Pursuing Problems is Pointless
Startups need to shift their focus.
After eight years of searching for a problem to solve, I've stopped.
Have you had this experience?
Get hit with an idea.
Do a Google search.
Find ten competitors,
three of whom have raised VC funding.
Stop.
Or worse....
You keep going, daring to build something better, only to find that it isn't quite good enough to cause customers to switch.
I've been there and done that. There’s even a T-shirt.
"Good problems are rare and hard to find," teaches Ash Maurya.
But over the last decade, it's gotten much harder. Hard isn't a reason to stop. Especially with a startup.
But I think the search for problems is pointless. Here's why:
Competition from your peers: There are more Founders chasing problems:
Have you noticed how many founders there are? Today, LinkedIn says 4M+.
That's a lot of people searching for a problem to solve.
The outsized success of founders like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Brian Chesky, and even the always humble Des Traynor has inspired many to start their own companies. Their motives are inscrutable.
Perhaps it's making unimaginable money and attaining the fame that follows founding (and funding) a company. It may be a more noble instigation: the belief that anyone can make it big in today's world. Neither is wrong, but it has created enormous competition.
There are a lot of fellow founders out there. So, I have to ask, what makes you unique?
Competition from platforms: Feeling the bite of the FAANGs.
Google Calendar recently added a feature to make it easier to schedule appointments.
Social media subsequently advertised the demise of all scheduling apps, including the vaulted and VC-funded Calendly. (U$3B valuation in Techcrunch)
I'm not advocating the imminent death of this company; I am simply pointing out the correlation.
In my first startup, I could count on larger companies and competitors to be slow and stupid.
Now, they have both speed and scale.
If you do find a problem, and it's big, don't you think a larger competitor will, too?
Competition from The Sands of Time: We've been doing this for a decade.
The Lean Startup movement has been active for ten years, coincident with the rise in startups and their founders. The presence of millions of founders is multiplied by the time that they have been active in the search.
Let's do the math to prove my point.
Assuming an exponential growth from 100,000 founders ten years ago to 4 million today (and getting help from ChatGPT for the math), I estimate 28 million founder years spent searching for problems.
That's a staggering amount of time—or, to use my analogy, an immense pile of sand to sift through to find the grain of a problem.
If finding a good problem were analogous to a boat lost at sea, with 28 million search years spent, isn't it time to stop?
So, I'm stopping the search for problems.
I am putting a pause on my pivots.
Ideation is insanity.
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results" attributed to Albert Einstein.
I have found a more effective method that even Albert Einstein would approve of.
One that I'm calling "Startups-as-a-Science."
What does that mean?
All my entrepreneurial endeavours are now based on scientific theory - one in particular.
I'm not the first and only person doing this. (More on that later.) But I'm taking the tagline.
A Sidebar on Science, Theories and Why They Matter.
A theory is to science what a compass is to a navigator. In the same way that a navigator would be lost in the natural world without a compass, searching for problems without a theory only gets you lost.
Theories help scientists understand, investigate, and explore the natural world. The theory of gravity explains phenomena ranging from planetary motion to airplane flight.
They give us a fact-based framework for why things work as they do. Theories are not guesses but fact-based frames of reference formed from hypothesis, experimentation, and observation.
Theories are already ingrained in our work world. A few examples are:
Regression theory: Used to predict seasonal sales increases.
Power laws: Used to predict the returns on investment portfolios.
Sampling theory: Used to predict population behaviour based on surveys.
However, the bedrock concept is that a theory predicts an outcome.
Introducing The Theory of Existing Alternatives
The theory of alternatives stipulates that for innovation to occur, there must be an existing way and a better way.
That's what Airbnb, Uber, and Facebook have done.
They replaced an existing way with a better way.
Think about it...
There were Bed and Breakfasts before AirBnB.
Taxis to the airport before Uber.
Ektachrome slide shows of vacations before Facebook.
(Yes, I know I said nothing about VCs and funding in my publication’s pledge, and I’ve mentioned them several times now, but this illustrates the theory.)
Why should you care about a theory?
Pursuing the search for existing alternatives gives us a number of advantages. (Over 4M+ other founders and the FAANGs)
There is proof of a problem: Someone is already using something. Even if they failed, that's evidence.
There is an existing way to position against: We can define a better way.
We have a start on a business model: Existing channels, costs, and resources are known.
There are two other compelling advantages: Causality and Unlocking Demand.
Causality: We can identify the factors that cause a customer to switch (or, in some cases, not).
Imagine if you knew, before you built anything, what it takes to succeed in making customers switch to your product or service.
Using the theory of existing alternatives, we see that no purchase is random. It's predictable.
Finding the how, when, why and where of that is hard. But we replace the hopelessness of searching for a problem with the hard work of discovery.
Unlocking Demand: We can identify the factors that lead to exponential growth (or, in some cases, not.)
AirBnB, Uber and Facebook achieved billion-dollar valuations because they unlocked demand.
People rented out second homes and bedrooms, became private drivers, and shared more than gossip online. These products extracted latent demand hidden within the existing alternative.
Stop and think of the impact of unlocking new paths to growth. And discovering it's potentially exponential.
That's why I stopped my search for problems and started working with the theory of alternatives.
It's been easier said than done. I've learned there are three keys to translating this theory into practice.
Locating the right adopters.
Learning the crucial, change-enabling facets of the existing way.
Leveraging those pivot points to present a better way.
The outcome: You cause a switch. That's innovation.
After six years of putting this theory into practice, I'm ready to teach it.
You're invited to spend 60 minutes learning about a program that pivots from a pointless search for problems to practicing a proven theory.
This private preview is free. You can sign up using the button below.
Press on,
...Jerry
p.s. I am not the first to apply this. I've learned these methods from a master Ash Maurya and following the writings of Bob Moesta.