Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution | Hacker News Reader

Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution

starterstory.com

246 pointspatwalls20 comments

“It seemed like a tough proposition. I would need thousands of merchants paying at least $20/month to create a successful business. I didn’t think it would be possible, until I came across the Bold Commerce story. This four person team in Winnipeg, Manitoba, had almost the same story as us. “Merchants first, identified gaps in the app store, and deciding to build apps on Shopify. Bold Commerce now employs almost 300 people, with no outside funding to date, and with their growth solely on the Shopify platform. This case study was enough to convince us to take the leap, I wanted us to be like Bold.”

Online Payments space is big. A company built on Shopify platform just for Shopify users with 300 employees!

Even in my company (JotForm - a form builder) payment integrations is just one of our minor features and we process over 500M/year on payment forms people create.

Bold Commerce has had some impressive growth but it’s worth noting that they are intentionally inflating that number as much as possible in hopes of a quick IPO.

They’re notorious in my city for bringing the wages of developers down, I’ve been told as low as 27K USD salary.

Though that shouldn’t detract from their success, clearly they’re doing something right.

Oh man, JotForm is O.G. SAAS for me. I used to use it all the time back around 2011. Thanks for making my work back then so much less tedious!

Yes, I remember comparing JotForm vs WuFoo back in 2008, back when the norm for forms on small websites was custom server-side code.

OP here. Very cool. Yes Payments space is huge. I'm looking forward to the future of payments for sure. Will checkout JotForm, congrats on your success brother.

Keep your features close and your problems closer.

I like this spin - im stealing it like the dirty thief i am

Well said. That's definitely going on our wall.

Remember attribution.

This should go on the wall at probably every startup.

Time is better spent trying to find a solution to a problem than a problem for a solution.

Not sure that the 'Identify, Test, Build, Measure framework' is yours to take credit for, but other than that, it's a good read!

The only thing worse than not fully solving the problem is fully solving the problem (because then you have no where to go, as competitors catch up).

Terrible advice.

You shouldn’t “fall in love” with anything

Everything is always changing. Consumer “problems”, their goals, their constraints.. its all changing, all the time.

Instead, commit yourself to delivering progress to consumers, and adapting to what that entails

It sounds like you read the headline, and not the article. In fact, it seems like you didn't even scroll down, to look at the images. This one [0] in particular caught my eye.

[0] https://scontent-yyz1-1.cdninstagram.com/vp/72c07367b0d95187...

I read the article.

It’s bad advice.

Here’s a famous paper on why:

http://www.sympoetic.net/Managing_Complexity/complexity_file...

i fail to see how the difficulty of problems and in particular how "commit yourself to delivering progress to consumers, and adapting to what that entails" make "not falling in love with the solution" bad advice.

you are absolutely right that the real focus should be to improve the lives of people. but that is tangential to focusing on problems vs solutions.

when someone is in love with their solution, the first step is to realize that they need to focus on the problem, and then the next is that they need to focus on the people whose problems they are trying to solve.

so the advice in the article is ok, it could probably be better...

greetings, eMBee.

My favorite Bezos advice is "Invest in the constants". He suggest that things like customers wanting quicker/cheaper shipping have been constant over duration of his business. In general, I suspect human nature is approximately constant relative to the velocity of technology.

> Instead, commit yourself to delivering progress to consumers

Sounds like your advice is to fall in love with consumers. Which sound sensible, but still is falling in love.

hmm... but we can parrying the problem in our life

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