If you don't solve a real problem people have, you will fail. People may not know they have the problem, but they must have it. If you can't articulate the pain, it's time to pivot.
I can come up with broad, hand-wavy justifications. But those justifications apply just as well to Blippy.
"It allowed people to share their recent purchases pretty much from anywhere at any time with minimum friction"
Twitter boomed primarily because its target early-adopters were precisely the kind of people who already had lots of followers to advertise to (celebrities, reporters/bloggers, "personalities", etc.), and who wanted a more streamlined, more informal, lower-expectation medium to push out their little updates. Twitter was such a channel, but although they were on it, their users weren't—so, since they were all of the getting-the-word-out bent, the next thing they all (simultaneously) got the word out about was Twitter itself. If not for this clever bit of social engineering, Twitter would never have become the "thing that comes after Facebook in 90% of sentences about social media."
i'm not sure i believe that this is the idea that spawned twitter.
I found it amusing at that time. Later I saw Twitter, and it was very similar.
So yes ,it does solve a problem: Broadcast short pieces of information to friends without having to start a conversation.
At least I think that was the original idea.
It allowed people to keep up to date with people and services they cared about in a format that they could quickly consume.
And if we don't know that we have the problem, how are we supposed to find out besides speculating and experimenting?
I'm sure Blippy thought they were improving people's lives somehow. They just guessed wrong. It happens.
I wouldn't say the only purpose of innovation is to relieve pain (even if I did just say it ;). Rather, humans are motivated by fairly basic things, and reducing pain and increasing pleasure are pretty much at the top (details come in defining those terms). If you can't identify what is going to motivate people to use your product, you are in trouble.
When I posted the parent comment, I thought about pulling out the reference to Blippy, because they may have done everything right and just had craptastic luck.
It doesn't mean "solve a known problem" because people aren't aware of their problems and are notoriously bad at predicting whether they will like new things.
And the "problem" doesn't have to be a bad thing that exists, it can just be something good that we are missing out on because it doesn't yet exist.
And we know that many great things are created by people just to scratch their own itch.
So it boils down to "make something that you think might be fun or useful to others or yourself", which seems entirely self-evident to me.
I could understand "solve a problem" as a method for discovering ideas -- look for an obvious need and fill it. But many successful ideas, and I would say the most successful ideas, don't come from that process but from a more imaginative place.
So, "it didn't solve a problem", whatever that means, is not sufficient to explain why an idea fails.
Beyond that, most companies are solving a real need:
- Can't find anything worth finding on the Internet? Google.
- Need a way to commoditize software for users? Microsoft.
- Need to use a car on occasion in a big city? Zipcar
- Have a spare room or need somewhere to crash? AirBnB
Yes, you can get lucky by throwing darts and seeing what sticks, but much better to have a known problem to solve (and known by more than the founders ;).
[0] Alternatively, they may just be lucky or a hype filled machine. Or, they might understand the market in an Apple-like way and are driving it. We may never know, because it could be the latter, but poor decision making at some point make it look like the former.