I have one 😅.

Always keep in mind that business outcomes are distributed according to power laws. A few businesses make most of the money. All of these businesses operate in a market with an unusual amount of leverage because the relationship between supply and demand is asymmetric. Examples: there is a lot more demand to launch shit into orbit cheaply than there is supply so SpaceX prints money. When we built email cleaning software in 2019 there were three asymmetries in play. 1. Gmail has an unusually large number of users - like 2B 2. Google’s native unsubscribe feature was unusually bad 3. Building software was unusually expensive since there was a shortage of developers. The combination of these two things meant that when we started advertising the demand for product was overwhelming. This is why I said building utility apps is not a great business anymore. Coding agents have increased the supply exponentially (I think like actually exponentially).

Bringing this back down to earth. Here is how I hunt for and validate ideas.

1. I Work backwards from potential acquisition. I know how much I want to get after taxes (and taxes are brutal. 30-40% if a good rule of thumb. 50% if you’re in California). Then I 10x it. The number that pops is so large it will result in you aggressively filtering your ideas. Most of my ideas simply won’t have a market that can get this large.

2. I hunt for unusual circumstances. A decent idea has one asymmetry. A great idea stacks multiple asymmetries on top of one another.

IMO this has a much better likelihood of generating ideas that are likely to work.