[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.