Monday, July 1, 2019

How to come up with creative ideas: Think about your own pain-points first

(draft blog, editing in progress)
I recently started sharing my scribbles on How to come up with creative ideas. To reiterate, my idea in sharing these is to look back at this list for my own inspiration and for those who are interested.

On my drive back from today, i listened to this podcast between Pankaj Mishra and BrowserStack co-founder, Ritesh Arora. I have been a sort of a fan of Pankaj Mishra's Outliers podcast series as i find it is very authentically presented without much airs. Pankaj's intriguing style of questioning brings out the best responses from the guests.

In the podcast, Ritesh shares his journey- a part of which caught my attention. His first start-up was based on sentiment analysis of customer feedback generated at many sites. For various reasons, he had to move on to his next start-up that was based on consulting. As a part of consulting business, Ritesh and his co-founder had built a website. They took almost 2 days to create the website using wordpress templates. But when it came to testing the website in various browsers, it almost took double the time. Their need to test the website on multiple browsers originated from the fact that they had Mac but were looking to test on Internet Explorer browser. They got curious of this state and dug a bit deeper to understand the prevalence of this problem and this led them to discovery that many people had the same problem. Thus, slowly but surely, this led them to think of starting BrowserStack. Per wikipediaBrowserStack is a cloud web and mobile testing platform that enables developers to test their websites and mobile applications across on-demand browsers, operating systems and real mobile devices, without requiring users to install or maintain an internal lab of virtual machines, devices or emulators. 
Image Source: https://www.ceralytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/pain-points-vs-solutions.jpg

In the spirit of Lean Start-up, they started small build 2-3 features and released the version for people to test. To their surprise, they saw a great demand for their service and decided to commit to it with full-time attention it needed. BrowserStack has over 25,000 paid customers and 2,000,000 registered developers in more than 135 countries.[2]

The reason I loved this story was because it gives us a definitive lead to the core question that intrigues me these days: How to come up with creative ideas.

Ritesh Arora and Nakul Aggarwal built a multi-million dollar valuation business by just converting their pain-point to an opportunity. Rather than accepting the fact that browser testing takes double the time, they took it as an opportunity area and built their start-up around this 'pain-point'.

Why look around for ideas, just don't take your pain-points for granted and come up with the next ground-breaking idea.

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