Choosing The Right Problems
Why Thinking Critically About What To Solve Matters
Every business idea starts from an insight into a meaningful need that is not being met. A startup’s success often hinges on its ability to identify, understand, and solve the underlying problem. The core customer problem becomes a North Star, guiding how decisions are made, how resources are used, and how solutions are developed. It becomes a driving force influencing individual thinking, organizational strategy, and even the path toward achieving commercial success.
Often, startups make the mistake of creating a solution in search of a problem. This is when they lose sight of the real problem, instead prioritizing what they believe to be an ideal solution. As a result, they build a product that fails to strongly resonate with customers because they created the version of the solution they wanted, instead of what the customers actually needed. The right problem to solve is one that deeply matters to a clear audience and one that the team is uniquely equipped to solve. What you decide to focus on becomes the foundation of your subsequent efforts, so you need to choose wisely because not all problems are worth solving.
Start With Empathy
Empathy helps us determine where the most important problems lie.
Empathy plays a critical role in identifying the right problems to solve. We use empathy to understand people’s experiences from their perspective, rather than our own. It involves understanding their needs, observing their behavior, and uncovering their challenges. The focus is on gaining context on their actions, thoughts, and feelings (through interviews, observations, surveys, etc.) and recognizing the moments of frustration they experience.
Startups need to imagine the customer's perspective to figure out how they can meaningfully improve their current experience. They have to understand what really matters to them and why before they start thinking about what a great solution could look like. They need to define a people-centric problem that is valuable to the customer and the business to justify the commitment of time, energy, and resources. While solving the problem should be worth it for the business, the primary goal is still to address a real user need.
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Identify Painful Problems
Discover critical problems that have an outsized impact on a customer’s experience.
Understand the dimensions of a compelling problem.
Customers experience problems on multiple levels. It can be a minor nuisance or a major obstacle depending on the circumstances. Typically, the greater the need, the greater the demand for a solution and the willingness to pay. When you can assess how painful a customer problem is, you can effectively evaluate the opportunity it represents. We can examine problems through the lens of the customer by considering the following aspects of the problem, within the context of individual customers and the broader market:
Scale — Does it impact a significant number of people?
Emotion — Does it elicit a strong emotion from people?
Impact — Does it drain people’s time, energy, and resources?
Function — Does it affect a basic task that people need to do?
Priority — Does it relate to an urgent, critical need people have?
Frequency — Does it happen frequently enough to concern people?
Persistence — Will it continue to be a problem (in some form) in the long term?
Look for enduring problems tied to fundamental needs.
Problems that may be vitally important to customers today might not matter to them in the future. Their priorities, preferences, and perceptions can change, and the entire market landscape itself could evolve. While that’s unavoidable to some extent, and companies will certainly need to adapt to these shifts, it helps to identify core problems that will still be relevant in the long term. You can start by asking: Will this problem still matter in a year? 5 years? 10 years? While that is not an easy question to answer, it helps you start digging deeper until you can frame a customer-centric problem based on fundamental human needs.
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Figure out the problems you are uniquely suited to solve.
Not all problems are created equal. Every startup team possesses a set of skills, knowledge, and expertise. When these align with the problem, they can execute well and build a great solution because they have the right capabilities. However, when they are misaligned with the problem, the team will struggle with creating a product, no matter how talented they may be. Startups have to assess how and where they can leverage their strengths to enhance, improve, and accelerate execution because this creates a competitive advantage. This also improves the team’s motivation because they know they are working on challenges they are equipped to handle.
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Validate Before You Build
Before investing resources, ensure the problem is real and worth solving.
Many valuable problems don’t have scalable, commercially feasible solutions. Often startup teams get excited when they have identified a painful problem that customers are willing to pay to solve. They believe that have narrowed down the market and validated the demand, but before embarking on creating a solution they need to consider whether they can even build a solution that can turn into a viable business.
While there are many approaches to validation, they are generally trying to validate that you have identified a real, painful, and significant customer problem and that there’s a strong business case for solving it. Startup teams can evaluate whether they can and should be trying to solve the problem they have identified by rigorously questioning their likelihood of creating a successful solution:
Insight - Do we have some new, important insight into this problem?
Timing - Why is this addressing this important right now?
Feasibility - How challenging and complex will this be to solve?
Capabilities - Do we have the skills, knowledge, and resources to solve this?
Assumptions - What assumptions have we made? What are the critical risks?
Value - Can we build a profitable business around solving this problem?
Competition - How is the problem currently being addressed? How can we solve it differently? If the problem is unsolved, why is it unsolved?
Some Signs To Look For
The problem is personally meaningful.
The best problems to work on are the ones you personally struggle with. When you are a target customer for the solution you can empathise with other customers more effectively. You inherently understand their pain points, frustrations, and needs. You know what features matter and why, which eliminates a lot of the guesswork involved in interpreting what customers want. When you genuinely care about solving the problem, you’re also more likely to persist through challenges and convince potential users to believe in your vision.
It turns out it's much easier to start a successful company if you're making something you yourself want, instead of something other people want…when you're building for yourself, you can trust your intuition about what to build.
Customers react strongly when discussing the problem.
When you talk to customers about the problem you’re solving, their responses, reactions, and body language will tell if you’re onto something. A conversation is full of information that cannot be captured in surveys and statistics. You get to see how people feel. Sometimes, it might take them a while to recognize the problem, but when it clicks you should be able to see them have a moment of realization (an “aha” moment). They might even elaborate on the problem, sharing personal anecdotes, opinions, frustrations, etc. They may respond with enthusiasm, doubt, anger, or even apathy. However, by evaluating these conversations you can weed out the aspects of the problem that strongly resonate from those that don’t.
When you see people's eyes get big and they expose more whites to you, you're probably onto something… that's not a workflow thing, that's an excitement thing. But people often react that way when you're solving a really sharp problem for them.
— Oji Udezue, Picking sharp problems, increasing virality, and unique product frameworks
Smart, talented people are working on the same problem.
Competition in a market is a strong indicator of a meaningful problem, especially if big players are working on it. They have most likely spent time examining the same customer problems. While you can’t beat industry leaders at their own game, at least not at first, you can choose which games to play. Focus on the part of the problem that’s not being addressed, or being addressed in some suboptimal way. These areas are typically what startups and emerging players are focused on. Use the competition’s efforts to inform your own solution development process.
When something is really needed, you’ll find there are lots of very intelligent people at other organizations trying to build a version of it.
— Guillermo Rauch, Non-Obvious Signs of Early Startup Traction — And How to Spot Them
Other founders believe that the problem is worth solving.
While validating problems with customer feedback is important, sometimes it’s helpful to run your ideas past other founders because they can assess your ideas in ways that customers can’t. Founders understand the challenges of building a product and starting a company. They have an understanding of what separates ideas that work from those that don’t, having gone through the process themselves. If they find the problem compelling enough to solve, you know you have found something valuable.
With founders, I wasn’t asking, ‘Would you buy this?’ But instead, ‘Would you start this company? And what are the things that you think you might bump into?’
— Bob Moore, The Uncomfortable Truth: A 3X Founder's Guide to Intellectual Honesty
Conclusion
Choosing the right problems to solve is the cornerstone of a startup’s success. Problems represent opportunities you need to uncover and evaluate. You need to identify a meaningful problem and establish a strong business case before committing resources to solving it. You want something worth solving for your customers and your business. What you choose to focus on may determine your personal, professional, and business trajectory for years to come. Therefore, it’s worth spending the time to evaluate whether you have indeed narrowed down on the right problem before you embark on the journey of creating a solution.
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