[diego]

"What problem are you solving" is dogma. At the earliest stage, a startup is an experiment to see if people want something.

There are tons of examples of companies that started as toys, and ultimately became businesses. In hindsight you can always come up a description of the problem they were solving at the time, even if nobody knew the problem existed. You could do this for Twitter today: they solved the problem of (exercise to the reader).

[bpatrianakos]

Thank you for this! That's one thought I had but forgot to mention in another comment below. Dogma is the perfect word for it too. I also believe the people repeating that dogma are doing it either out of ignorance or some attempt to make themselves feel important and world changing. That's where your second point comes in - those same people will do all sorts of mental gymnastics to explain the problem which may not even exist. Your example of Twitter is perfect too! They now say its some novel communication platform. Well, I'm pretty sure it started as what basically amounted to Facebook status updates on a site called Twitter. Now people are rewriting history to make the legend true.

[brackin]

Uber is a good example. Started as a black car service for Silicon Valley but are fixing transportation problems in major cities with eventually 5+ modes of transport for anyone. They're fixing urban logistics, at first they were a neat app.