Paul Graham：How to Get Startup Ideas, Excerpt 7

I know it's a bad idea the way I know randomly generated DNA would not produce a viable organism. The set of plausible sounding startup ideas is many times larger than the set of good ones, and many of the good ones don't even sound that plausible. So if all you know about a startup idea is that it sounds plausible, you have to assume it's bad. [ 3 ] More precisely, the users' need has to give them sufficient activation energy to start using whatever you make, which can vary a lot. For example, the activation energy for enterprise software sold through traditional channels is very high, so you'd have to be a lot better to get users to switch. Whereas the activation energy required to switch to a new search engine is low.

Source： https://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
Locator：Essay, additional excerpt 7 · Verified：2026-10-19 · Verification：Short excerpt

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