9 ms·

How Generalised Problems Kill Startups

143 points by davesuperman 10y ago

TeMPOraL 10y ago
TL;DR: 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.
- andy_ppp 10y ago
  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!
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- cestith 10y ago
  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.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    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.
yeldarb 10y ago
What are some examples of this phenomenon in action?
- ronilan 10y ago
  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
  - icebraining 10y ago
    That's a mission, not a problem. They had a general mission, but they were solving very specific problems with Search. Wave, on the other hand, is a good example of a product made to solve a general problem.
- wpietri 10y ago
  A classic example is Webvan. 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.
  - Nition 10y ago
    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.
fiatjaf 10y ago
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.
- wpietri 10y ago
  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.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- hyperpape 10y ago
  "consumers purchase to solve a specific problem." This was in the original post, and highlighted in green.
- frandroid 10y ago
  ...and why would anyone buy your product? Solving a problem is a damn good place to start.
- sharemywin 10y ago
  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.
- tadfisher 10y ago
  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.
javitury 10y ago
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. Which reminds me of http://imgur.com/gallery/t0XHtgJ 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.
- davesuperman 10y ago
  This is my new favourite gif of all time.
- gridspy 10y ago
  Or as a video http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2gp98t http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2gp98t Awesome. Love it!
- AznHisoka 10y ago
  is that Walter White?
  - icebraining 10y ago
    No, it's Hal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_in_the_Middle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_in_the_Middle (yes, it's the same actor)
kevlar1818 10y ago
The real problem Medium is trying to solve is not to get you to read interesting things, but to grow their brand. No, I will not "tweet this".
- a13n 10y ago
  I don't think Medium put that there, I think the author did... You can embed tweets directly into Medium posts.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - rdiddly 10y ago
    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
    - nandemo 10y ago
      I hear you, but there's a insightful saying that explains that: "Quoting yourself is cool, as long as you're cool" -- nandemo
- gfosco 10y ago
  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.
- TheGRS 10y ago
  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.
kronion 10y ago
Reminds me of the quote by V. N. Vapnik: "One should solve the problem directly and never solve a more general problem as an intermediate step."
- davesuperman 10y ago
  Absolutely love this! I'd love it if you left this as a comment so I can come back to it.
- olewhalehunter 10y ago
  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).
  - gridspy 10y ago
    Perhaps Vapnik was speaking from experience when he said that "generalized problems suck."
  - tnecniv 10y ago
    Generality is relative.
tedmiston 10y ago
> This is paradoxical; it’s easier to pitch a general problem, while consumers purchase to solve a specific problem. I'm not understanding what the paradox is here. This seems intuitive to me.
- davesuperman 10y ago
  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.
  - tedmiston 10y ago
    I mean that's how so many startups work though. 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.
    - davesuperman 10y ago
      Well, that's the story winners are incentivised to tell - they had some grand plan and every step was designed perfectly to lead to the next.
ikeboy 10y ago
>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.
- callmeed 10y ago
  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.
  - askafriend 10y ago
    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.
    - tinco 10y ago
      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.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
gsharma 10y ago
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.
kristianp 10y ago
When we spend so much time resuming the details, it’s easy to forget them altogether. "Resuming the details"? Should that be revising?
thallukrish 10y ago
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.

143 points by davesuperman 10y ago

TL;DR: 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.

andy_ppp 10y ago
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!
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
cestith 10y ago
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.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  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.

yeldarb 10y ago

What are some examples of this phenomenon in action?

ronilan 10y ago
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
- icebraining 10y ago
  That's a mission, not a problem. They had a general mission, but they were solving very specific problems with Search. Wave, on the other hand, is a good example of a product made to solve a general problem.
wpietri 10y ago
A classic example is Webvan. 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.
- Nition 10y ago
  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.

fiatjaf 10y ago

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.

wpietri 10y ago
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.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hyperpape 10y ago
"consumers purchase to solve a specific problem." This was in the original post, and highlighted in green.
frandroid 10y ago
...and why would anyone buy your product? Solving a problem is a damn good place to start.
sharemywin 10y ago
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.
tadfisher 10y ago
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.

javitury 10y ago

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. Which reminds me of http://imgur.com/gallery/t0XHtgJ 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.

davesuperman 10y ago
This is my new favourite gif of all time.
gridspy 10y ago
Or as a video http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2gp98t http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2gp98t Awesome. Love it!
AznHisoka 10y ago
is that Walter White?
- icebraining 10y ago
  No, it's Hal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_in_the_Middle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_in_the_Middle (yes, it's the same actor)

kevlar1818 10y ago

The real problem Medium is trying to solve is not to get you to read interesting things, but to grow their brand. No, I will not "tweet this".

a13n 10y ago
I don't think Medium put that there, I think the author did... You can embed tweets directly into Medium posts.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- rdiddly 10y ago
  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
  - nandemo 10y ago
    I hear you, but there's a insightful saying that explains that: "Quoting yourself is cool, as long as you're cool" -- nandemo
gfosco 10y ago
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.
TheGRS 10y ago
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.

kronion 10y ago

Reminds me of the quote by V. N. Vapnik: "One should solve the problem directly and never solve a more general problem as an intermediate step."

davesuperman 10y ago
Absolutely love this! I'd love it if you left this as a comment so I can come back to it.
olewhalehunter 10y ago
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).
- gridspy 10y ago
  Perhaps Vapnik was speaking from experience when he said that "generalized problems suck."
- tnecniv 10y ago
  Generality is relative.

tedmiston 10y ago

> This is paradoxical; it’s easier to pitch a general problem, while consumers purchase to solve a specific problem. I'm not understanding what the paradox is here. This seems intuitive to me.

davesuperman 10y ago
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.
- tedmiston 10y ago
  I mean that's how so many startups work though. 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.
  - davesuperman 10y ago
    Well, that's the story winners are incentivised to tell - they had some grand plan and every step was designed perfectly to lead to the next.

ikeboy 10y ago

>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.

callmeed 10y ago
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.
- askafriend 10y ago
  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.
  - tinco 10y ago
    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.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

gsharma 10y ago

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.

kristianp 10y ago

When we spend so much time resuming the details, it’s easy to forget them altogether. "Resuming the details"? Should that be revising?

thallukrish 10y ago

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.