How to get startup ideas

The best way to come up with startup ideas is to figure out what problems you’ve had a lot of experience with, professionally or personally, and try to fix them. This gives you unique insights that 99% of other founders don't have. Any problem that you have had for a decade will make you the “master” of that problem.

For me, I’d grown up receiving remittances from my dad, and later, when I began earning in the US, I always put money aside to send to my tia and abuela in Santo Domingo.

The remittance process hasn’t changed much since I was a kid. People still sent money through Western Union or MoneyGram, which required the recipient to physically travel to a brick-and-mortar agency, usually in a rough part of town. Not only was the process time-consuming and inconvenient, but it also presented a safety risk because everyone knew you were coming out of these buildings with cash in hand.

I figured if this money mainly goes to pay bills and buy groceries, why not cut out the middleman? This became the premise for my business, originally named Regalii—a play on the Spanish word for “gifts.” We would streamline the remittance process in two ways: internationally refillable gift cards for local grocery stores in Latin America and direct, cross-border bill pay.

That idea ultimately did not work, and we ultimately pivoted to what became Arcus, which leveraged the bill-pay aspect but as a payments platform in Mexico. That's ok. The point is to just get started. Once you start walking down your startup path, you can use the momentum and experience from one idea to the next, which just may be your big idea.