A New Heuristic For Startup Ideas

We have discussed about heuristics for startup ideas earlier - we spotted a new heuristic today.

Sometimes, you will see that users of some popular product/service are "inventing" new uses for existing features, to help them achieve something that they need. When that happens, it is a clear indication that a product/service that does just that "newly invented" piece potentially has a solid number of users right off the gate.

Let us take some examples: real time status updates - users were trying to use offline messages in messenger services - "stepping out for lunch" - an indication that a real time status update service was needed (the company that solved that would be worth a cool 10 billion dollars tomorrow). Foursquare and check-ins are another example.

We do have two examples that are open right now - Reddit's AMA (Ask Me Anything) is probably a good standalone service. And the fact that Pinterest is used to pin things that are not really pinnable - there are many services waiting to be tapped there.