How to find a problem worth solving
Successful products & startups solve big global problems, so how do you find them?
đ Hey, product builders! Itâs Matt and James here.
Welcome to the first of our ProductKit newsletters, which is part of the PM Playbook that you downloaded recently. Weâre building a community of kick-ass product builders & founders, this isnât something you want to miss out on.
Each week weâll tackle reader questions about product, startups, and venture capital. Send us your questions and in return, weâll humbly offer actionable real-talk advice.
On to this weekâs question! đ
Q: I want to build a product but Iâm trying to find the right customer problem to solve, and how to validate it. Do you have any advice?
Successful products solve big hairy problems. Why? When your target customers face this problem, they go looking for someone or something to solve it. This is the moment your product has to meet their needs.
âMake something people wantâ - Y Combinator
But how do you find a problem worth solving? Itâs not easy, and often theyâre right in front of you without realising.
Uber is a great example of this. Before Uber, most people didnât like getting taxis to travel from A to B. They were overpriced, often didnât take credit cards, and the customer experience wasnât great.
But there was no alternative. Most of us didnât even realise this was a big problem worth solving until Uber came along and did it for us.
đ„ So today weâll take you through our step-by-step process for identifying and validating problems to solve.
This is a process weâve refined over the past 18 months, each month choosing an industry problem and going deep into it. At the end of the month, we either "kill" (the idea sucks and we no longer want to progress it) or "keep going" (there's something here and we want to progress it further).
This is a great exercise to do full-time or outside of your day job. At worst, youâll learn about a new industry and meet interesting people. At best, youâll find a big hairy problem and build a startup to solve it.
We hope this post gives you a better sense of where successful products come from, and thus where to get started đ
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Top 5 takeaways
Big hairy problems can often be right in front of you, sometimes you need to adjust your thinking to see them
Validate your problem with at least 10 people to ensure youâre not building for yourself or nobody
Test your solution as quickly as possible but remember to be problem-focused, and solution agnostic
Fail fast, take your learnings and move onto the next problem if you realise this isnât worth solving
Letâs dive into it.
Step 1: Find the problem
Big hairy problems are everywhere, we just need to train our eyes to look for them.
Start by thinking about your day-to-day:
What frustrates you frequently?
What wonât your friends or colleagues stop complaining about?
Whatâs a really bad customer experience you had recently?
Whatâs a global trend thatâs taking off, and where are the bottlenecks preventing it from moving faster? E.g. international hiring bottlenecks preventing remote work
Write this problem down.
Step 2: Validate the problem
Next, you need to ensure youâre not the only person that faces this problem, otherwise, you risk building a product for yourself or nobody. There are a few ways you can do this:
Online research: read blogs, product reviews, social media, and research papers to understand whether this is a problem that many people are complaining about online
Talk to customers: find 10 people (outside of your inner circle) that you believe face this problem and interview them to understand whether this is true and why itâs a problem for them
Competitor analysis: Google search keywords of the problem (e.g. âalternative to taxiâ for Uber) to see if there are any players out there solving this problem
During your validation try to answer questions like:
Who faces this problem? Gives you an idea of your target customer
Why is this a problem? Tells you the root cause of the problem
How do people solve this problem right now? Even if thereâs no obvious competitors, there might be other substitutes or manual solutions (e.g. calling a cab vs. Uber)
Why is nobody solving it? Tells you if the market is a blue or red ocean.
This will give you an idea of whether the problem is real, and its magnitude. Going through this validation process wonât guarantee your productâs success, but it will radically increase your chances.
Step 3: Test your solution
Once you have a good understanding of why the problem exists, who faces it, and whoâs currently solving it, you can start investing effort into building a prototype.
Use a design tool like Figma to quickly create a prototype that you can show to potential customers and get real feedback on. The design doesnât have to be perfect, the purpose is to create something visual that you can have a solid conversation about with the customer.
Show your customer the prototype and ask them:
What do you like about it?
What donât you like about it?
What would you change?
Whatâs missing?
After enough customer interviews, youâll start to see patterns in what features are important. Use this feedback to iterate on your prototype until youâre confident it meets customerâs needs.
If youâre game, you can take this a step further and use a no-code tool like Bubble or Pory to create an MVP that customers can start using.
If a customer isnât willing to pay for the product once the full functionality is ready, this could be an early indicator that the problem youâre solving isnât important enough for them. But youâd rather find this out early, rather than spending hundreds of hours of time and money to only find out the same later, right?
Step 4: Fail fast
By this point, youâll have generated enough customer insight to know if itâs a real problem and whether youâre passionate about solving it. Now itâs time to decide whether you want to continue investing effort or not.
There are 2 questions we find useful here:
Is this a "vitamin" or a "painkiller"? Are you solving a problem that's big enough for people, that they're willing to pay for and use often? Or is it better as a feature of an existing product they already use?
Is this problem going to be around in 20 years and growing? Are you betting on a growing industry that is going to increase in demand in the future? Or will your business be wiped out due to changing consumer preferences and incoming technologies?
Thereâs nothing wrong with âkillingâ a problem, itâs actually a good thing! Youâll save time, money, and can take your learnings onto the next problem to find success.
If you decide to keep going you should keep obsessing over your target customers and iterating on your product, as you work towards product-market fit đ
Wrapping upâŠ
Finding the right problem to solve isnât easy, but itâs the critical first step in building a successful product. Use this process to find a problem that customers are itching for a solution and that you are passionate about solving.
We hope this post gives you a better sense of where successful products come from, and thus where to get started đ
If youâre finding this newsletter valuable, consider sharing it with friends, or subscribing if you havenât already đ
Lastly, good feedback or questions that you want us to tackle? Please add here.
đ Further study
đ§ Inspiration for the week ahead
Read: Lessons from a billionaire CEO who canât focus on anything for more than 4 hours
Read: The inside story of how HelloFresh clawed its way to the top
Watch: Naval Ravikantâs on how to get leverage using code and media
Keep building awesome things đ
Matt & James