A successful startup is rarely about a brilliant idea.
More often it is a very normal idea that appeared at the right time and aligned with some real change in the world. That is why searching for "great ideas" is usually a waste of time. It is much more productive to search for great changes - and their non-obvious consequences.
Those consequences are where startups are born.
For example, right now we see a global shortage of qualified specialists. Many people jump straight into recruitment startups. But recruiting on an empty market is mostly pointless - there is no supply to optimize.
A more interesting consequence is retention. Keeping existing employees suddenly became much more valuable than finding new ones. Tools that help companies retain people are easier to build, easier to sell, and companies are happy to pay for them.
Another example is customer acquisition. Paid traffic is getting more expensive every year, and many startups try to out-optimize ads or invent new growth hacks. But when attention itself becomes scarce, squeezing funnels harder rarely helps.
The more interesting consequence is distribution ownership. Companies start investing in email lists, communities, content, and direct relationships with users. Tools that help build and monetize owned audiences quietly become much more valuable than yet another ad optimization platform.
Remote work is another obvious change.
The surface effect is distributed teams. The less obvious one is that more and more people slowly start working two full-time remote jobs at the same time. To do that, they need tools that help them split attention, manage time, and stay invisible enough.
This is not a moral judgment - just an observation of reality.
At any given moment, there are plenty of changes happening around us. I only listed the first ones that came to mind. And of course there is AI, with a huge number of obvious and non-obvious consequences that we are only starting to understand.
As a founder, I actively track these changes. Not only because I want to build something specific, but because it trains my intuition. It improves my sense of where the market is actually moving, not where I want it to move.
When a new "great idea" appears in your head, pause for a moment. Ask yourself which change it belongs to. What trend will carry it forward.
If the answer is "none" - maybe it is not such a great idea after all.
And of course, these are not eternal rules. Just a snapshot of how things look right now.