Discovering Opportunities Everywhere: Tools and Resources for Uncovering Great Ideas

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In this chapter, the hosts explore the concept of opportunity being everywhere and introduce four valuable tools and resources to uncover great ideas. They emphasize the significance of paying attention and utilizing the internet to find opportunities, including using Twitter for idea exploration, subscribing to Patent Drop for major companies' patents, exploring the Not Boring Sci-Fi Idea Bank for a wealth of ideas from science fiction books, and consulting Wikipedia's page on unsolved questions.

The internet has a treasure trove of information that you can use to generate business ideas, spot trends, and understand what the future will look like before everyone else. But to benefit from the internet's wealth of knowledge, you need to learn how to use it in the right ways.

In this episode, Cal and Steph discuss four unconventional ways that you can use the internet to find good ideas for businesses and products that people actually want.

You’ll learn how to:

Use Twitter searches to discover products that people want
Tap into a rich reservoir of unsolved problems with Wikipedia
Leverage a sci-fi technology database to dream up the future
Leverage patents to see what companies are investing in

Resources Mentioned

Wikipedia’s list of unsolved problems
Patent Drop newsletter
Not Boring Sci-Fi Idea Bank and further reading on the database
Twitter Searches
- "request for product" min_faves:200
- "someone please build" min_faves:200
- "I’d pay for" min_faves:200
- “why doesn’t this exist” min_faves:100
- "business idea” min_faves:1000

This episode is not affiliated with Steph's work at a16z and is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.