TC Disrupt Experience - Seriously, What Problem are You Solving?

Wait, what? You're writing a rant about other entrepreneurs not solving problems when your startup is "google alerts for video games and movies" with no apparent business model?<p><i>&#62;&#62; You need to be a painkiller, not a vitamin.</i><p>If you read that article, he actually says "very few are (painkillers)" ... being a vitamin isn't bad, it's just easier to market a painkiller ...<p><i>&#62;&#62; I feel like an asshole for saying all this, because I never want to talk badly about fellow entrepreneurs.</i><p>The fact that you have to add this to your post is a good clue that it may have been unwarranted or poorly worded.<p>Look, my startups don't cure cancer but I like to think they solve problems for people. If people ask me for honest advice about their startup or pitch, I will definitely give it. But I don't go to conferences and then publicly rip the participants (or most of them).

"What problem are you solving" is dogma. At the earliest stage, a startup is an experiment to see if people want something.<p>There are tons of examples of companies that started as toys, and ultimately became businesses. In hindsight you can always come up a description of the problem they were solving at the time, even if nobody knew the problem existed. You could do this for Twitter today: they solved the problem of (exercise to the reader).

While it's important to initially form an idea around a problem to be solved, the focus really should be on building a product to solve a problem in such a way that it would be painful for your customer to stop using your product.<p>That's how you create enough demand to properly charge for your product versus offering it for free and it being considered just a really cool idea.<p>That being said, there's quite a few "startups" launching every week that are really just neat projects or ideas, but aren't proper startups/products/businesses. That doesn't make them bad, just not in the same category as something that charges money. They're essentially trying to solve a problem they created themselves...said another way, they're a solution in search of a problem.

I think some of this gets back to talking to customers asap and getting over the fear of them telling you that they don't want your product. The faster they tell you what pains they really are having, the faster you can move in the right direction. But good pitches need the one sentence "here's who we are" followed by the one sentence "here's how we're solving your problem". Get that correct and people will at least know why you are worthy of taking their cash. And as he referenced, vitamins = where you spend spare change, health care (painkillers) = large $$

I agree with you.<p>But we're wrong. We're just saying this because in our eyes, these "problems" aren't worth solving. We're not interested in them.<p>matchist (matchist.com), my current venture, wants to help freelance developers cut out all the bad things about freelancing. We want to save you time, money, and headaches.<p>I love this problem. It NEEDS to be solved.<p>But you might think it's the stupidest problem around.

I know you didn't ask for product feedback, but I think your product has a problem: You need early adopters to start using it, but early adopters naturally hear about the news and developments that you claim to deliver. In otherwords, I shared your product with a few coworkers, we signed up, then we all independently decided that we'd hear about those things naturally, through other channels. Sounds like a vitamin.

I'm sure most profitable companies were formed to solve a problem. But a few absurdly successful ones don't really fit that description. You can shoehorn them in, but it seems like a stretch to explain the "pain point" facebook solved. Instead, it seems like in those cases, they provided a new thing no one knew to want before.

funny, kelly sutton wrote a similar-ish post on TC Disrupt last year: <a href="http://kellysutton.tumblr.com/post/10164180568/your-idea-is-terrible" rel="nofollow">http://kellysutton.tumblr.com/post/10164180568/your-idea-is-...</a>

This is a good idea for a post, but needs specifics.