients. I agree it's worth it, but it's definitely more expensive than hitting Jack In The Box.
There seems to be a misconception in the USA that everything healthy must be fancy. Make rice and lentils, chop a tomato and an onion, fry an egg: congratulations, you just ate a full, healthy meal for less than $2. Time wasted: approximately 10 minutes.
Even better: take turns cooking for the team. 5 people, 20 minutes of work: you're down to 4 wasted minutes per person. That's less than you need to walk to Jack in the box.
100% agree with this. I worked on Wall Street for almost three years, and ended up with a good idea for mortgage bond analytics software. Most jobs out there use some antiquated, terrible, but really expensive niche software. Most people would love to upgrade to something better, but there's often only one company in that particular space.
The following article provided some helpful inspiration for me. Hope you enjoy it:
This is brilliant advice. Remember all that shit about pain points and building a product that has value? That's what living and breathing a 9-5 in a specialty domain will teach you. Think you might want to build an online property management system? Go get a job managing properties. Etc.
I just came out of college at the end of 2008. The place I work for seemed like it was going to absolutely rock but I was dead wrong. It's not a small company which I've found that I really should have started with.
I'll spare the details, but the point is that I've generated a lot of ideas while I've been working and I've moved forward and completed some of those ideas. I've seen how an industry works, good and bad. I've met some really crazy smart people and now have some good recs behind me. I've messed with several technologies that I otherwise probably wouldn't have.
If you don't have a solid idea, plan or financial path just snag a job first and work a couple of years while feeding your inner entrepreneur. You can do both for a bit.
Adding to what others have said, look for an industry that either interests you or is somewhat a laggard. Get some domain experience and the ideas will flood you. There are obvious benefits to an area where the pace is slow and the practitioners are not stellar, fewer HNers to compete with. Be aware of the sales cycle though. Government has multiple crying needs, but it can take years to make a sales.
What edw519 is saying here doesn't require creativity though. It's pretty much what I did in my first side business: I could see the problem customers at my day job were trying to solve by combining some products we sold, and I realized that they would happily buy a single product that did what they were trying to get done. No thought required, just implementation and marketing.
The owners of the company thought my idea was dumb, so I built it myself and sold it into a completely different market.
I hate to rain on anyone's parade, but the thought of begging for ideas in an on-line forum is just so alien to me. The best predictor of your success in any endeavor is your own determination. With someone else's idea, you're much more likely to bail at the first sign of difficulty. Once you get a little real world experience under your belt, you'll find plenty of opportunities to encounter something for which you'll have real passion.
Your chances of success increase astronomically when you're working on something you "have to do". The only way to know if you "have to do it" is to have a little background and experience with it. Trading ideas like commodities in a place like this seems like the least likely way to find something you'll be passionate about.
OTOH, a "boring job" can be an incredibly fertile environment for start-up ideas. You'll learn what people want, see what works and what doesn't, and be much more adept at identifying opportunities. Oh, and get a chance to bank some money so that when you do start working on your passion, you can concentrate on that instead of begging for funding.
Sometimes the easy way out is just that: the easy way out. Get a job and pay your dues. You'll probably be very glad that you did.