Email 1: Why you start with a problem, not an idea
A quick story:
In the 1960s, Russia and the United States were in a space race to get a man to the moon. Among all the challenges they would face in this competition, there was one that was particularly surprising in its mundanity: They soon discovered that ballpoint pens don’t work in zero gravity.
NASA spent years and millions of dollars to develop a pen that could work in space. They invented a pen that writes in zero gravity, on nearly any surface, at extreme temperatures, and even upside down. It was a true feat of human ingenuity. Sort of.
The space pen, an engineering feat
What did the Russians use? A pencil.
Want to create a great business? Think about the problem you’re solving first
The above example is fictitious (I had you going though, didn’t I?).
It illustrates what happens when we start developing new products by focusing on the solution instead of the problem. In this case, the U.S. asked the question “how can we make a better pen that operates in space?” while the Russians asked a fundamentally different question, “how can we write in space?”. The U.S. question results in a better pen, while the Russian question has a number of potential solutions, including a pen, a pencil, or something else altogether.
As you’re working on starting a company, think about problems, not solutions. If you are problem-focused in the beginning, you’ll be in a much better place to develop a solution that has a transformative impact on a person or business.
Problems are everywhere, you just have to look
Six million women put their lives at risk each day and 150 die every year because of ill-fitting personal protective equipment.
Jane Henry, a Rice Jones School alum, consulted with oil and gas companies for over a decade. Jane would advise on safety measures, protocol, and personal protective equipment. She would go out in the field to observe teams and work with them to improve their processes.
One day, in the midst of cleaning up debris after Hurricane Harvey with unisex gloves and injuring herself, she had an insight: personal protective equipment is largely designed for men of a particular size and shape. If you didn’t fit that description, you were at risk of being unsafe.
This insight led her to start her company SeeHerWork, which develops women-specific workwear, safety equipment, and other job-specific products to keep women safe and performing at their highest level. Jane has since appeared on CNN, Good Morning America, and a number of media outlets. Her product is now sold in a number of retail stores, including Lowe’s.
A problem can come from your own personal experiences as it did for Jane, or it can come from situations where you’ve seen others struggle. But the key is to stay focused on the problem before diving into potential solutions.
There’s no better time than now to start searching for problems to solve
Outside of starting a venture, the benefit of starting now is that you’re honing a skill that will last you a lifetime.
Over the next few days, start collecting problems and storing them somewhere. You can carry a notebook or have a note saved on your phone. Wherever you choose, make sure it’s accessible throughout the day. Think of this space as your problem and opportunity library, where you generate and store as many problems as possible for later use. Take note of:
- Who is affected by the problem? It can be more than one type of person.
- When does it happen? How often does it happen?
- Where does it happen?
- Why does it happen?
Don’t judge the quality of these problems just yet or get caught up in the analysis. Your goal is to capture problems, knowing that you’ll have time to filter them down later and select one.
Okay, I can go looking for problems… but how can I find good problems?
I’m glad you asked. In the next reading, I share tips for finding problems to solve.
Email 2: How to find good problems to solve
In the last reading, I shared that entrepreneurs and innovators need to start with the problem, not a solution (remember the space pen vs. pencil?). Now that you’ve heard this, you may be tempted to lock yourself up in a room and think of as many problems as possible. That’s guaranteed to be frustrating, and probably not effective.
Here are three tips to help you go out and find *good* problems to solve.
Walk a day in someone else’s shoes
IDEO is one of the top design firms in the world.
Since its inception 30 years ago, IDEO has been at the forefront of human-centered design. They designed the first Apple mouse, transformed the customer experience at hotels and airports, and built massively successful products with startups.
IDEO has learned a lot from working with some of the top companies and organizations in the world. They’re used to discovering unexpected insights. But some projects are more surprising than others.
During one of their projects with a hospital system, IDEO was tasked with improving patient satisfaction scores. Along with hospital administrators, they mapped the journey of a patient from the emergency room to their hospital bed. They had a deep understanding of where a patient would be, for how long, and the frustration they experienced at that particular moment in each stage of the process.
But that’s just one part of the story.
Rather than relying on just this data, one of the IDEO designers had a different idea. They checked themselves into the hospital with a camera strapped to their head. For hours, this is what they saw:
What would it be like to stare at a hospital ceiling for hours?
After this insight, instead of focusing on optimizing time in each room, the hospital reconsidered what the patient experience was like from the view of the patient. They adjusted the patient journey based on this insight. Patient satisfaction scores went up.
Takeaway: when finding problems, walk a day in someone else’s shoes. While you don’t need to check yourself into an emergency room, you’ll uncover insights by going through the same experience as the people you are designing for.
Think like a traveler
What happens when you first arrive in a new city?
As you’re in Paris now, everything looks new and curious to you. You’re more likely to put your phone down and pay attention to your environment.
You don’t take anything for granted. You have a beginner’s mindset. You ask, “Why is it this way?”
How can you apply this to your own life? Every day, you encounter problems that you dismiss because it’s more of the usual.
Take this opportunity in the new city to question your regular routines. What has to change when you’re in this new place? What inspirations can you pick up from others around you?
Look for workarounds
People hack together solutions to solve their problems. There’s a difference between knowing that a problem exists and cobbling together your own solution. Look for situations where people have invested time and effort to address their problems. There might be an opportunity for you to pursue.
For example…biking with a wet seat in the rain is no fun. The workaround? A plastic bag; it’s cheap, easily reusable, and solves the problem.
If you’re currently employed, there can be a treasure trove of problems waiting to be solved at your job. Ever see something done a certain way manually at work that seems like it’s in dire need of being automated? A big, clunky spreadsheet? There might be an opportunity there.
In the next couple of days, look for workarounds, possibly walk a day in someone else’s shoes, or take a beginner’s mindset to your own routines. Continue collecting problems that you see.
I can’t stress enough that finding a real need someone has must be a critical first step in starting a company. What happens when you don’t do this? Find out in the next reading.
Email 3: The story of the $699 juicer
Juicero is a WiFi-connected juicer.
Like Keurig, Juicero sells single-use pouches to use in their machines. Instead of coffee, it’s fruit and vegetables.
Unlike Keurig, the machine costs $699. Each pouch costs $5-$8.
People quickly discovered that you don’t need the machine to squeeze the pouches; you can just squeeze them yourself. Juicero’s CEO defended their product, saying that squeezing the pouch instead of using the machine overlooks the “experience”.
Despite raising $120m in venture capital funding and eventually lowering the price to $400, Juicero was a failure.
Why did it fail? Probably for multiple reasons, but the most important one is that it wasn’t solving a real problem.
To understand how important a problem is to someone, consider why they have or haven’t adopted existing alternatives. What alternatives did Juicero’s potential customers have? Here are just a few:
- Buying the vegetables on their own and using a juicer,
- Buying a juice at the local juice shop, or
- Consuming something other than juice while offering the same benefits
As you capture problems, think about how the person experiencing the problem deals with it today. Do they use another solution that doesn’t work well? Do they do nothing at all? Are they really motivated to change?
When you just need some quarters to do laundry
When visiting a laundromat, you need quarters. If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t usually have quarters on you, this is a problem.
Enter Washboard. Washboard is a subscription service that mails you quarters. For $27, you get 80 quarters. You’re paying 33 cents for 25 cents.
Unsurprisingly, Washboard failed because (a) there are laundry startups that can pick up and do your laundry for you, and (b) not that many people experience this problem.
Ask yourself: how many people in the world need quarters to do laundry and can’t find quarters on their own? And are willing to pay a 30% premium for the privilege to have quarters mailed to them?
Bad problems are ones that:
- People don’t care about enough to be motivated to change their behavior
- Have a number of existing solutions that work fine
- Aren’t affecting a sizeable population to be worth pursuing as a business
What happens when you work on a bad problem? You run out of money, get frustrated when no one wants your product, and waste your team’s time.
So now you’ve seen what happens when you work on a bad problem and build something no one wants or needs. Hopefully, you’re avoiding this mistake and are collecting a number of problems you think can be viable startup ideas.
You have to select only one problem to address. How do you decide? In the next reading, I’ll share some filters you can use to make your choice.
Email #4: Pick a problem
By this point, you’ve written down some problems you’ve observed. How do you select the one to pursue?
Get as close to the intersection of your passions and unmet needs as possible
Time for some bad news: the overwhelming majority of startups fail. Despite what you may have heard or seen elsewhere, it’s not glamorous.
You can be thousands of dollars in credit card debt. Forego a lucrative job opportunity when you graduate. Risk relationships and friendships that you care deeply about. Have an awkward family dinner where you try to explain that you’re working on this new “idea”.
What keeps you going? You have to care about the problem you’re solving and find a problem a significant population hasn’t had addressed.
Don’t settle on a mediocre problem. Have conviction about what you’re doing. Invest the time to find the intersection of your passions and unmet needs. It will pay off in the long run.
Look at the list of the problems you’ve collected and cross out the ones that aren’t really that interesting to you. Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Select a problem that people will pay for and whose customers are accessible
Perhaps the visual above is an oversimplification. Someone also needs to be willing to pay to have the problem solved. You also need to be able to reach them.
Let’s imagine you are solving the problem of getting a good night’s sleep among flight attendants and pilots who frequently travel across multiple time zones.
The customer could be the person experiencing the problem or perhaps the airline, in an effort to improve their employees’ productivity and well-being.
If the customer is the flight attendant or pilot, do they have the funds to pay?
If the customer is the airline, do you know who in this large organization would be most likely to care? Can you find the right means to contact them? How would you start?
As you consider different sets of people that might experience the problem that you’re trying to solve, think about how you might reach them. Who else, beyond the person that you are solving the problem for, will you have to convince about how your solution makes a valuable, positive impact?
Be specific, but not too specific
The animation above is a clip from the 1977 documentary, Powers of Ten, by Charles and Ray Eames.
The documentary starts with a picnic on the lakefront of Chicago, zooming out continuously until you see the universe as we know it. If you were to continue watching, it would zoom back down to the person and zoom in further until you see a single cell within them, until finally reaching a single carbon atom. At each zoom level, you’re able to see a completely different scene.
When deciding on the problem you want to solve, take a moment to step back and gauge how zoomed in you are. Is it a big enough problem to be worth solving, but not impossible for you, given your resources, to get started in the short term? Is it addressing a huge, known problem? If so, and others have tried to solve it, why is it that you’ll succeed in light of what others before you have done? You may want to think about ways to zoom in (be more specific) in the short term to eventually accomplish that long-term goal.
In the below example, we zoom in and out until we find a right-sized challenge we can pursue.
Too general ⇒ Too specific ⇒ A good starting point: An example
Don’t worry about getting this perfect just yet. But be prepared to adjust your zoom level as you continue to explore the problem.
Action item for Monday: it’s time to pick a problem
I’ve shared a few ways to think about which problem to select, including solving a problem that:
- is at the intersection of your passion and people’s unmet needs,
- is big enough that people are motivated to change,
- affects a large enough market to make it worth pursuing,
- is one that people would be willing to pay for,
- has customers that you can reach.
Review the problems you’ve captured over the past few days. Use the criteria above to make a selection.
If you’re not ready yet, that’s okay! You can’t rush this process. Select your best option for now.
So you’ve identified a problem that meets all the criteria above and is, at least on first glance, scoped appropriately. It’s time to transform your notes about the problem into a crisp, clear problem statement. In the next reading, I’ll share the format for creating the statement that will kickstart your venture.
Email #5: Craft a problem statement
Over the last couple of days, you’ve gathered problems around you.
You’ve picked one that is at the intersection of what you care about and what others need to be solved. And if you aren’t ready yet, that’s okay: read on to know what to do next.
Now, you’ll want to kickstart the discovery process of your venture by forming a crisp, clear problem statement. By doing so, you’re making the case for why your company needs to exist.
Problem, population, outcome
There are three parts to a problem statement: the problem, the population, and the outcome. There’s no order of operations here (Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally?). You can mention the population before the problem, the outcome before both, or some other combination.
Let’s start with a bad problem statement:
People are busy and don’t have time to exercise so we’re going to build an app that holds them accountable.
Following the problem, population, outcome format above, we can deconstruct the statement above and make it better.
Problem: Busy and don’t have time to exercise
This is a classic mistake new founders make. Person ‘X’ is busy and doesn’t have time to do ‘Y’. What’s happening is that we’ve identified a symptom (busy and no time to exercise) but not the root cause.
Why are people busy? To answer this question, we need to think about the second part of the problem statement: the population.
Population: People
All people should exercise, but who might want to exercise but doesn’t have time? We need to identify specific segments of the population. Here are just a few who might experience this problem:
- Firefighters, emergency doctors, and others who work graveyard shifts
- Full-time mothers who manage their family and kids
- Consultants that travel frequently throughout the week
Let’s select full-time mothers as the population we want to serve. Why don’t they have time to exercise?
Perhaps they have an infant they have to watch all day and school-aged kids they need to drop off and pick up. The kids might have after school activities. Then there’s dinner, followed by a shower and a bedtime routine. And throughout the day, there are a number of other problems beyond finding exercise time that we might be able to solve.
But if we were to focus on exercise, we could revise the first two parts of the problem statement (problem + population) to say:
Between all the responsibilities they have to support their family, full-time mothers struggle with finding time to exercise.
Outcome
The remainder of our original problem statement mentions a solution: an app and holding people accountable. Instead of providing a solution, we should remain in the problem space and explain what happens if the problem isn’t solved. What’s the negative outcome? Sometimes this can be easily quantified, but in other cases, it’s less obvious.
In the case of the full-time mother, perhaps the negative outcome is the number of potential exercise hours lost or some other quantitative metric. But it’s also possible that the negative outcome is the way they feel as a result of not having the problem solved.
Perhaps the negative outcome is feeling as if they’re not giving themselves the personal attention they deserve, and that they are putting their wellbeing at risk.
You’ll have to make some assumptions here. Unless you’re experiencing the problem yourself, you can’t truly know how the person feels. And even if you are experiencing the problem, you want to make sure the negative outcome is more broadly applicable beyond just you.
How will you know if these assumptions are true? You’ll talk with people that experience the problem and ask open-ended questions. The Talking to Humans reading offers tips and best practices for having these conversations.
Our revised problem statement
Our old problem statement:
People are busy and don’t have time to exercise so we’re going to build an app that holds them accountable.
Our new problem statement:
Between all the responsibilities they have to support their family, full-time mothers struggle with finding time to exercise. This results in them feeling that they aren’t giving themselves the personal attention they need and that they’re putting their health at risk.
We will continue to refine the problem statement, but this is a good start.
Good problem statements:
- Are easy to understand and avoid jargon
- Highlight a specific population that has the problem
- Provide context of why and when the problem is happening
- Are generative and don’t have a solution embedded
A good problem statement is like a North Star for your team in the early stages of your startup. It will keep you focused on building for the unmet need a person has, and help you avoid distractions that don’t solve the core problem.