The Startup Graveyard Is Full of Problem Solvers - Minid.net<br>July 30, 2019<br>The Startup Graveyard Is Full of Problem Solvers

Everyone in the startup graveyard solved a real problem. This is about why that was not enough, and what the survivors did differently. The companies that last are not the ones with the best solutions. They are the ones people cannot imagine quitting.

For centuries, the town square clock told everyone what time it was. Nobody had that problem. Then a watchmaker started selling something nobody asked for: the time on your wrist. It solved no new problem. The clock in the square was still there, doing its job just fine, thank you very much. What the watchmaker did was something else entirely: he convinced people that not wearing one meant falling behind somehow. And it worked. That was not the work of someone who solved a problem. That was the work of someone who invented a need. And once the need existed, others followed. Not to solve the original problem, but to expand the need itself. Sport watches, dress watches, dive watches, luxury watches. None of them competed with the town clock. All of them competed for a place on your wrist. The need had become the market.

“Find a problem and solve it” is probably the most repeated piece of startup advice in existence. It sounds sensible, actionable, and reassuringly simple. It is also incomplete. During one of my sessions as a mentor at Google Launchpad in Romania, I asked a group of startups a question: is a good product one that solves a problem, or one that satisfies an important need better than anything else? The distinction may sound academic, but it changes how you think about products, markets, competition, and growth. I arrived at this question after building several service-oriented companies. Some failed despite having perfectly reasonable technical solutions. The technology worked. The teams worked. The supposed problem simply did not matter enough to the market.

That is the uncomfortable part founders tend to avoid. A problem can exist without being important. It can be annoying without being urgent. It can be technically interesting while remaining commercially irrelevant. When a product becomes part of something people consider necessary, the situation changes. Usage is more frequent, retention tends to be stronger, and growth can happen through behavior rather than persuasion. You are no longer reminding customers that they have a problem. They already know why they want the product.

The problem with solving problems

Startups usually begin their pitches with some variation of the same sentence:

We are solving a huge problem.

Sometimes they are. More often, they are solving something the founders have decided must be a huge problem. Those are not the same thing.

In many of the pitches I have reviewed, the team had spent months building a solution before having meaningful conversations with real customers. The problem had been validated internally, usually through enthusiasm, assumptions, and a slide containing a suspiciously large market estimate. Then they talked to people. The potential customers did not care enough. Some agreed that the problem existed but had no intention of paying to solve it. Others had already created a workaround. A few did not recognize the problem at all.

When I told founders, “I would never use this,” or simply asked, “Why would I use it?” the reaction was often a combination of skepticism and confusion. They had become so familiar with their own reasoning that they could no longer imagine someone rejecting it. This pattern kept appearing, and it made me question the conventional advice. Solving a problem is not a bad objective, but it is not proof that a product deserves to exist. It certainly does not guarantee a sustainable business.

Not everyone has your problem

The first limitation is obvious: not everyone has the problem you are solving.

Founders often describe a narrow inconvenience as if it were a universal condition. Once they start speaking with customers, they discover that the problem affects a small group, appears infrequently, or depends on a very specific context. There is nothing wrong with serving a niche. A small market can support an excellent business. The mistake is believing that a niche problem automatically creates a massive opportunity. The more specific the problem, the more carefully you need to examine the size, frequency, and willingness to pay behind it. A painful event that happens once every five years may be less valuable than a minor inconvenience that appears every morning.

Frequency matters. Context matters. Priority matters. The fact that a problem exists is only the beginning of the conversation.

People may not know they have it

The second limitation is awareness. People are not conscious of every security, health, financial, or technical problem affecting them. They usually notice a problem when it produces a visible consequence. Until then, it...