As I mentioned in my previous article, learning to think outside the box is the main thing I got from working on a start-up. Now, you don’t have to do it like me and go through a grueling but fun ride that takes 9 months long before you see the results, but I strongly encourage you to exercise thinking like that.

For example, let’s say you want to work on a start-up and you want that one great idea that will make you rich. For starters, you can take a look at the tasks you don’t enjoy doing every day and how they could be done faster. Or, take a look at the things you would like doing but you just don’t have the time/ don’t enjoy doing/ don’t know how to do.

I’ll give an example here. I personally would love to organize a competition on one of my blogs, but the problem that I have is all the hassle of buying the prizes, wrapping them, sending them out to another country. For me, this is not a pleasant thing, so I’ve postponed it a lot of times.

How you can make a start-up out of this? Easy. You make a site geared towards bloggers and webmasters, that takes care of all the hassle of buying the prizes and sending them to the lucky winners. The blogger picks the prize, pays for it including shipping, and the start-up takes care of the rest. All the blogger needs to do is log back in when the competition is over and put the name and address of the winner so he can get his prize. You can expand on this a lot, like creating widgets for the competition to be used on blogs or inside posts. For example, why not create a plugin for Wordpress or give the blogger a code to insert in a post, and through that you allow those that take part in the contest to register, while monitoring that they don’t register multiple times. Then use some code to randomly pick a winner out of those registered or allow the blogger to pick one or to nominate 1st, 2nd and 3rd place. This website could also list all the competitions in progress through them, and give those that want a freebie a chance to become a subscriber of the blog/ forum/ whatever by seeing in one place all the competitions.

Of course, for a service like that you would need to have access to relatively low prices for a wider range of products from which the bloggers can pick from, but it’s doable. If there is a service like that they obviously don’t market to bloggers, because I haven’t seen anyone use it.

This is just an example of reaching an idea for a start-up by taking something you don’t enjoy doing and seeing how you could make it easier or better for others.

Open a text file, start brainstorming and write down every task you don’t enjoy doing or that you depend on and see how you can get a start-up out of it. Try to mix what a service like Feedburner offers with features from Digg, MySpace or any other online or offline service. You never know what great idea you might get.

Is there a big enough market for the idea I’ve written above (probably, since there are millions of blogs and who knows how many websites)? Can it make you a good profit? I don’t know, because I haven’t given it too much thought. It can’t be done from my country because I don’t have access to cheap enough items (a MAC in my country costs 50% more then in the US because of taxes) and the shipping costs to a mostly american blogosfere would be higher.

The thing is, ideas are worth less then the paper they’re written on. It’s what you do with them that matters. If I get a couple of Red Bulls and I spend couple of hours I can write down at least 2-3 ideas that would seem destined to be successful at first glance, picked from 10 or 20 others. As long as I don’t implement them (because I already work on another project), they’re not worth anything. There is no such thing as a million dollar idea. There are only million dollar start-ups. So get a friend that knows design or programming, or hire somebody (Digg was started with less then $2000 I think and he hired a programmer to code it), and get started in your free time and work on it. You don’t need funding for that. Just make sure you have money to pay your hosting.

If you fail, it means you at least tried. Learn from it and try again.

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