How Generalised Problems Kill Startups
medium.dave-bailey.com
medium.dave-bailey.com
Which reminds me of http://imgur.com/gallery/t0XHtgJ
As a side note I think most of the problems don't have a unique solution, but have a set of solutions that lessen that problem to some degree. Some people tend to get lost finding the perfect solution for which they need perfect tools that don't exist.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2gp98t
Awesome. Love it!
(yes, it's the same actor)
I disagree. Sometimes it's because we see other people frustrated with something and think we can help, or more generally because we had an idea to provide value to some group of people without necessarily being in that group of people ourselves.
At the very least, another person's pain causes you pain via empathy or some sort of chain reaction. I had a successful website business that was born solely out of a friend's constant requests for updates. I hacked a CMS together and a business was born. His pain was getting his website updated–my pain was him bugging me.
Kalanick may have had a hard time hailing a cab...but that probably wasn't inconvenient enough to want him to devote his entire life to building a company solving that one specific problem that he randomly had in his life.
"Early on, when a reporter asked me how I came up with the idea for Anybots, I answered honestly that I made a list of all the ideas I thought might really change the world in the next 20 years, and picked the one I thought I could contribute most to. His eyes glazed over. It's unprintable."
A lot of people seem to take the "romantic origin story" as a template to follow, and waste a lot of time as a result.
Personal pain or recognition of a pattern of problem(s) that could be solved? This is an interesting point because if you limit yourself to simply solving your personal problems, these problems have to be experienced by either a large number of people (usually peers). Otherwise there is no real chance of a business.
I'd prefer to put this as, "solving a personal problem that many* other people face"*.
Uhh, we're all the same species living in one of a handful of large societies. Our personal or work problems are likely shared by thousands, millions, possibly even billions of other people.
No one is that weird or special of a snowflake.
I thought to myself "what is more addictive a product than big tobacco?". We all need food, and society is slowly changing with megatrends that make feeding yourself at home more of a hassle for quite a few of us (aging populations, people living solo or just with one partner, weird hours/urban living, commute fatigue, international travel, etc.). So ... why not try to automate a reasonable solution with fresh ingredients and mass-appeal? So far we haven't had problems getting people on board with the idea or menus, though some of our chef friends remain skeptical!
Gee, they must have sold a bootload of boots then!
> Recent scholarship confirms that merchants made far more money than miners during the Gold Rush. The wealthiest man in California during the early years of the rush was Samuel Brannan, a tireless self-promoter, shopkeeper and newspaper publisher. Brannan opened the first supply stores in Sacramento, Coloma, and other spots in the goldfields. Just as the rush began he purchased all the prospecting supplies available in San Francisco and re-sold them at a substantial profit.
> Some gold-seekers made a significant amount of money. On average, half the gold-seekers made a modest profit, after taking all expenses into account; economic historians have suggested that white miners were more successful than black, Indian, or Chinese miners. Most late arrivals made little or wound up losing money.
This was in the original post, and highlighted in green.
If we don't solve problems, we close ourselves off from this potential.
This is part of why the Lean Startup approach caused so much of an uproar. It has a lot of clear techniques for learning what actual customers want, and insists that people establish fast feedback loops with the real world.
That's especially important in hype-ish areas where people pursue investment. People often sell the idea. That isn't always bad, but it's easy to focus on the idea alone.
"Generalised problem" is a by-product of not talking to the right people. Talking with the target customers/users will lead to better understanding of the actual problem.
Wave, on the other hand, is a good example of a product made to solve a general problem.
The basic idea was that ecommerce was going to kill store-based commerce. The founder was talked out of selling absolutely everything and focused in on groceries. They spent a billion dollars building out warehouses, buying trucks, etc, etc. They solved the general problem of delivering groceries.
However, nobody buys a general solution. Each person picks a specific solution to their specific problems. And most people a) already had ways to get groceries they were happy enough with, and b) WebVan never was particularly great for anything, just adequate for a bunch of things. WebVan would have known this if they had started trying to solve the problem for, say, people living on a single block. But because they scaled up while solving a generalized problem, they were screwed.
This is in sharp contrast to Amazon, which started out with book sales, nailed that, and has spent 20 years gradually expanding to other products, markets, and approaches.
From Wikipedia:
> In September 2000, stockholders approved a $1.2B all stock buyout by the cash-rich competitor Webvan of the much larger HomeGrocer.com. HomeGrocer was rebranded to Webvan, the management team fired and the technology and processes converted to Webvan. The Webvan technology did not work very well and their execution was poor. Most telling, the eight different HomeGrocer facilities converted to Webvan saw overnight sales declines of one-third, then over 50% within two weeks and never recovered. Formerly profitable HomeGrocer facilities quickly ended up with significant losses. Studies of what happened after the merger were not kind to the original Webvan management who spent over $500M before going bankrupt less than a year later.
When we spend so much time resuming the details, it’s easy to forget them altogether.
I'm not understanding what the paradox is here. This seems intuitive to me.
You start with a big grand vision, find fit in a specific niche / market / vertical to solve a specific problem for a specific customer, then generalize it back to more customers and more verticals.
You have a very specific problem P you want to solve. It's too large when specified to pitch successfully, so you compress it with a destructive, one-way generalization function G, getting you a general problem G(P). You spend so much time pitching G(P) that you forget what P was.
The problem: customers don't want you solving G(P), they want you to solve P. But G is a one-way function, so you can't get P from G(P).
Solution: note the problem P down somewhere before you start pitching G(P). Reread the notes when you get your funding.
G(P) is going after a larger market than P, but is doing so with a diffuse focus on the general case. A specific solution that meets customers' needs much better for P is often disregarded on the way to something that more comfortably fits every case of G(P) but not P or P's siblings particularly well.
No, I will not "tweet this".
"Quoting yourself is cool, as long as you're cool" -- nandemo