To come up with a series of startup or side-project ideas, all you need to do is sit down to a blank business project…

And wait until you get stuck confused, or uncomfortable, the solution to the your issue will be a startup idea.

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If you don’t like the idea of creating a blank company, in order to strip mine it for problems that people actually have.

Challenge yourself to create a multi-user news website, that gets its dose of daily articles by scraping sites you like.

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If you need passion in your ideas, and require something real, take this:

Every student in the world has been betrayed, by their teachers and politicians.

In some nations they are being slowly led into debt, so that they will feel compelled to work themselves to death.

And in a few nations, students are sent into military.

And in a couple, directly into war, pondering why the modern nations, don’t care to save them from their corrupt governments.

For the Humanity in you, save them, by giving them the tools, to co-found tiny creative AI driven, paid membership companies.

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Every problem along the way, marks a zone of people or future users…

Who will be willing to use your software, to get over this problem when they encounter it, themselves.

If your software is brilliant and powerful, then they will be happy to pay for the premium version.

What makes premium special, is that that money, it pays for servers, and thus you are able to offer more.

In a word, premium, really is premium, fair and square.

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While you should always keep your code base tidy, and brilliant, you should never feel compelled to finish it, which can be difficult.

Use that frustration, to setup some meetings with investors.

And passionately show them, what a tragedy it is, that you are not able to finish your beautiful project in a reasonable amount of time.

Then the wise and honest investors will help you, ignore the other kind, they are not worth your time.

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If your project is a good idea, then you will receive funding, to hire programmers in order to finish it.

The idea behind funding, is unnecessarily complex, what it should be, is you getting free money to finish the project.

In return, the investors giving you free money, get a small cut of the company, 10% seems alright.

Your startup must not be built in such a way so that it can fail, or implode from monthly bills and upfront investments.

Businesses that require a lot of money to stay in operation, and immediately self destruct when the money dries up...

Are a stupid and fake idea, and your time in life is far too precious to stress about it.

Instead, your business should scale with every new monthly customer, or sale of a software license.

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Let me show you your first startup idea, because it is ridiculously close to the very beginning.

You don’t have to register it it, but come up with a company name based on a nicely sounding city like Antwerp.

Create a folder on your hard drive, a README.md file, and you are there.

You just got stuck, with a pretty company name, no domain name, no code, no boilerplate legal mumbo-jumbo.

Nowhere to map out your mono repo (where you keep your code), and nowhere private to easily version your files.

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That should be your first startup, you ask your customer for a company name.

And then let them map everything out, perhaps with text, rather than drag and drop ui.

Help them come up with a domain name, list some code repository ideas.

And finally ask them about code preferences, and generate as much boilerplate as a new project could need.

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The free version of your offering, runs on the customers computer.

The premium version, runs on your company servers, supports multiple users.

Finished on unfinished, any idea, side-project, or startup on your servers, can be listed for sale.

Potential buyers, can review the code, the todo lists, and commit logs, and either buy, or make an offer.

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But your free offering, is the key, it has to be a powerful open source program.

Where others can volunteer to help you fix bugs, or even add new plugins, or features.

It is important that the program takes care of all the boilerplate, and network setup and optimizations.

Allowing the idea creator, to just focus on what makes their business great and unique.

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If you don’t like this idea, because it is too small, or too big, get over it, set-up the mono repo yourself, and now start watching for the next trouble spot.

Is it network optimization, process management or logs, are you starting to worry about security…

Or not having a tool to map out your database tables, or ORM models, are you annoyed that you can’t see the data users table.

Are you scared of persistent WebSocket connections costing too much, can you come up with an idea where you can use HTTP somehow?

All of these things, lead to startup ideas, some small some big.

Small ideas are not bad ideas, it may even be better to have 5 small companies than one big one.

And finally, does the paperwork and billing for five little companies scare you, because that is a neat startup idea too...