[ahussain]

This 'focus on problems' attitude is interesting to me given that the founders of companies like Facebook, Apple and Amazon never set out to solve specific problems, but rather found cool new applications for maturing technologies.

I think an equally valid approach is to start building something that you think should exist in the world, and bypass the "solution in search of a problem" issue by making sure your product has plenty of contact with reality. E.g. if no one is interested in an early version of the product, then you're probably going down the wrong path.

[turnsout]

It depends on your perspective, but Facebook, Apple and Amazon all solved a very specific problem. Facebook helped you connect to young people at your school (and eventually beyond). Apple made it accessible to get into home computers in the 70s without soldering your own breadboard or spending a ton. Amazon let you buy books without leaving the house, at a deep discount. Those are all solutions, but you can find the problems by inverting them.

[zain]

I think this is a point in favor of the parent, actually. As you said, you described solutions, and the "problems" found by inverting them are not really things that people would say. To some degree, the founders thought "this product would be awesome if it existed" not "I'm solving a painkiller-level problem here"

For example:

- Facebook: "it is hard to connect to young people at my school" (what do you mean? I'll just go to the campus bar)

- Apple: "I want to get into home computers but I don't know how to solder" (ok, let's start a soldering school?)

- Amazon: "I don't want to leave the house to buy books" (???)

[turnsout]

Product "problems" are almost never things that real people would say out loud. But yeah, going down the list:

- Facebook: Connecting to others is a real human need at almost every age. "I feel like being social but I just want to lay on the couch" is an actual "problem" for products to solve.

- Apple: "I want to get into home computers but I just want to pay someone to give me a finished board" is totally a real problem in 1976.

- Amazon: "I'm feeling lazy but I want this book" is also 100% a real problem.

[omeze]

For Amazon, it was actually about vastly expanded inventory. It was often hard to find books if you didn't live near a large retail book chain. I remember having trouble in high school finding some english class books driving around the suburbs.

[disgruntledphd2]

Yeah I have been a customer of Amazon for over twenty years because of this. I used to spend time looking through microfilm catalogues of my local bookshop before Amazon and it's super nice to not have to do that anymore.

[mattgreenrocks]

Strong agree.

There are well-intentioned voices that emphasize not building unless you know there is a market for what you are making. And I believe they’re mostly right, as lack of product/market fit is usually fatal to an idea.

However, for people like myself that crave certainty and end up sitting on things because nobody’s screaming about their pain in easily seen locations, or connecting it to potential fixes. So I opt to do nothing rather than small experiments seeing what will stick. And I lose out on potential experience and wins.

The issue isn’t the advice, it’s how the advice interacts with my disposition towards skepticism and needing proof that something will work out before it’s done. That’s not how any of this works. It’s always a risk.

That's the fun part, really.

[j45]

Esoteric knowledge of a domain is hyper valuable.

If it's in the B2B space, it's often still about finding which parts are painful enough to pay for is fun.

The long and short of it is people will justify what they want to build what they want without making it customer or market focused.

Building the future is fun, but timing the market is what kills most of those attempts.

Building what's needed now and ready to adopt might grow into something far more, like the first version of Facebook was very simple, not what it grew into (with users in hand learning along the way) to the complex thing it is now.

The metric that matters is people who sign up, use it, and pay. The last one is usually not one that funded startups want to know much about because it actualizes potential and valuations. In that way self-funded startups (or with F2F) has to focus on default-alive economics sooner, which can be great for an idea to hang around until it's time comes.

[c_o_n_v_e_x]

I've worked in product at a few startups and have "inherited" a few products. Having a "solution in search of a problem" is something I NEVER want to repeat again.

Customer: "Why should we use your product?"

Startup: "Errr, we were hoping you could tell us."

[WendyTheWillow]

The point isn’t which startups to found, it’s how to find a startup idea if you don’t have one or aren’t sure if your idea is good.

People who are building what they want to see in the world don’t need this article and would likely not even read it. This is for the “entrepreneur as a lifestyle” folks who want more to be entrepreneurs than they want to see a better world.

These people are trying to maximize the chances they’re going to get to keep being entrepreneurs, which is a wholly different problem than what you’re talking about.

[spandrew]

Your point is true, but as many trillion dollar businesses have been created with the "hey look at this cool tech!" school of thinking as the "focus on problems" school of thinking. Google thought they'd sell to Yahoo before they hit pay dirt.

It's a crap shoot, pal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[WendyTheWillow]

Zero "trillion dollar businesses" were created with the "hey look at this cool tech!" school of thinking. There are 6 "trillion dollar" companies by market cap (terrible measurement but whatever), and every single one of them was founded with a specific market in mind.

[caminmccluskey]

Totally agree that a valid approach is looking at what should exist. I also agree that the issue with that is that your conception of what should exist needs to be grounded in reality. Ensuring you're focused on problems is that "contact with reality".

To that end, I would contend the examples you give are absolutely founders that wanted to solve a problem (or realised very acutely that they were solving a problem as they built something new)

Facebook's core problem was figuring out if that person you met at a party was single without being creepy. A problem that Instagram now solves much better (coincidental acquisition? I don't think so).

The 2 Steves initially met and solved the problem of long distance phone charges by building legally questionable "blue boxes" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_box. They later united on the problem of bringing computers, which they had a passion for and knowledge of, into the homes of everyone.

Amazon is an interesting point - Bezos saw the clear trend of increasing internet usage and realised there needed to be commerce online. He was certainly smart about the type of things that could sell well on the early internet. I would argue it solved a problem - long tail commerce (i.e. bookstores can't stock books about any conceivable topic) - but I'd concede that perhaps wasn't the primary initial motivation.

[rpsw]

Maybe there is a better word than problem, but I think you can frame these all as solving problems. Facebook was created to have "a directory of information for college students". There was other social networks and other ways to get in touch with other students, but this way made things easier and funner. Apple's goal was to have a more user-friendly personal computer. Amazon wanted to make ordering books online possible.

[gumby]

Also Facebook and Amazon started by taking advantage of computers to change the magnitude and affordances of something that already existed (freshman picture book and book shops respectively).

I don’t really get the “want to start a business, don’t care about what” — I’m more in the “want to work on this problem; business seems to be the best way.”

But this kind of framework could perhaps be useful for operating businesses too.

[caminmccluskey]

Yep finding opportunities to take advantage of changes in technology to solve a problem 10x better is part of ideation.

> “want to work on this problem; business seems to be the best way.” This is the right attitude but I would ask - why limit yourself to a single problem?

[gumby]

Well I have worked on lots of problems over the decades (acceptance of open source in business, guess that one worked :-), internet servce (before there were ISPs), drugs in the water supply, remote loally-maintainable solar... and a business is not always the optimal approach.

Saying "I want to start a company, what should it do?" seems like putting the cart before the horse. I guess it matters if your primary goal is actually "I want to make a lot of money", but that's kind of lame for a primary goal IMHO.

[caminmccluskey]

> "I want to start a company, what should it do?"

That's not what the article is saying, although I appreciate the sentiment exists. The core idea was that, if you are someone that likes to solve problems, and you've noticed some in the world, how do you figure out a) which of them is a good idea to work on and b) if you find out your initial ideas are flawed, how should you improve them?

I don't mean to single your comment out but I see a common idea I disagree with throughout this comment section namely:

"You should only work on the 1 problem you have a burning desire to solve"

I get why people feel like this. There is a culture of people that just want to start companies because it seems cool. To that I say, so what? If they solve a problem for people, and are successful, it doesn't matter what their initial motivation was and if they fail they fail. Secondly, a problem is not an idea. A problem is a starting point for many ideas - what I think could be better understood is how to ideate from a problem as a starting point. Thirdly, curious people exist in the world and it would be a good thing if they were solving problems and maybe starting companies as a vehicle to distribute their solution. Curious people don't have a single thing they're curious about, they may have many problems they'd like to work on, Elon Musk had a list of at least 2 (humans aren't multi-planetary and we're running out of fossil fuels) but slotted in online ads & payments first because it was a better problem to solve for him at the time.

[laurex]

I think both "build a cool thing and then see" and "find a problem" both miss quite a bit- what really matters is what motives people have and whether you can make something they perceive to be valuable. The idea that Apple and Amazon didn't largely succeed based on understanding motives and just 'found cool new applications for maturing technologies' has no basis in anything I have read about how they grew. Instead, each had someone at the helm who was very good at understanding the motives of customers and what people value. If you want to have a successful product without wasting a lot of time trying out cool ideas, you can learn what people care about and waste less time. Even better, map your own assumptions and test those, not solutions to problems you think other people have.

[laurex]

Just to add to this, a few things that can help: The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, Demand-Side Sales 101 by Bob Moesta, Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres, and this article on Risk Taxonomies by Marty Cagan https://www.svpg.com/product-risk-taxonomies/

[j45]

Hacking on small problems all the time is a great thing to do - simple enough most people can understand and play around with it and the sunk cost isn't too crazy. Shipping in this case is the most important thing to do.

[j45]

I'm pretty sure amazon and facebook started without problems to solve.

Facebook was trying to make a better social network compared to hi5 and friendster before it.

Apple made a personal home computer that was accessible to anyone who wanted one or build it

Amazon started with book deliveries with a goal of distributing everything and doing it much better. There is a bezos interview out here.

It's OK to build something that exists in the world but to some degree it is a vanity exercise relative to your experience with that thing or domain. It's fine to build something you think should exist, but it should be seen for what it is - a project, and not a product until an addressable market and audience is found who pay to sign up and there's low churn.

Building some of what you want and including feedback from a market is something.

Otherwise (it's fine), it can be a lot of folks wanting to exercise their inner Steve Jobs visionary ways without remembering he had a few billion in backing to do as he wished with a track record.

Lean startup is more about betting more than on just one version of your idea that you think needs to be built today, it's about finding enough hypotheses to test before doubling down. It's more of a science than an art (that may or may not work out)

Having plenty of contact with reality is still kind of vague, if it's relative to what's important to you for a confirmation bias effect, so be it. But simply putting in the conversations constantly and including a part of your roadmap between what you want to build, what customers are saying, bug fixes, and long term dev (5-10%) can lower your risk much more.

[ipaddr]

Building what people want vs building what they need

[j45]

More guessing or deciding what they need/want vs verifying with them first.

The rub is there’s no value to build it until it’s verified a little (email addresses and LOI/CC pre auth) first.

[cloudking]

Totally agree with this, as the one typically ideating, sometimes ideas for products just appear in my head, and then I explore if they are useful and solve a problem. This has worked well for me. I don't think there should be hard rules in how to come with ideas, brainstorming sessions should be free flowing and allow room for exploration. Sometimes silly ideas can trigger discussion paths to good ideas.

[IanCal]

But they did start by solving specific problems. Facebook absolutely wasn't a new technology either.

> think an equally valid approach is to start building something that you think should exist in the world

Does the thing you think that should exist in the world really not solve any problems?

[ignoramous]

> Amazon never set out to solve specific problems, but rather found cool new applications for maturing technologies.

This (timing the market) is probably the most important aspect of building any hyper-growth business. Also explains why early-stage investors tend to jump from one hype to another like no tomorrow.

Jeff Bezos in June 1997 explaining why now and why books: https://youtu.be/rWRbTnE1PEM / mirror: https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/rWRbTnE1PEM

[ska]

> I think an equally valid approach is to start building something that you think should exist in the world

Certainly we overall benefit from people trying this.

I think it far, far less likely to work, but if you fully believe in your "thing", you aren't looking at it statistically anyway.