The real issue is that you can't solve the original problem upfront. You have to work your way acquiring new tools, capabilities, ideas... And it is easy to get lost in the woods.
As a side note I think most of the problems don't have a unique solution, but have a set of solutions that lessen that problem to some degree. Some people tend to get lost finding the perfect solution for which they need perfect tools that don't exist.
>We all start businesses because we’re frustrated with something.
I disagree. Sometimes it's because we see other people frustrated with something and think we can help, or more generally because we had an idea to provide value to some group of people without necessarily being in that group of people ourselves.
I don't know. I have to say, most startup origin stories I've heard seem to begin with personal pain. Kalanick and Camp started Uber because they had problems getting a cab in Paris. Zuckerberg created Facebook/mash to have a central Harvard student directory. Stripe because Patrick C had so much trouble setting up payments for other projects.
At the very least, another person's pain causes you pain via empathy or some sort of chain reaction. I had a successful website business that was born solely out of a friend's constant requests for updates. I hacked a CMS together and a business was born. His pain was getting his website updated–my pain was him bugging me.
Those stories are usually made up after the fact. People naturally have the tendency to create interesting narratives to explain phenomenon in their lives. It's also just better PR. I know this sounds cynical, but it's more often than not true.
Kalanick may have had a hard time hailing a cab...but that probably wasn't inconvenient enough to want him to devote his entire life to building a company solving that one specific problem that he randomly had in his life.
Is that really so hard to believe? Building a social network or a ride sharing app is something you do in a couple of months maybe a year. When it takes off though, that's when you make the decision to dedicate your life to it for the years to come.
"Early on, when a reporter asked me how I came up with the idea for Anybots, I answered honestly that I made a list of all the ideas I thought might really change the world in the next 20 years, and picked the one I thought I could contribute most to. His eyes glazed over. It's unprintable."
A lot of people seem to take the "romantic origin story" as a template to follow, and waste a lot of time as a result.
"I have to say, most startup origin stories I've heard seem to begin with personal pain."
Personal pain or recognition of a pattern of problem(s) that could be solved? This is an interesting point because if you limit yourself to simply solving your personal problems, these problems have to be experienced by either a large number of people (usually peers). Otherwise there is no real chance of a business.
I'd prefer to put this as, "solving a personal problem that many* other people face"*.
> This is an interesting point because if you limit yourself to simply solving your personal problems
Uhh, we're all the same species living in one of a handful of large societies. Our personal or work problems are likely shared by thousands, millions, possibly even billions of other people.
That's where the real money is. Not many people made a killing mining in the gold rushes. Quite a few made out real well selling boots, picks, booze and less savory necessities, to the greater mass of fools, though.
> Modern estimates by the U.S. Geological Survey are that some 12 million ounces (370 t) of gold were removed in the first five years of the Gold Rush (worth over US$16 billion at December 2010 prices). [0]
Gee, they must have sold a bootload of boots then!
> Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush. The wealthiest man in California during the early years of the rush was Samuel Brannan, a tireless self-promoter, shopkeeper and newspaper publisher. Brannan opened the first supply stores in Sacramento, Coloma, and other spots in the goldfields. Just as the rush began he purchased all the prospecting supplies available in San Francisco and re-sold them at a substantial profit.
> Some gold-seekers made a significant amount of money. On average, half the gold-seekers made a modest profit, after taking all expenses into account; economic historians have suggested that white miners were more successful than black, Indian, or Chinese miners. Most late arrivals made little or wound up losing money.
At Infinite Food we sell food to regular people. Not one demographic of people mind you, people in general. We sometimes compete on convenience/availability, sometimes on choice, sometimes on sanitation, sometimes on novelty, sometimes on personalization, sometimes on familiarity. But the key thing we provide is hot, personalized meals: http://8-food.com/
I thought to myself "what is more addictive a product than big tobacco?". We all need food, and society is slowly changing with megatrends that make feeding yourself at home more of a hassle for quite a few of us (aging populations, people living solo or just with one partner, weird hours/urban living, commute fatigue, international travel, etc.). So ... why not try to automate a reasonable solution with fresh ingredients and mass-appeal? So far we haven't had problems getting people on board with the idea or menus, though some of our chef friends remain skeptical!
Why would anyone start a company to "solve a problem X"? You should start trying to sell something people want to buy. In the meantime you may end up solving a problem.
People buy things to solve a problem, not so you can sell them something. It goes back to being focused on the customer and the whole disruption theme. If your in the tiny nail business and make the best damn tiny nails in the world that's great but when 3M comes along with that putty crap and your sales fall through the floor then it hits you, you were actually in the help customers hang stuff business.
It is absurdly common. People have a big idea, and then set out to build the idea. They make two errors: products are not businesses, and the product you to make is often not the product people need.
This is part of why the Lean Startup approach caused so much of an uproar. It has a lot of clear techniques for learning what actual customers want, and insists that people establish fast feedback loops with the real world.
That's especially important in hype-ish areas where people pursue investment. People often sell the idea. That isn't always bad, but it's easy to focus on the idea alone.
Often, knowing which product to sell is predicated on the particulars of the solution. VCs know this and are willing to fund the exploratory development of the solution in hopes of potential revenue streams.
If we don't solve problems, we close ourselves off from this potential.
Often because they have problem X and want a solution to it, and they think (sometimes correctly) that other people also have problem X and will want their solution.
There are multiple ways to start a company. Many originated as simply solutions to problems the founders had, oftentimes worked on as a side project. Also, a pretty effective way to find something people want to buy is to solve a common problem, and charge money for the solution.
The author doesn't mention who the founders are pitching to; I assume he is talking about pitching to investors or other people who might lead to investors. IMO this is the actual issue rather than the "generalised problem."
"Generalised problem" is a by-product of not talking to the right people. Talking with the target customers/users will lead to better understanding of the actual problem.
That quote would make sense if the quoted had say, isolated the medicinal properties of penicillin, but Vapnik invented Support Vector Machines which have solved generalized cases of classification but directly solved 0 problems (if you say something like running an OCR algo on documents whose purpose remain unamed that were: translated from human speech or thought, printed on paper, then scanned; is solving a problem directly I question your ability to speak of general and direct problem solving any further).
The basic idea was that ecommerce was going to kill store-based commerce. The founder was talked out of selling absolutely everything and focused in on groceries. They spent a billion dollars building out warehouses, buying trucks, etc, etc. They solved the general problem of delivering groceries.
However, nobody buys a general solution. Each person picks a specific solution to their specific problems. And most people a) already had ways to get groceries they were happy enough with, and b) WebVan never was particularly great for anything, just adequate for a bunch of things. WebVan would have known this if they had started trying to solve the problem for, say, people living on a single block. But because they scaled up while solving a generalized problem, they were screwed.
This is in sharp contrast to Amazon, which started out with book sales, nailed that, and has spent 20 years gradually expanding to other products, markets, and approaches.
There was another older service called HomeGrocer that was doing quite well... until WebVan bought them out and converted them to WebVan tech.
From Wikipedia:
> In September 2000, stockholders approved a $1.2B all stock buyout by the cash-rich competitor Webvan of the much larger HomeGrocer.com. HomeGrocer was rebranded to Webvan, the management team fired and the technology and processes converted to Webvan. The Webvan technology did not work very well and their execution was poor. Most telling, the eight different HomeGrocer facilities converted to Webvan saw overnight sales declines of one-third, then over 50% within two weeks and never recovered. Formerly profitable HomeGrocer facilities quickly ended up with significant losses. Studies of what happened after the merger were not kind to the original Webvan management who spent over $500M before going bankrupt less than a year later.
Obvious. There was, during the dot-com bubble, a startup that said "our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" when all their customers really wanted was to buy the top position on their search engine like one would do with an AOL keywords. You never heard about this example cause generalization just killed them. /s
Being general or specific is just a thought process about an idea. You can go from one end to another and vice-versa while ideating and even when you build stuff. You can assume the whole world is going to use your product. But when you try to define that first set of faces who may use, everything starts to become specific and it questions the overtly general assumptions you made.
The paradox is that founders generalise a problem to make it sound more valuable, and in doing so lose sight of the specific problem which is actually more valuable. At least, that's how I understand it.
You start with a big grand vision, find fit in a specific niche / market / vertical to solve a specific problem for a specific customer, then generalize it back to more customers and more verticals.
You have a very specific problem P you want to solve. It's too large when specified to pitch successfully, so you compress it with a destructive, one-way generalization function G, getting you a general problem G(P). You spend so much time pitching G(P) that you forget what P was.
The problem: customers don't want you solving G(P), they want you to solve P. But G is a one-way function, so you can't get P from G(P).
Solution: note the problem P down somewhere before you start pitching G(P). Reread the notes when you get your funding.
Thanks for that, the MVP craze makes G really small as well IMO - it's so damn difficult to build something worthwhile in your spare time but I'm nearly there! It's going to be so satisfying launching something I believe in even if I have another 6-8 months of features to add to it!
The problem is, I think, one of dilution. Even if you still know what P is, you're not solving it well.
G(P) is going after a larger market than P, but is doing so with a diffuse focus on the general case. A specific solution that meets customers' needs much better for P is often disregarded on the way to something that more comfortably fits every case of G(P) but not P or P's siblings particularly well.
I'd also say the general principle of solving problems you're not familiar with applies - a solution to P can be tweaked into a solution to P', and going this way gives you experience to later tackle generalized G(P) efficiently.
The author did this, and it's totally obnoxious. The point of the article is more to increase the authors brand than it is to teach you the obvious information it contains.
I've heard it all now. You can pre-select the things YOU YOURSELF SAID that are especially profound/awesome/tweet-worthy? This is like, NOT EVEN an echo chamber, because the sound never even makes it out of your own head. You're your own editor, reviewer and audience. Tweet THIS! grabs crotch
Oh, I thought they were sarcastically putting that in at first, like "you can't put your problem into the size of a tweet". But reading on I see they are serious. Hmm.
Which reminds me of http://imgur.com/gallery/t0XHtgJ
As a side note I think most of the problems don't have a unique solution, but have a set of solutions that lessen that problem to some degree. Some people tend to get lost finding the perfect solution for which they need perfect tools that don't exist.