Paul Graham：How to Get Startup Ideas, Excerpt 6

A good trick for bypassing the schlep and to some extent the unsexy filter is to ask what you wish someone else would build, so that you could use it. What would you pay for right now? Since startups often garbage-collect broken companies and industries, it can be a good trick to look for those that are dying, or deserve to, and try to imagine what kind of company would profit from their demise. For example, journalism is in free fall at the moment. But there may still be money to be made from something like journalism. What sort of company might cause people in the future to say "this replaced journalism" on some axis? But imagine asking that in the future, not now. When one company or industry replaces another, it usually comes in from the side.

Source： https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
Locator：Essay, additional excerpt 6 · Verified：2026-10-19 · Verification：Short excerpt

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