One problem with the meme that building products is about "solving problems" is that the biggest successes often come from recognizing very vague "problems" oth

One problem with the meme that building products is about "solving problems" is that the biggest successes often come from recognizing very vague "problems" others don't, in the form of seeing fundamentally better ways of doing something -- without being able to grasp up-front the long term concrete benefits. You need to build and ship to learn them. So in those scenarios, people don't recognize what you are doing as a "real" problem, so it ends up being hindsight bias when it's recognized as such. An example in the article cited was Wikipedia: Wikipedia didn't "solve a problem" with existing encyclopedias, it recognized there was just a fundamentally better way to collect objective knowledge and disseminate it -- most people at the time were scratching their heads about what the point was, since from their perspective encyclopedias worked perfectly well within the scope of their design goals. I think the mental model that you should always be working on software where you have people directly telling you the problem they want to solve is a poor one -- it's great for a variety of domains, but often people want a faster horse or don't even see a problem with their existing horse. Even when you think you are recognizing a problem others don't see yet -- it can require a leap of faith to begin exploring to see if you can iterate and react to discovering something with big promise.