My first venture, Sampa, closed its doors in August of last
year. Since then, I’ve been forcing myself into figuring out what’s next.
Taking care of Seattle 2.0 can consume quite a bit of hours from my day, but
I’m a technology guy and I want to solve bigger problems in the world. Then,
how do you find good ideas?
Josh Petersen of 43 Things gave a great talk on the topic of finding good
ideas at the StartupDay 2009.
Over the last 4 months or so, it became clear to me that
most entrepreneurs, including myself, create a business out of a personal
problem followed by a great idea on how to solve it and then we just fall in
love with the solution and said solution becomes the goal, not solving the
problem anymore. Got it?
There is a big difference between a startup that’s trying to
create a photo-sharing site and a startup that wants to help people share
stories through pictures. Most startup might start as a problem-focused but
they quickly become solution without a purpose.
For the last 6 months I’ve been “pitching” friends,
entrepreneurs, investors, ex-coworkers on ideas for my next startup, seeking their
feedback. A couple of months ago I told Andy Sack about one solution for an
untapped market and he’s response was basically that he believes on the
problem, but he wasn’t sure the solution was right. Paraphrasing it: “This can
be the right solution or not, I don’t know”. That statement opened a door in my
brain to think more broadly about the problem itself.
Do I want to create product X for the sake of product X, or
do I want to solve the problem with market Y? A solution in search of a market
is not much of a solution at all.
A nice side-effect of thinking deeply about the problem (and
not the solution) is that you quickly identify all the substitutes and
alternatives to solving that problem. In other words, is my solution for the
problem a 10% increment over a substitute, or is it a 10x improvement?
My question to you (entrepreneur) is this: Did you fall in
love with the technology you created or are you still in love with the
problem-space?