Organic Startup Ideas
April 2010The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you?There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are going to be necessary to some class of users other than you. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer. Unlike most people who wanted computers, he could design one, so he did.
- ▪April 2010The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you?There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your own life, and those that you dec
- ▪Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer.
- ▪Unlike most people who wanted computers, he could design one, so he did.
Paul Graham — Essays files mainly under blogs. We currently carry 219 of its stories.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Paul Graham — Essays |
| Canonical URL | http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html |
| Publication time | Not provided by source |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-26T08:49:07.854Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-26T08:49:31.831Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | xfGQWbc1KJKF · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator. April 2010The best way to come up with startup ideas is to ask yourself the question: what do you wish someone would make for you?There are two types of startup ideas: those that grow organically out of your own life, and those that you decide, from afar, are going to be necessary to some class of users other than you. Apple was the first type. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer. Unlike most people who wanted computers, he could design one, so he did. And since lots of other people wanted the same thing, Apple was able to sell enough of them to get the company rolling. They still rely on this principle today, incidentally. The iPhone is the phone Steve Jobs wants. [1]Our own startup, Viaweb, was of the second type.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Paul Graham — Essays.