A random collection of thoughts about problems. I find this subject quite interesting so I’m giving the title “v1”.
So you have an idea and want to create a business. Congrats!
You heard about this thing called AI and you want to make a business with it, awesome. You’re thinking about a chatbot or a LLM interface to identify the thoughts of your cat based on a picture of it. That’s a pretty solid idea.
The thing is… who will want that?
In this particular case I am confident there will be thousands of people who would want it, for sure. But in general, for your actual idea, who wants it? Or even better, who needs it?
If you have a specific answer to that question, awesome! You just found your customers. Your market. If you can offer them a proper service or product, exactly what they need, well that’s even more amazing: you have the very much longed for product-market fit.
Else, if you don’t have a specific answer to the question above then you should probably start looking for the people who want your product. There is no business without customers.
The easiest way to find them is looking for problems. And there are some very good news for this: there are plenty.
One of the biggest difficulties is that it is very complicated to identify them. Human beings are complex creatures. We have a tendency to complain about things way before getting to solve them, if we try at all.
The vast majority of time we spend complaining, or trying to make quick fixes that generate more problems, which in turn leads to a ton of suffering (watch Star Wars Episode III for reference).
You and me, as founders, we must focus on those cries for help. Most complaints derive from a problem that you can actually solve. With enough money and time you could solve 99% of problems (leaving -temporarily- aside things like incurable diseases, the unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity, etc).
So next time you’re listening to a relative or friend, or even yourself complaining about something, write it down. It might just be the start of a billion dollar business.
Now back to the matter, you (and me also, to be honest) are trying to create an app or an LLM interface to talk to your Egyptian ancestors. That sounds great and all, but the actual biggest problem of all is to find who that product solves a problem for.
If there aren’t any people to serve this app, then there is no market and that is a real problem. One of the bad kind.
Good and bad problems
Good problems are the ones you can solve for yourself or others with little to no negative implications on your well being or any one around you. Additionally, solving these problems usually yields unanticipated tremendously good benefits for your future self (you know, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger).
Lemme try to illustrate with a few examples.
Example of a good problem: trying to communicate with distant relatives.
Explanation: a long time ago an uncle of mine traveled thousands of kilometers to pursue a better future for himself and his family and he used to send letters to my grandma every 1 or 2 months.
Why? Because he was such an ungrateful son? Of course not. Just because that’s how long it took for those letters to reach my grandma and for her reply to get back to him.
That is painful. How long would you stay out of touch with your loved ones? It was difficult back then, and long distance calls were very expensive.
Today I can talk to friends and family across the globe in real time while watching them cook dinner. What a wonderful world we live in. And this is all thanks to the efforts of people who also shared that suffering and, like you and me, decided to do something about it.
Meaning, someone (thousands of people, really) put in a lot of time and effort into solving this problem. In the process they created some of the things that we now call the internet.
Some people put a lot of money into this, some sacrificed many nights of sleep and some others made a complete career out of this problem. Is the kind of thing you want to keep solving and making better.
In the process they came up with ultra fast internet connectivity, low-latency video streaming, and many more things. Not only did this problem improve the lives of the people working on it. They improved the lives of millions of people, and thanks to that I can talk to my grandma 10000km apart.
Photo by Georg Arthur Pflueger on Unsplash
Bad problems seem to be the ones that cannot be solved in a foreseeable or practical amount of time. Looking for a way to fix them quickly usually leads to a significant loss of valuable resources with little to no evidence of improvement. And on top of that, trying to find quick fixes usually lends to bad outcomes for you and the people surrounding you. I.e., suffering.
Example of a bad problem: trying to get back with your toxic ex.
Explanation: I’ve had at least a friend or two who have been in this situation. I myself may have been there for a bit longer than I like to admit. It’s the kind of situation that keeps you up at night, wondering how things could have been if he or she hadn’t done that. Or if you hadn’t!
You miss the texts, the cuddles, the fights. Oh the fights… Never ending. Intense. Annoying… How lovely. One day you gain up the courage (with the help of a shot or two of tequila) to call her in the middle of the night and say straight to her all of the things you couldn’t say before. You get it out of your chest, you fight for a bit again and out of nowhere you end up in her place, in the middle of the night. Once more. The next morning you feel awful, and after a few weeks the cycle starts all over again.
Think about it. This problem is taking up a bunch of resources from you: time, countless hours of sleep, the opportunity to go out and meet new people, etc.
Of course this is just a ridiculous example, but the point is there are problems which you may encounter that will inevitably waste precious resources you could be employing elsewhere.
This might look very different for every one of us but the one thing we all share for sure is that it will happen to all of us at some point. Maintaining an unhealthy relationship, staying at a job you hate, keeping up with that relative that always makes fun of you just because they’re family, etc.
The first step to move forward is to figure out whether or not this problem is worth your time.
Fall in love with the problem
After all that random rant about what problems might be, you can now see the kind of problems that you may want to spend your time solving.
And the interesting thing is that with these kind of problems you won’t really want to find a solution and then forget about it. You will want to go deep into it and find all the intricate ways this problem can materialize.
If you go deep enough you’ll find yourself dedicating an unexpected amount of energy and time into a problem like this. I think at some point it might even feel like it’s one of the bad ones. But if you carry on, you’ll come through the other side with an immeasurable amount of wisdom and potentially, money.
In the 1980s Steve Jobs had a vision of what he wanted for Apple. He wanted to create an “incredibly great computer” that would fit in a book, could sell at under $1000 and anyone could learn how to use in 20 minutes. He [publicly said this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk3vo7xVkJc) at a time when the state-of-the-art Apple computer was the Lisa. A 40cm by 40cm, 20kg computer that was sold at almost $10k. At the time, this vision was far from impossible. What a problem!
It only took him 25 years to solve that problem. And when he did, he found himself a couple more and went on to solve them too.
Steve Jobs unveiling the first MacBook Air in 2008 by taking it out of an envelope. Screenshot taken from this video .
If Steve Jobs being a genius and all could dedicate 25 years of his life to solving this one problem (and many more), why can’t you and I dedicate just a few years to building something remarkable?
Cover photo by Dmitrii Ko on Unsplash