Where good business ideas come from: Drybar, SciPy and Fadell's painkillers
October 12, 2026 · 23 min read
Alli Webb argues that your idea is right in front of you and grew Drybar out of her own mobile blowout side hustle, Travis Oliphant began SciPy by scratching his own itch, and Tony Fadell holds that great ideas are painkillers. Their accounts point people looking for a business or project toward real problems close at hand.
The rules, numbers and steps worth keeping in front of you.
- Start from your own life: Webb's idea was hair, Oliphant's was missing software for his PhD, Fadell's was about a thousand CDs.
- Mel Robbins's questions: what do you talk about all the time, and what would you do all day if your bills were paid?
- Tony Fadell's rule: build a painkiller, which people need, not a vitamin, which may or may not work.
- Fadell: pair the pain with a joy. The iPod removed the CDs and gave all your music, all the time.
- Habituated pain goes unnoticed. Fadell's prompt: remember the first time you did the thing and how it felt.
- Write down what you don't want. Webb's Drybar rules reversed what she had seen as a salon assistant.
- Test small, with a price: Webb guessed 35 or 40 dollars and posted in a Yahoo group for moms.
- For anything built before it is sold, Fadell writes the press release first: audience, pains solved, features, price.
- Watch your first customers: working without mirrors in clients' homes became Drybar's no-mirrors rule.
- Warning from Oliphant: your own itch does not guarantee pay. He was never once paid to work on NumPy.
- Oliphant: give a new project a good 18 month run before judging the feedback.
- Warning: passion without pain can be a vitamin. Being energized by something does not mean anyone needs it.
This is the short form. The full insight has every expert's reasoning, their own words and the sources.