Will your startup make you happy?

It’s rare that startup ideas spring forth fully-formed—instead, they’re often the result of a painful search process.

Pilot is the third startup I’ve started with my cofounders, and I wanted to run the search in a structured way. Before I even started to think about the idea itself, I thought about the characteristics of the jobs I’ve enjoyed most. Since we intended to spend years or decades building our next business, I wanted to make sure I was going to enjoy it.

It’s an unusual place to start, but taking the time to consider what will make you happy can be an important first step in your idea search. Your requirements might be different than mine, but here’s what I came up with:

Work with smart, talented people

Above all, I want to work with smart, talented people who push me to do my best work every day. Interestingly, achieving this objective doesn’t require starting a startup—you could, for example, go to MIT or join the Go team at Google—but a startup happens to be an efficient vehicle for pulling a group of smart people together. 

This requirement is far and away the most important one. Your day-to-day happiness is much more informed by the people you work with than the company mission. You can be working on the world’s most inspiring mission, but if your coworkers aren’t great, I guarantee that you’ll be miserable.

Interestingly, this says literally nothing about the business idea—which feels right to me. I’d work on anything with the Pilot team and I’d still enjoy it.

Make something people want 

When I tell people about what we're up to, I want them to say “Wow, that sounds awesome. I really need that.” With apologies to YC, you could also phrase this as “Make something people want.”

There’s a joy in making something that solves a problem for someone, and seeing their excitement about what you’ve built. It’s a satisfying feeling, and it lets you take pride in your work. That feeling is a critical part of keeping you motivated when things are tough—and, spoiler alert, they’re going to be tough a lot of the time

Finally, if people don’t want what you’re making, you’re probably not building the right thing. Not only will this requirement make you happy, it’ll also help make your business successful.

Make something that isn’t societally net negative 

The surprising thing about this requirement is that it doesn’t sound like it’d filter out tons of ideas—but it actually does. For me, Juul is obviously disqualified here, but so are Zynga and Coca-Cola.

If #2 is “Make something people want,” this one is “Make something people should want.” To be clear, we aren’t curing cancer at Pilot, and that’s okay. But we are making it possible for business owners to focus on making their businesses successful, while we focus on the scary, tedious, administrative back-office work—and I feel great about that.

As I mentioned, this is a framework for things that make me happy—your framework might be different. But regardless of your criteria, considering what makes you happy is a good place to start when looking for your startup idea.

We’ll get into tactical advice for finding good startup ideas in my next post, so if you’re not already a subscriber, you should subscribe here: