Summary of Y Combinator's "How to Evaluate Startup Ideas" ✏️ 📃

The First thing you should do is determine what is exactly the problem you're solving?
Only After defining the problem and the target audience, you should start asking your self:
👉 What is your solution?
👉 Why is your solution will be successful?
👉 What unfair advantage do you have that your competitors don’t?
👉 Are you passionate about solving the problem?

Never start with the solution! Find a Problem and only then find a solution

The problem the idea solves needs to be one or more of the following things:
✔️ Popular (many people have the problem)
✔️ Growing (Problem that will grow with the time and more people will have the problem)
✔️ Urgent (People need you to solve it now)
✔️ Expensive (Solving the problem will save your client lots of money, otherwise you don’t have a business)
✔️ Frequent (It’s not a one-time problem, people come across the problem frequently)

What kind of ideas investors like?
🤑 People need it right now (Urgent)
🤑 1B market
🤑 Law changed and now there are many new opportunities
🤑 Hourly – People will use your solution every couple of hours (Like Slack)

5 Types of “unfair advantages”
🤓 Founders: are you 1 of 10 people who can solve that problem? (most likely that you don’t)
🚀 Market: is your market growing 20% a year
💪 Product: is your product is X10 better than your competitor’s product?
🚀 Acquisition: 0$ (Can you get to users for free?), can you scale with no budget?
🧐 Monopoly: Is your company is easy to be defeated by competitors?

Hope you liked it!
Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments 🙏

Naveh