A painful problem

Problem before product

You should be able to describe the problem without mentioning the solution.

Bad: “We should build an AI platform for X.”
Good: “People who do X struggle with Y because Z.”

You may have seen this in entrepreneurial courses and thought it was bullshit. I thought so too. But then I understood its job was much deeper. The goal is to force you to name the pain before you picture the solution.

That shift changes what you do, who you talk to, and how you know you are going in the right direction.

To write a good statement, you need five answers about the problem:

Who experiences it: it should be a specific group, not “everyone.” For example, independent restaurant owners with one to three locations, not “restaurants.”
How often: daily, weekly, once a year. For example, they reorder supplies every morning before service.
How painful it is: the cost in time, money or risk. For example, 45 minutes each morning, and a missing ingredient can cost a full night of sales.
How they solve it today: the current workaround. For example, a notebook, WhatsApp messages to suppliers, and a spreadsheet nobody updates.
Why existing solutions fall short: For example, inventory software built for chains is too expensive and takes weeks to set up.

Always remember that your goal is not to build a product. It is to prove the problem is painful enough that people will change their behavior to solve it.

And changing people’s behavior is very hard. People stick with the bad spreadsheet they know over the better tool they would have to learn.

To justify that, listen to Harvard professor John Gourville, who found that users overvalue what they already have by about three times. Even worse, people building a new product overvalue it by about three times.

Thus, a new solution has to be roughly ten times better to make people switch.

At this point, there’s no need to continue reading if what you want isn’t solving a painful problem, because being a founder is exactly this. If you prefer coding or building a product, join a startup that inspires you instead.

The pain must be real

As we say, a product is either a vitamin or a painkiller.

In short, a vitamin is something nice to take but easy to skip. On the other hand, a painkiller is something people go looking for and, more importantly, pay for the moment it hurts.

But how do we define pain? I’d say pain comes on a scale of five.

nice-to-have
useful
painful
urgent
existential

Aim for painful or urgent. The others are often bad for startups:

Nice-to-have: people agree it’s a good idea, then never change their habits. Nobody pays to fix a problem they can live with.
Useful: people use it when it’s free and easy, but it’s the first thing cut when budgets shrink.
Existential: the problem threatens the customer’s survival. The pain is real, which is amazing, but they can’t afford to bet on an unproven company. They pick established vendors, and a startup waits months for a deal it rarely wins.

As you can see, painful or urgent is the sweet spot. People run into the pain often enough to look for a solution, and are willing to try a new one.

A good test is to be able to answer the following question:

What does the user currently do because the product doesn’t exist?

If the answer is “nothing,” that’s a warning. But if they spend 10 hours a week on it manually, lose money over it, or pay someone to handle it, it starts to look like a real problem.

Dogfood and abuse doing it

Use your own product every day.

This is so important that a term even exists for it, it’s called dogfooding.

Living with the problem gives you instant feedback and an intuition about what matters that no interview can replace.

Always prefer businesses where you understand the problem yourself over ones where you need to keep asking users what they want.

This is the same as asking your friends at school to do the job for you because you can’t do anything. It works until you’re alone facing your fate.

Don’t get me wrong, customers are essential because they make the business generate profits. But ultimately, you have to make decisions to thrive in the long term.