Fall in Love With the Problem, Not the Solution

There’s a phrase in startup land that really resonates with me: stay close to the problem.

As an entrepreneur, it’s easy to become enamored with ideas, visions, and what could be. While all of those are important, what ultimately matters the vast majority of the time is solving someone’s problem. It’s providing a solution to a business issue, identifying something that needs a better way of being done, and delivering that new way.

Entrepreneurs often want to go off into a room and start building. It’s fun to get lost in your ideas. It’s fun to build an application and see a tremendous amount of progress without being beholden to feedback or input from others. It’s easy to get excited about your own work.

The huge issue, of course, is that what you want in the product isn’t necessarily what the market wants. The longer you spend operating in a vacuum, the more likely you are to veer off course from what is actually needed.

By staying close to the problem, even when you don’t have the perfect solution or a clear answer, you develop greater understanding, gather more data, and build more empathy for what needs to get done. All of this feedback results in regular realignment with the solution the market actually needs.

In today’s world of AI, it’s even easier to go off on a quest without the necessary market input. When you ask AI questions, it is designed to give you answers. Whether those answers are correct or not, it will continue providing them. The deeper you go down the rabbit hole, the more information it will feed you.

The problem is that you may be reinforcing something that isn’t market-driven. You get the satisfaction of receiving a confident answer from the machine, but the machine is not the human being who will ultimately decide whether to buy your product.

There’s another saying in startup land that still resonates today: get out of the building.

Go see the customer. Go see the prospect. Talk to partners. Learn face to face. While this creates more effort and friction, it also reduces the information loss that occurs when seeking answers secondhand.

One of the best ways for entrepreneurs to stay close to the customer is through consulting. By doing real work for the customer, even when the work isn’t exactly where the entrepreneur wants the product or vision to go, the entrepreneur develops a much deeper understanding of the problem.

When there is a relationship in which real value is exchanged, rather than merely a free trial, the customer will provide better information. The customer will share their pain in a deeper way, and the entrepreneur will become embedded in the organization in a way that allows them to fully understand what needs to be solved.

My recommendation for entrepreneurs is to stay close to the problem and remain flexible with the solution. Figure out how to get direct feedback and ideas without going through a middle layer. Figure out how to charge a little bit of money so that the relationship is more serious and the feedback is higher quality.

Stay close to the problem. Let the solution evolve from there.