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Talk to people who you want to help. Try to figure out if you're good at something they're not. If you start a startup, you're going to spend every waking hour for, like, 2 years thinking about the problems your customers have. (After that, you'll start thinking about building / structuring your company more.) You have to like them. You have to understand them. Your current ideas about what will sell and scale are, at best, poorly specified. Go ask people what their hopes and fears are. On the other hand, you also have to actually provide something novel. Think about what you believe that's contrarian, or you learned in the last year or two about the current state of things. Write that down, but don't spend a ton of time on it. That's probably going to be at the root of the solution you come up with. For me, this was marketing analytics. I was working in marketing, and I like marketers. I was a dev for a while, so I knew how to glue together the data sets marketers used. The specific problem/answer took a solid 6 months to really come together, because it took me 6 months to go have a couple dozen really solid conversations with VPs of Marketing. It turns out there's about 3 classes of tools that are vastly underutilized by modern B2B marketers because they're poorly integrated. If you put them together, a 4th tool naturally emerges. So we're building that. It's going to take a while, because it's a lot of functionality, but it certainly wasn't something that we knew we were going to build at the beginning of the journey. Go talk to people. Empathize, be curious, apply your slant. Your start is going to have your fingerprints all over it, so don't be afraid to get really personal about finding a problem that gets you excited to solve. |