I was chatting with a friend of mine, after almost a decade. He now works at a reputed late stage startup in SF. He is surrounded by people who are starting startups, and being successful. He's tried a few ideas, got a few customers, followed the startup handbook on building something people want. But yet, didn't find something that he can work on for the rest of his life. "I must be doing something wrong", he said. He asked me how I have gone about finding a problem to work on.
As always, the following is a note to self on the conversation, to help refine my own mental models.
"Build something people want" is not enough. There are a lot of things lot of people want. They might also be sound businesses to build, maybe even venture scale. But yet, how does one choose what to work on?
The essence of the solution I ended up giving him was - "Find a persona you really care about. Hang with them, think like them - and then intuit a problem they want solved".
This sentence captures a few mistakes an aspiring founder makes, which I'll now break down.
Even before knowing what problem you're going to solve, it's not useful to talk to customers. No use going to them and asking what problems they have, or worse - asking them if they'd buy your product if you solve X problem for them. Users always lie on such questions. Two reasons, a typical user usually even notice problems in their life. I don't think I would have said I needed a food delivery app, when I could google the phone number of my favorite restaurant. But now, I'm a power user - because the app exists and caught my imagination. Secondly, the easy thing to do is to say the nice-consensus thing. Ideas worth starting up for are by definition non-consensus.
Basically, the first advice here is to not expect the people around you to hand you a problem worth working on.
For example, in the early days of Reclaim Protocol, I made the mistake too to ask users if they would want to use this obscure technology to generate zkproofs from website responses. Nobody even got it. I myself didn't have a good articulation of what the tech we had invented could do, until we built it. I knew this is a powerful enough product to build even when everyone I spoke to said it's useless. Which brings me to the second point I'm trying to make.
It's hard to find a problem you care about intuitively. But it is easy figure out what persona/demography you care about. Ideally, you are this persona yourself. The second best is someone super close to you - a child, spouse, parents. Once you know what persona you are targeting, you need to start thinking like them. Again, if you are this persona yourself, you just need to think like yourself. If not, hang out with them, make best friends with them. Best friends are people whom you can think like, at will. Once you are there, will it and think like them. The most imporant part of this exercise is that many times you will not find a problem worth solving. And you'd feel dejected. But if you care enough about the persona, and you hang with them - you will find the motivation to try again. And again. You'll very likely get the problem wrong at first, you'll get your solution wrong at first, you'll get your GTM wrong at first - in varying permutations and combinations. But if you care about your friends or yourself, you will find the motivation to keep trying just the one more time where it matters.
A great example of this is my cofounder Harsha. He is a developer by training, but one that has not identified as a developer for several years now. He's a growth hustler. But, we're building a Developer tool - an SDK. He just spends so much time with developers by going on dinners, movies and camping with them. He now has more developer friends than me (I still identify as a developer). He has a better pulse on what the developers want than me.
The counter example is also important. When Harsha and I were building CreatorOS - we were building for creators. It was Harsha who cared more about creators than me, so I was following his lead. Over time, we noticed ourselves using the term "fuckers" for potential customers. This was particularly true for Youtubers. We cared about creators in the sense of people who were creating art films. We cared about creative, rebellious people. That actually matches exactly with Harsha's persona. So, we cared. But we did not care about Youtubers. Once when most of our customers were Youtubers and not artists, we quickly lost steam in what we were doing, even though we were at the peak of a rapidly growing revenue chart.
The hardest part is finding a problem in our own lives. When there are shortcomings, we overcome them with adjustments. Especially, ones that are frequent in our lives. To find a problem, one needs to cultivate pessimism and curiousity. Not be satisfied, and be wanting to find out why. You are ideally looking for something that is really really frustrating - but just that you've been overlooking or have found workarounds for.
I personally hate banks. Especially in India, where the work is extremely bureaucratic. It always gave me physical pain when I had to deal with anything to do with banks or paperwork in general. I don't think I'm unique in that - I'm sure a lot of people hate banks. But I hated it enough to explore better ways of storing and using money. When I was about to receive my first salary at Microsoft, I was trying to figure out what's the best way for me to store that money without having to use a bank. That's when I stumbled on Bitcoin. That's when I knew this is the dimension in which I want to spend my career. And today what we're working on helps do away with paperwork at enterprises, using blockchain technologies.
To note, having a frustration is not good enough - awareness of the frustration and the curiousity to investigate the frustration is just as important.