I just read a great post by Paul Graham of YCombinator fame (he probably did something else, too 🙂 ). It talks about the fact that it isn’t about the ‘quality’ of the startup idea. Instead, the “main value of your initial idea is that, in the process of discovering it’s broken, you’ll come up with your real idea.”
He then recommended that instead of saying what your idea IS, you should instead pose it as a question, “could we accomplish this idea/goal?”. That changes the way you think about it, and instead of proving your idea wrong, it allows you to expand your thinking.
Go find an intolerable problem and nurture the feeling that “it must be possible to solve it” and question how you would do so — Paul posits that “simple as it seems, that’s the recipe for a lot of startup ideas.”
I’m really enjoying Paul’s essays.