Where do you get your ideas?

It's a question that everyone is asked. The first answer for this is: problems!

One of the first steps to starting a company is identifying a problem. Start making yourself aware of the little problems you face every day. Examples might be as simple as Finding Parking, Learning about music, or just planning a date for Saturday Night.

Anything can be a basis for a startup. The old advice of "find a need and fill it" applies to modern, ultralight startups just as much as it did for traditional businesses. The difference is the size of the need. If you are going to rent a store, hire employees, and pay for advertizing, the opportunity needs to be pretty large. If you are trying to get venture capital, you better be looking at $100 million plus in revenues.

The good news, is that a modern start-up can target opportunities much smaller than old-style businesses. All you have to do is cover your time, web hosting, and some overhead. That means that hundreds of thousands of business that were not big enough to be interesting are now possible. The important thing is to minimize your investment of time and money, to allow for a worthwhile profit.

This doesn't mean you can't build a huge business, it just means you don't have to be huge to start with. The modern start-up is lean, flexible, and can change to meet its user's needs almost instantly.

Start your list now. Keep track of little things that annoy you, or seem too complicated. Write them down, don't try to remember them all! Sometimes one or two problems will come together, so review the list and look for ideas you can combine, and build a solution  out of.