Is my startup solving a problem?

Every successful startup solves a problem. That could be:

• Difficulty in finding a driver that will not overcharge
• Difficulty in finding a place to stay for a couple of nights in a foreign city
• High rates for currency exchange

Sometimes it is easy to forget how the world looked before a revolutionary product changed it completely. How things worked before Uber, AirBnB, Revolut and countless others. The thing that separated wheat from chaff was that the successful ones solved real problems.

I am not an expert in the problem, or solution evaluation. Although I do recommend exploration of some high quality materials available online. My favorite source is the Y Combinator library[1,2,3]. Y Combinator is a Silicon Valley startup accelerator with a number of successful stories in their portfolio. They have made a lot of their expertise available online for everybody. Second resource that I recommend is Simon Sinek The Golden Circle presentation and the book Start with WHY. The idea emphasizes the importance of the reason why we do things. In the startup world this is the problem a company is trying to solve.

This blog's intention is to provide digestible chunks of theory with practice, that’s why we will explore just two concepts related to the problem definition.

Get feedback quickly

Countless startups fail because the problem they are trying to solve is too small, does not exist, or people are not willing to pay for it. That’s why the team should get a confirmation as soon as possible: “There are people having the problem, wanting to pay for the solution”. The best way to do it is try to solve the problem manually, without elaborate systems and months spent in design and development.

It is tempting for technical people to jump to implementation, however I don’t advise it. I strongly believe that it is paramount for startup engineers to understand the problem. This way we can bring a lot of innovation to the table and handle priority shifts and pivots better. Being a startup engineer is very different than being an engineer in a big company. In a big company an engineer can just do what they are told, in a startup engineer has to know why things are happening.

There are a number of tools that can get the confirmation needed, for example low-code Retool (I wouldn’t use it for customer facing applications), Zapier for integrations, or social media like Facebook groups, or Instagram profiles. There is no shame in trying a hacky solution if it gets the job done. Meaning provides validation, builds community, or customer base for the future product. Of course we do not always get the validation we expected, what then? We can stick to the plan anyway, pivot, or look for another idea. There are a number of problems out there, a number of ideas, attachment clouds, judgement. I get overly excited about a new business idea around once a week, but I run it through my friends and family for a sanity check. At this point I get honest, (even harsh I am pretty sure they are fed up with me🙂) feedback, but it is good, cause I can move to the next idea. For those who struggle with attachment I recommend writing down and evaluating 100 ideas on paper, before starting the work on one.

Practice

In this article series we will work on an imaginary problem, picked in a way we can walk through the full lifecycle, without messing with someone else’s actual business. I also want to describe my process here, so no one gets a feeling that I came up with all of that in the first spot, so please bear with me 🙂.

Journey to the Golden circle and back

I decided to explore the problem by using the Golden Circle concept, to understand how far it can take me, and if it is going to be beneficial to the process. The concept introduced by Simon Sinek in his famous Ted Talk outlines the way great leaders and companies structure their work and communicate with customers. It consists of:

• What - What the organization does in the day to day business
• How - How an organization achieves goals and make it special
• Why - Why an organization does the thing in the first place

I had a bad start because I started with What. The Initial idea was “to build a marketplace for plants”. It is a one sentence statement, nothing exciting, very focused on the solution. I would place it on the outermost rings of the golden circle. I decided to explore it more in search for gold; why did I want to build this marketplace in the first place? I thought it was an easy question, however it took me a few iterations to formulate it better.

One of the iterations was “Plants deserve a second chance”. It was definitely a step forward, a marketplace was supposed to be just a solution to give plants a second chance. However I still failed to articulate why they needed the second chance.

The final step, that I was satisfied with (at least in the context of this article) was: “It is difficult to grow plants, that is why we want to help plant owners to grow their plants and keep them alive”. I liked it because it included the problem statement “it is difficult to grow plants” and the target audience, the plant owners.

Having the why for our imaginary startup, I decided to walk back through. How I want to address the problem:

• By educating people how to take care of the plants
• By giving plants a second chance

Knowing why and how, I ran a brainstorming session and we came up with the following ideas on what we can do about it:

• Build a plant library including
• Plant sickness
• Difficulty to keep
• Poisonous (for animal owners)
• Build a plant exchange application
• Build an application to help people find the right plant for them
• Build an expert network
• Build a community as a Facebook group
• Start an Instagram feeds displaying different plants and what’s best for them
• Workshops about plants
• Plant pot exchange shops

This is a lot more than an initial “plants exchange marketplace”!

Feedback

At this point we had a number of ideas and we could pick the easiest one, to get the confirmation we needed. For me, starting an Instagram feed, or a Facebook group sounds easiest and has the benefit of connecting to an existing network of people. There are plenty of materials available online committed to helping people create a social network presence, that is why I will leave this part to the experts.

A disclaimer is that I am not going to build a real plant oriented community on this blog, as this is not my area of expertise. However I wanted to highlight that there are ways to start small, without a significant investment, to get the feedback.

Summary

The journey in search for why was more exciting and insightful than I expected. It helped me understand the big underlying problem and broaden my perspective on possible solutions and revealed ways to get feedback quicker.

If you liked the article I encourage you to subscribe to the blog, so you can easily follow our journey to build an MVP. I also encourage you to engage on LinkedIn and Facebook.

References

1. Michael Seibel (Y - Combinator) - How to Plan an MVP
2. Michael Seibel (Y - Combinator) - How to get and test startup ideas
3. Y - Combinator - library
4. Simon Sinek - How great leaders inspire action
5. Simon Sinek - Start with Why
6. Peter Thiel - Zero to One