Where good business ideas come from: Drybar, SciPy and Fadell's painkillers
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.
Good business ideas, on these three accounts, come from a problem or a pull that is already in your own life, not from hunting for a big clever concept. Alli Webb, Travis Oliphant and Tony Fadell built very different things, and each started close at hand.
Webb was a 32-year-old stay-at-home mother of two when she started what became Drybar. Hair had fascinated her since high school, and she was itching to do something for herself. She posted in a Yahoo group for moms, offering blowouts at home for 35 or 40 dollars, and emails poured in. She made no money after gas and time, but within about a year she was turning down more appointments than she accepted, and she opened one small shop with her brother. Mel Robbins, who interviewed her, says the idea is "typically right in front of you" and that whatever energizes you is data worth trusting.
Oliphant began from need. His PhD research required mathematical tools that Python lacked, so from 1998 he built them and put them on a basic web page. He had about 100 users by the end of the year, and they began sending him fixes. That work became SciPy, and the same pattern later produced NumPy and Conda.
Fadell gives the plainest rule: great ideas are painkillers, not vitamins. A painkiller is something people need; a vitamin may or may not work. The iPod came from his hatred of carrying about a thousand CDs as a DJ, and it paired that pain with a joy, all your music all the time.
They disagree on what to look for first. Webb and Robbins say to follow your energy. Fadell says to follow the pain, and his rule is a warning that being energized by something does not mean anyone needs it. In each story, though, the two sat side by side. They differ on method as well: Webb tried a guessed price straight away, while Fadell, who was building hardware, wants the press release written before anything is built. Webb's inbox filled at once; Oliphant says a new project needs "a good 18 month run" before you know whether the feedback is there. And solving your own problem does not guarantee pay: Oliphant says he was never once paid to work on NumPy.
What to do with it: ask what you already talk about and do unprompted, and list the pains in your own work and daily life, including the ones you have stopped noticing. Write down what you don't want. Check the idea for both a pain and a joy. Make the smallest real offer you can, with a price, where the people with the problem already gather. Work out how you will be paid as a separate question. Then give it time, and expect it to be lonely.