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What rings true for me in this article is the notion that, as a founder, it’s better to pick a problem space than it is to pick a solution. Amazon chose to live
by ttul 4y ago
What rings true for me in this article is the notion that, as a founder, it’s better to pick a problem space than it is to pick a solution. Amazon chose to live in the problem space of how to bring consumers more products, more conveniently, at a lower price. Geico chose a similar goal but in insurance.
Technical founders often focus on a particular cool way of solving a problem and burn lots of capital building that thing. Sometimes the thing is the right thing and everyone makes money. But sometimes it’s not. Yet if you stick with the same problem space for long enough, and aren’t too connected to your particular solution, I think you have a greater chance of succeeding.
Okay, go ahead and poke at my pontifications now. I’m ready.
- barumrho 4y agoI generally agree with your statement, but it depends on what your goal is. Ultimately, do you want to build a successful business or bring a (specific) new technology into the world? I suspect the former is true more often and it can lead to innovations along the way, but there is nothing wrong with the latter.
- yobbo 4y agoDepends on perspective. What is one thing and what is a problem space. Is a microprocessor or a mobile phone one thing in many different problem spaces?
- TuringTest 4y agoBusinesses are not built on things they sell, they are built on the customer problems they help solve. If you build microprocessors, you better understand how your clients are using them to create electronic devices, and provide all the services and documentation they may need. A less potent microprocessor paired with a website that perfectly explains how to use it and what use cases it supports will win any day over a more powerful chip that no one understands.
- yobbo 4y agoYes, but the investment in things can be so great that it becomes impossible to change according to customer preferences. The business then has to find new problem spaces for their things.
- choxi 4y agoI think maybe the fundamental hard thing about startups is that you can’t ignore the problem space or the solution space. It’s not like Bezos was passionate about selling cheap books for years before Amazon, he saw that this new Internet thing was going mainstream and building on top of this new tech was the premise of the business more than selling books cheaply and quickly was. Most of the startup opportunities in the last couple decades were built off the back of several deeper tech breakthroughs like mass mobile phone adoption and virtualization. I think more founders have been successful just riding these tech waves than sticking to a problem space. Brian Chesky didn’t work in hotel management and Travis Kalanack didn’t work in transportation. They were just familiar with cutting edge consumer tech and applied it to problems they had no familiar with before they started.
- pyinstallwoes 4y agoBezos built Amazon to solve the traveling salesman problem.
- bmitc 4y agoI think this also points out the timing aspect. The big "breakthrough" companies (breakthrough in terms of capitalistic successes) happened since people were in the proverbial right place and time with the right idea.
- jbaczuk 4y agoGreat observations!
- noobker 4y agoI was once at a talk with several medical technology founders. One of them namechecked specific legislation that enabled their solution to come to market. And so I asked, "How do you survive if only 1 law is prying open the opportunity for your business?" They replied that their business exists to solve a need -- a need that exists regardless of the specific regulations. Should the regulations shift, a company motivated beyond a specific solution will adapt to keep meeting its customers' needs.
- Moodles 4y agoTotally agree. For a negative example see all the companies desperately trying to find sone problem for blockchain to solve.
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- nathias 4y agothis is a great strategy if you already have near infinite resources
- lazide 4y agoWell, except what you’re describing fundamentally leaves the hardest problem unsolved. Where to start (concretely) and what you’re actually going to do, and if it will work for customers in a way they will pay you more for it than it costs to do. Discovering that, and if it is going to work, is what a startup does. You can’t do it without deciding on something concrete eventually to deliver, and pursuing it with enough vigor to get a workable product in someone’s hands. Tech startups that build an entire product without understanding the space are leaning too heavily in one direction. Sales led startups that get a customer base and start collecting money without a concrete product plan are leaning too hard in the other (and even more, add big red flags for scams and fraud). Doing all the things and integrating it into a workable collection of customer needs they’ll pay to solve, along with an actual solution that works to solve it, while not going bankrupt in the process is why startups are hard. Not being a scammer or committing fraud in the process? Harder still! It’s the unknown unknowns and navigating all the bullshit on the way that also make the risk very high. Fundamentally, it’s impossible to know everything until you’ve already done it, and by then, it’s already changed under you.
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- kmonsen 4y agoIsn't Amazon's cash cow AWS which is not in that problem space?
- SatvikBeri 4y agoAWS is Amazon's most successful business, but they were wildly successful even without it. AWS only launched in 2006, 12 years into the company. Today, most estimates I could find put AWS at 25%-50% of Amazon's worth.
- kmonsen 4y agoSo 25-50% of the company is not in the problem space, at least. Doesn't sound good for the stay in the problem space theory.
- aquafox 4y ago> Technical founders often focus on a particular cool way of solving a problem and burn lots of capital building that thing. This nicely summarizes the current hype in Bitcoin or deep learning.
- cpeterso 4y agoSometimes quoted as "Fall in love with a problem, not a solution."