We hand-coded every real answer on two r/Entrepreneur threads asking how founders actually get their ideas. A third gave the same reply, and it contradicts almost everything written about brainstorming.
Search “how to come up with business ideas” and Google’s top result is not a guide. It is a r/Entrepreneur thread of founders arguing about it. That is a signal worth taking seriously: people do not want another list of frameworks illustrated with the Airbnb origin story. They want to know what people who actually did it say.
This page is the research behind that observation. If you want the step-by-step process instead, see how to come up with a business idea in five steps. What follows is the evidence: we read the threads and counted. Across the two most-discussed versions of this question on r/Entrepreneur, 87 comments gave a real answer (as opposed to a joke, a tool plug, or “DM me”), carrying 602 upvotes between them. We hand-coded each one into a theme. The result is the closest thing to a vote on how founders actually generate ideas, and the top answer is not in the HBS or Antler guides that rank alongside the thread.
One theme took 34% of the answers and 35% of the upvotes, nearly three times the next most common: your idea does not need to be original. Meanwhile the advice most guides lead with, follow your passion, drew 6 answers and 16 upvotes in total. Below is the full tally, the quotes behind it, and the live company data that shows the founders are right.
Stop trying to invent one. Pick a market you can reach, read where its customers already complain, and find the frustration that repeats across many of them while existing tools handle it badly. That is what 68% of founder answers describe, in four different flavours. Originality is not the constraint and never was; evidence of a real, repeated, badly-served problem is.
The reason this works is unglamorous. Novelty is a property of your idea. Demand is a property of the market. Only one of those decides whether you get paid, and you can observe it before you build anything. As the highest-scoring comment across both threads put it, “If you solve real problems money runs after you.” (r/Entrepreneur, 103 upvotes.)
Here is every theme, ranked by how often founders gave it and by how many upvotes the community gave those answers. Vote share matters as much as count: it separates advice founders say from advice founders agree with. Note that a few comments carry more than one theme; each was coded to its dominant claim.
| What founders said | Answers | Share | Upvotes | Vote share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The idea does not need to be original | 30 | 34% | 211 | 35% |
| Hunt pain points directly | 13 | 15% | 96 | 16% |
| Mine the industry you already work in | 10 | 11% | 48 | 8% |
| Observe the world / stay alert | 7 | 8% | 22 | 4% |
| Solve your own recurring problem | 6 | 7% | 57 | 9% |
| Follow your passion | 6 | 7% | 16 | 3% |
| Just start something and let problems find you | 4 | 5% | 107 | 18% |
| Generate volume / keep an idea journal | 3 | 3% | 26 | 4% |
| Execution matters more than the idea | 3 | 3% | 10 | 2% |
| Talk to people / test / validate / other | 5 | 6% | 9 | 1% |
Group them and the picture sharpens. The four problem-first themes, copy-and-improve, hunt pain, mine your job, and scratch your own itch, account for 59 of 87 answers (68%) and 412 of 602 upvotes (68%). The four themes that dominate published advice, passion, volume, observation, and execution, account for 22% of answers but only 12% of the vote. Founders say the classic advice out of habit. They upvote the problem-first advice.
The single most common answer, by a wide margin, is that you are not required to invent anything. Thirty separate founders made this argument, and the highest-scoring one, at 89 upvotes, was two sentences long:
“Your solution doesn’t need to be new. Most existing businesses couldn’t serve 100% of their market. Find a weak competitor and just beat them.” — r/Entrepreneur (89 upvotes)
The second thread’s top comment, at 32 upvotes, made the identical point from a different angle: “You are not under any obligation to be an inventor. Just because someone is doing one business doesn’t mean nobody else can do the same business.” A reply to it listed the receipts:
“Facebook didn’t invent social media. Apple didn’t invent the home computer, the smartphone, or the digital music player. Google didn’t invent the search engine. Amazon didn’t invent online retail or cloud computing. Netflix didn’t invent streaming video. Most people would be hard pressed to name who did invent those things.” — r/Entrepreneur
Within this theme, founders named specific moves, and they are worth treating as a menu rather than a slogan. Beat a weak incumbent. Take a proven model to a market or region that lacks it. Buy an existing business rather than starting one (two commenters had done exactly that, one with a dog daycare). Franchise. Serve the segment the generalists ignore. Or, as one put it bluntly, “If it already exists, it’s a good idea. So, just start one.” This is also why reading the one-star reviews of existing products is such a productive shortcut: the incumbent has already proven the market and published its own weaknesses.
Here is the sharpest contrast in the data. “Follow your passion” is the default opening of most published advice on this topic. Among founders answering the question in public, it drew 6 answers and 16 upvotes in total, roughly 3% of the vote. The best-performing passion answer earned 6 upvotes. The best-performing “originality is optional” answer earned 89.
| Advice | Where it dominates | Answers | Top answer | Vote share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Idea need not be original | Founder threads | 30 | 89 upvotes | 35% |
| Hunt pain points | Founder threads | 13 | 32 upvotes | 16% |
| Follow your passion | Published guides | 6 | 6 upvotes | 3% |
| Execution over ideas | Twitter aphorisms | 3 | 8 upvotes | 2% |
This is not an argument for building something you hate. Two founders reasonably noted that passion is what carries you through the years of unglamorous work, and one commenter added the missing leg to the classic what-you-love framework: “You forgot the fourth leg: what people are willing to pay for.” That is the point. Passion is a fine tiebreaker between viable options and a terrible filter for finding them, because your enthusiasm tells you nothing about whether anyone else has the problem. Use it last, not first.
Both threads were started by someone stuck on the same sentence. One wrote, “Whenever i come up with an idea i then realise it’s been done already, so that’s the tough part.” The other: “all the ideas I’ve come up with are either too obvious (it already exists in the market) or too outrageous.” Neither had an idea problem. Both had a scoring problem: they were grading ideas on novelty, which no customer has ever paid for.
The company data settles it. BigIdeasDB tracks the Stripe Index, 30,000+ real companies from Stripe’s public directory, every one of them live and taking payments. If “already taken” closed markets, the most crowded categories would be the smallest. They are the largest.
| Category | Companies taking payment | What that means |
|---|---|---|
| Ecommerce platforms | 3,400+ | The most “taken” category is also the biggest |
| Scheduling & booking | 2,000+ | A solved problem that keeps funding new entrants |
| Consulting | 1,400+ | Zero barrier to entry, thousands still get paid |
| Marketplaces | 1,400+ | Crowded and still compounding |
| Home services & trades | 960+ | Unglamorous, local, and consistently profitable |
Two thousand companies charge money for scheduling and booking software. Every one of them launched into a category that already had a leader. One founder made the same point with a cheaper example: “Pepsi and Coca Cola make basically the exact same thing, supply the exact same stores and restaurants and malls, and yet both of them are MASSIVELY successful.” Competition is the cheapest market research you will ever get. It tells you the problem is real, the buyers exist, and someone has already paid to educate them. For how to judge whether a specific crowded market is still contestable, see the six-signal scorecard for deciding what business to start and our guide to the most profitable SaaS niches.
Here is the finding that reframes the whole “everything is taken” anxiety, and it is the strongest single piece of evidence on this page. When you split the Stripe Index by whether a category’s companies are operators (agencies, trades, consultancies, shops) or software, the categories with the most paying businesses turn out to have almost no tools built for them.
| Category | Paying companies | Micro-SaaS tools | Software share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software development agencies | 590+ | 1 | 0.2% |
| Nonprofit & fundraising | 640+ | 1 | 0.2% |
| Home services & trades | 960+ | 4 | 0.4% |
| Ecommerce platforms | 3,400+ | 29 | 0.8% |
| Consulting | 1,400+ | 13 | 0.9% |
| Travel & hospitality | 1,400+ | 20 | 1.4% |
| AI tools & apps | 950+ | 331 | 34.7% |
Read the top and bottom rows together. There are 960+ home-services businesses taking live payments and 4 small software products serving them. There are 950+ AI tool companies and 331. Founders crowd into the category that feels like the future and ignore the one full of customers with money. That is the entire “boring industry” thesis, and it is measurable rather than anecdotal.
Founders in the threads reached the same conclusion from experience. One spent four years in glass and glazing before opening his own shop: “Get a job working in an industry that will always be in demand, it doesn’t have to be exciting.” Another, reflecting on a friend with an unremarkable local pizza chain who became a millionaire, wrote: “You don’t need to cure cancer to make money.” If you want the sector-by-sector version of this, see niche SaaS ideas and micro SaaS ideas validated from real complaints.
The second most common theme replaces ideation with search. Thirteen founders described some version of it, and the most complete came in at 32 upvotes as a four-step loop:
“Don’t think of business ideas. Look for pain points that you can solve. 1. Work in an industry and understand the workflow. 2. Identify an opportunity to ease pain amongst those you know. 3. Find out why they’re still using the ‘old way’ and if they’re willing to switch. 4. Relieve them of their pain.” — r/Entrepreneur (32 upvotes)
Step 3 is the one most people skip and the one that separates a complaint from a business. A reply to that comment, at 22 upvotes, described the most practical habit in either thread:
“I started keeping a ‘pain journal’ about a year ago. Anytime I am in conversation with someone about their career, I try to ask them what the most frustrating part about their job is. Got some good stuff so far.” — r/Entrepreneur (22 upvotes)
Another reply added a clever sourcing trick: read a company’s open job postings, then search Reddit for people discussing those same roles. The postings tell you what work the company cannot automate; the threads tell you why it hurts. A third founder described a whole business built this way, after noticing that clients at his SEO firm cared less about ranking than about burying one bad result:
“Stop thinking like an inventor and start thinking like a problem-solver. The best businesses usually come from solving boring, frustrating, persistent problems that lots of people have and no one wants to touch. And the irony is, those are often the most profitable.” — r/Entrepreneur (32 upvotes)
This is the method BigIdeasDB automates, and it is why it sits at the centre of this list rather than at the end of it. Doing it by hand means reading threads until a pattern emerges. BigIdeasDB runs a pain journal at scale: 2,300+ scored Reddit pain points across 180+ subreddits, 40,000+ documented Capterra feature gaps, plus G2, app-store, and Upwork signals inside a 1M+ complaint corpus, each problem ranked by severity and market gap so the loud, badly-served ones surface first. Start with the complaint analysis platform or the Reddit market research workflow, and see the pain-point tools compared for the manual alternatives.
Ten founders said the shortest path to an idea is the industry knowledge you were paid to acquire. The recurring observation is that every workplace leaks product requirements:
“Any job I’ve worked at, even at the lowest level, had people talking about how ‘if we had a thing that does abc we’d save so much xyz’.” — r/Entrepreneur
The strongest example in either thread was an ex-Boeing engineer whose suggestion to add winglets to aircraft was ignored internally. He left, built the retrofit business, and when testing showed a 4–5% fuel saving, the market had to come to him. The commenter’s framing is the useful part: “Was that a magical epiphany that came suddenly while sitting on a rock meditating in the jungle? No, he became a subject matter expert over a long period of time working in the industry.” He closed with a prediction that matches our density table exactly: the opportunity is in “implementing modern software tools into old school industries in manufacturing, farming, mining.”
If you already have domain knowledge, that is your unfair advantage and the reason to narrow rather than broaden. See how to find a profitable niche for turning a vertical you know into a defensible slice.
Fewer founders named this than you would expect from how often it appears in startup folklore, but it punched above its weight in votes. A teacher built the preschool she could not find for her son. Another built a movie-rating product because he disliked how existing sites worked. The consistent framing: “The best products are created while solving your own problems. Chances are that you will be solving them for many others too.”
The discipline this needs is the one thing the threads underweight. “Chances are” is a hypothesis, not evidence. Your own itch gives you speed, niche vocabulary, and a first user, but you still have to confirm the problem repeats beyond you, which is theme two applied to yourself. One founder captured the failure mode of skipping that step: “You are trying to come up with supply ideas in a market demand blackout.” Before you build, run the candidate through the startup idea validation framework and the idea validation tools.
Four themes carry 68% of the vote. Combined, they are a single afternoon loop rather than four separate philosophies. Run it against one market you can actually reach.
Run it once and you have a candidate grounded in observed demand rather than a blank-page guess. If you would rather start from problems that are already collected and scored, that is exactly what the idea generator, the discover page, and the idea validation tool provide. For worked examples, see business ideas that solve real problems and SaaS ideas backed by pain points.
Skip the reading. BigIdeasDB has already run the pain journal across a 1M+ complaint corpus, scored every problem by severity and market gap, and cross-checked it against 30,000+ companies that already take payment. You start at the shortlist.
Browse validated problems free →The founder tally. We took the two most-discussed r/Entrepreneur threads asking how to come up with business ideas (261 comments combined) and hand-coded every comment that offered an actual method. Jokes, “DM me”, tool plugs, one-word replies, and comments pitching a single specific idea were excluded, leaving 87 substantive answers carrying 602 upvotes. Each was coded to its dominant theme. Upvote counts are as displayed at time of collection.
What this cannot tell you. Three honest caveats. First, coding is a judgement call: several comments carry two themes, and a different coder would shift a handful of rows, though not enough to move a 34% leader. Second, Reddit upvotes measure agreement among people reading an entrepreneurship forum, not business outcomes, so this is a survey of belief, not a study of what worked. Third, the sample self-selects for people who answer questions online. Treat the tally as a strong signal about consensus and the Stripe Index rows below as the independent check on whether that consensus is right.
| Data source | What it evidences here | Limitation |
|---|---|---|
| r/Entrepreneur threads (hand-coded) | What founders believe about idea generation | Belief and self-selection, not outcomes |
| Stripe Index, 30,000+ companies | That crowded categories still sustain thousands of payers | Payment profiles only; no revenue data |
| Stripe Index micro-SaaS classification | Where operators outnumber the tools serving them | AI classification; directional, not audited |
| Reddit pain points (180+ subreddits) | Problems in the customer’s own words | Directional; not payment validation |
| Capterra feature gaps (40,000+) | Missing features buyers ask for | Extracted from reviews; a request is not a purchase |
| G2, app store, Upwork signals | Incumbent weakness and paid-for manual work | Freelance demand is not product-market fit |
One external anchor for why this framing matters: CB Insights found 42% of failed startups died from no market need, the single most common cause. Nothing in the founder threads contradicts that, and the problem-first majority is effectively a crowd-sourced hedge against it. Complaint data is a demand signal, not a business plan; it tells you a problem is real and repeated, not that your particular solution will sell.
Stop trying to invent one and go find a problem instead. We hand-coded 87 founder answers to this exact question on r/Entrepreneur: 34% of them, carrying 35% of all upvotes, said the same thing, that your idea does not need to be original. The second most common answer was to hunt pain points directly, by reading complaints, keeping a pain journal, or working in an industry until its frustrations become obvious. Together, problem-first answers accounted for 68% of the advice given and 68% of the upvotes. The reliable method is to read where people already complain, find the frustration that repeats, and confirm existing tools handle it badly.
No, and founders are close to unanimous on this. It was the single most common answer in our tally of 87 responses, and the highest-scoring version of it drew 89 upvotes: “Your solution doesn’t need to be new. Most existing businesses couldn’t serve 100% of their market. Find a weak competitor and just beat them.” The data agrees. In Stripe’s public directory, the single most crowded category, ecommerce platforms, holds 3,400+ companies all taking live payments. Crowding is evidence that people pay, not evidence that the door is shut.
No. “It already exists” is the most common reason aspiring founders abandon ideas and the one experienced founders reject most consistently. As one put it, Facebook did not invent social media, Apple did not invent the home computer, Google did not invent the search engine, Amazon did not invent online retail, and Netflix did not invent streaming video, and most people would struggle to name who did. Existing competitors prove demand exists and that customers are reachable. The real question is not whether something exists, it is whether the incumbents serve the whole market well.
It is the most common advice in published guides and one of the least endorsed answers among founders. In our tally, “follow your passion” accounted for 6 of 87 answers and just 16 upvotes in total, about 3% of the vote. The highest-scoring passion answer earned 6 upvotes; the highest-scoring “you don’t need an original idea” answer earned 89. Passion sustains you through the work, but it is a poor filter for what to build, because it tells you nothing about whether anyone else has the problem.
Usually because you are generating supply in a demand vacuum, judging ideas by novelty when the market judges them by whether a problem is real. Ideas feel scarce on a blank page and abundant the moment you start reading complaints, because people describe problems worth solving every day. Shift from “what could I build that is new” to “what are people already frustrated by and paying to work around,” and the shortage disappears. BigIdeasDB automates that shift by surfacing repeated, scored problems from a 1M+ complaint corpus.
For the process built on all of this, see how to come up with a business idea in five steps, which adds the revenue and acquisition data on how big these businesses actually get. Still stuck at the very beginning? Start with where to look when you have no ideas at all, then work through how to find problems worth solving and how to find startup ideas in 2026. If you would rather have AI do the clustering, see how to use AI on real market problems and the step-by-step SaaS idea workflow.
BigIdeasDB Research. (2026). How to Brainstorm Business Ideas (2026): 87 Founders, Counted. BigIdeasDB. Retrieved from https://bigideasdb.com/how-to-brainstorm-business-ideas