Excuse me, is there a problem? | Hacker News Reader

Excuse me, is there a problem?

longform.asmartbear.com

243 pointstosh21 comments

I can't wait for somebody to come up with a form- or chat-based online tool that serves to provide a solid answer to prospective entrepreneurs based on this framework.

This could be a fantastic lead generator.

https://dimeadozen.ai

I've used this to get similar insight into ideas I've been thinking about.

It generates a pretty big report and some of the sections provided some challenges I hadn't considered.

I made https://notionsmith.ai for probing ideas like this

Funnily enough when asked about itself, the generated users love the idea but wouldn't pay for it (as-is)

I built exactly this here: https://www.codelantis.com/blog/startup-viability-score

This is one incredibly insightful piece of work. I'd recommend it to anyone who is thinking about a startup. I definitely know some people who could have used this dose of cold water. And there's a lot of great, general-purpose advice in here too.

I also loved the post. Jason is super quick to respond to feedback or questions btw. After I failed to bring his framework to Excel, I created a interactive web tool here, in case you're interested: https://www.codelantis.com/blog/startup-viability-score

The flowchart is nice to refer to as a checklist.

The pattern of failure which includes steps

  3. Founder builds a product that solves The Problem. (And it really does!)
  4. Founder fails to make enough sales, and the company shuts down in 6-24 months, when the founder runs out of patience or money.

...can largely be avoided by focusing not on the identified problem but by real potential customers that have the problem. It's not the problem in isolation that you're solving, though it's necessary but not sufficient. Interacting with actual people will let you know if there's any hindrance to adoption. Rinse, repeat and address each hurdle faced by potential customers. The mistake is simply thinking "if you build it, they will come" where it is a real solution to a real problem.

Sometimes there's a problem that precludes adopting the solution which is a bigger problem for the potential market, and it may be a good to consider pivoting. Go beyond understanding the product/solution and understand your customers (to be).

Jason's obviously a smart chap and knows much more about startups than I do but following this decision tree would effectively have meant that most startups that exist today likely wouldn't exist.

A few examples: Notion, Airtable, Linear. They would all fail a few of these tests.

Maybe; all have large target markets and the last two have unique things.

That said, let's say you're 100% correct. I went back and forth on whether to even include the rubric, because I myself (the author) think it's a little silly to pretend there's a formula.

I found in early feedback of the article, however, that it forced people to really ask themselves good questions, which they might not have done if they read only the rest.

Therefore, I felt like it was useful for that reason -- posing good questions that folks should answer -- but I agree with you that it does have the problem of being a "formula" that cannot really be accurate.

Thank you for your article.

The rubric by definition is going to be inaccurate as you say.

I went over it myself for my project, and your breakdown does shed light despite the acknowledged inaccuracy.

For instance it made me google how many 250+ employee English-language businesses there are. In the UK it is around 8,000. That was useful in itself.

Oh absolutely believe that asking yourself these questions is critical. Even if the answers aren't encouraging or positive. In the very least, they make you think about how you might overcome these challenges if they exist for your business.

Didn't mean to dunk on your post. I actually loved it. Just wanted to call out that founders should probably not follow the letter of the law of the formula but more use it as a guide to evaluate ideas and problems.

You bet! I didn't read it as a dunk at all, and again I agree with the critique!

Really fantastic article. As someone who on a day to day basis is better at (and generally only thinks about) how to solve my employers own problems, it got me thinking about if any ideas I've had in passing might be good enough to look into further.

I found this super interesting and build an interactive tool based on the framework in the post (a couple of months ago actually!) https://www.codelantis.com/blog/startup-viability-score

Off topic, but I’d like to note that a startup does not have to solve a problem.

There’s a sort of cult around that idea but it’s wrong.

There’s plenty of businesses that don’t solve a problem.

Can you give examples of such businesses?

Sure, there are companies that provide entertainment or fulfill desires. But even in those cases they offer something that's missing, something that one is seeking. Those might not be serious problems with pain points you need to deal with immediately, but problems nonetheless.

I guess you could argue what a problem is. To me, a problem is when I have a need that's not satisfied.

Sex, entertainment, games, movies, health, fitness, education. It's takes a little twisting but you can frame every one of these such that they are in fact problems that need solving.

Yeah it's easy to play word games to describe everything as solution to a problem but that's really just cheating to be able to actually say "every business is the solution to a problem".

For example, "entertainment/games are the solution to boredom". You'd only say that if you really wanted to back the idea that every business must be the solution to a problem.

Hard to argue that Twitter solves a problem, nevertheless there's an awful lot of people using it constantly. In the "every business must solve a problem" world, you could say "Twitter solves the problem of people needing to communicate with all the other people in the world in public conversations", but that's really trying to force it.

As the author of the article, I agree with you.

I also agree that trying to force "problem" into the discussion isn't useful, and in fact is counter-productive because you're verbally moving further away from what the business is really doing.

So perhaps the whole thing should be qualified as: In the case that a business is solving a problem, which _is_ typically the case in B2B (notice all your examples were B2C), _then_ this is a useful way of breaking down the typical questions you should be posing yourself.

I'm not a PG fanboy but I do respect his thinking, and he really nailed it when he said "make something people want".

That statement is a much more generalized statement about what the basis of a business must be, whether or not it solves a problem, for a business to succeed it must provide something that people want.

In writing this comment I suppose it could even go further and say "make something people want or need". For example insurance and legal compliance are not things people tend to want, but do need.

> make something people want or need

That makes sense. I agree, it's more universal and elegant than just solving a problem.

I'll go one up from the previous poster and suggest that many startups only solve a problem nominally at the beginning, but once they get market share their business model instead becomes solving a problem they created in the first place.

See: Yelp

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