One surprisingly effective way to find a great startup idea:
Make something 10× faster.
Let's call this the "speed heuristic".
The speed heuristic helps you find good ideas because:
By starting with an existing something, you're likely to be solving a real customer problem, this eliminates a common failure mode of new product ideas that sound good but aren't something people want.
Achieving a true 10x speedup often forces real innovation, technical design or otherwise, which often makes the idea unique and defensible.
Obvious value proposition. Everyone has limited time, so a speed up is easy to explain and sell.
A clear principle for product decisions. Just ask yourself, does this change make the user go faster?
Of course, finding an idea that that satisfies the speed heuristic is easier said than done. But in case you're trying, here's a couple of observations that might help.
Speed matters at every scale Obviously going from hours to minutes is great but even going from 100ms to 10ms feels meaningful in user interfaces. Returns don't diminish as much as we might think. For example, the leap from physical mail to e-mail was a breakthrough speed up, but the jump from e-mail to instant messaging still feels like a breakthrough speed up.
Perceieved speed counts Instagram made posting a photo feel instantaneous by uploading the image in the background while you write your caption. They didn't make the upload any faster - the user just never waited for it.
Specialization is a shortcut You can sometimes achieve a meaningful speedup by focusing your product on a narrower version of a general job (if that narrow job is important enough). Canva is 10x faster than Photoshop if you only want to add text over an image.
Net speedup is what matters Some speedups can work by slowing down one job but eliminating another. Clayton Christensen famously described how a customer wanted to fill their car with gas and drink a soda, they might go to a gas station and then a store. But these Jobs are often concurrent, so someone made gas stations with integrated convenience stores. Thus the customer only makes a single stop, and even if that stop is a bit longer, it's an overall faster experience.
"I wanna to go fast"
Speed isn't the only value a product can have, but I think it's a somewhat underrated one, especially in an when many products approach performance with a "it's good enough" mentality. For my part, even small improvements in speed can make the difference between a product that I love and a product that annoys me. It's the difference between flow state and interruption.