Starting a Business - choosing the problems
A few days ago I wrote a post for my friends on Facebook talking about the businesses I am considering starting (the ideas I’m considering will be in a follow up post). In the past weeks I have written about some of the questions I am exploring and my processes.
1. What are the best current resources for getting a new company (pre-seed) started?
2. Of the current cloud platforms and related services what are the best for the very early stages of experimentation (again pre-seed)?
3. What accelerators/incubators or early stage investors do you recommend?
4. Should I write code or make prototypes in a no-code manner)?
Before I write about the ideas I’m exploring, first let’s consider the biggest problem any business owner or entrepreneur faces:
What is the problem you are solving?
It may sound simple but knowing the problem usually also means knowing who the customers are (it is fine to solve a problem you don’t personally have — but make sure you really understand the problem and that your solution solves it). Furthermore it implies you know the problem in sufficient detail to know, or at least have a strong hypothesis about, how to solve that problem. Typically not for everyone — but for enough people you can reach to sustain a business.
If you have an existing business it is worthwhile to from time to time make sure you still know the problem(s) you are solving — and for whom. As the world around your business changes, your answers may also change — whether or not you have changed how you run your business.
When you are considering what problem you are solving make sure that you are in a brainstorming mode — by which I mean the goal is to jot everything down, not to go back and edit or filter or second guess yourself — that comes later. When you are brainstorming get everything down — don’t filter or edit yourself. This is why brainstorming is usually best in private by yourself or with a very small, very trusted team that understands that part of brainstorming is coming up with crazy ideas, with impractical ideas, with thoughts you will write down once and recognize that they aren’t good.
If you love everything you come up with when brainstorming — for anything — it should be a sign that you haven’t challenged yourself enough or that you have been holding back and filtering yourself.
Instead you should hate some of the ideas you come up when brainstorming. It is important that you have these negatives — the stuff that when you see it written down you recognize that it isn’t right (at all or specifically for you and your team) — in this recognition you learn why it isn’t right, why it isn’t what you want to do, what makes it obviously wrong.
After brainstorming you should feel a bit exhausted and a bit overwhelmed, likely pulled in a bunch of directions with a lot of ideas for how to frame your business or the business that you want to start. The next step is one of the hardest.
Walk away from your lists, if done as a group, go get some food but also go spend some time apart from each other. Rest and quite literally sleep on it.
In a day or two, take out the whole list and review it with now fresh, well rested, no longer in the moment of not editing anything, eyes and see which ideas pop and still resonate, which are bad and unworkable, and which are a bit crazy. If you brainstormed in person consider doing the brainstorming in a room you don’t need to access for a few days to just leave all your notes up on the walls. But pro tip — make sure someone still has taken detailed notes/photographs in case anything gets disturbed or cleaned up.
When reviewing the output of your brainstorming session watch your immediate reactions and use them to sort the ideas into broad categories. Here is my suggestion for categories but create a few buckets that work for you and your team.
Bucket 1 — ideas that are just “ok” you neither love nor hate them, they don’t seem crazy or impossible but neither do they seem very exciting
Bucket 2 — ideas that are obviously bad, unworkable, or not what you want to
Bucket 3 — ideas that are crazy that feel insane but might be amazing if they worked
Bucket 4 — ideas that immediately feel right and resonate and exciting
Broadly you likely should have most things in Bucket 1 and fewer and fewer things in each of the remaining buckets. And while the ideas in Bucket 4 should be explored in greater depth don’t immediately discard EITHER bucket 2 or Bucket 3. Instead use them to help you refine your thinking.
From Bucket 2 — explore for a little while WHY each “bad” idea is now that you are in a judging and evaluating mode. What makes it something you don’t want to do? Does it cross an ethical line? Does it require serving a different group of customers than you are comfortable serving? Does it require skills or resources you don’t have and aren’t sure how to get? In short make sure you think about why you are rejecting each idea but especially on the ideas that are clearly to you “bad”. If the idea is just poorly formed or a random idea you jotted down don’t dwell too long on it — but do think about why you put it in this category — something about even a short note may have reminded you of a bigger issue with your business.
Knowing what you do NOT want to do is incredibly valuable and should help you focus on all aspects of your business — team, customers, partners, and investors. Do not lose sight of what you won’t do as a business even as you should primarily focus on what you do — on the problems you solve and who you solve them for.
From Bucket 3 — explore what makes you immediately reject these ideas as “crazy”? There are very different categories of “crazy” — a review is a chance to explore which categories your specific ideas fall into. As you review them, think about what would be required to make a crazy idea happen — is it more resources? A different set of skills? The right partners? The right customers? Some new invention that doesn’t currently exist (as far as you are aware)? What makes you define this idea as crazy?
Spending a few minutes as you review the “crazy” ideas might help you identify the ones that aren’t impossible — and which you might want to aspire to achieving. And from the others as you identify what made you think of them as crazy it may help you refine the ideas you choose to pursue. But importantly don’t reject a “crazy” idea immediately.
From Bucket 4 with each idea review why the idea resonated with you, why you got excited. Think about whether that idea will continue to excite you in a year? In five years? In a decade? Can you find a team of people who will also be excited? Beyond it being exciting, is it achievable? Can you and your team make this idea a reality?
And having reviewed your “bad” and your “crazy” ideas it is likely that while you are reviewing the most resonate ideas from Bucket 4 you will also be thinking about whether your idea will grow to cross any of the lines you identified from Bucket 2. And perhaps can think about how to be even more ambitious and set your goals higher and broader after reviewing the “crazy” ideas in Bucket 3.
Finally don’t completely neglect the likely many ideas in Bucket 1 — the stuff that felt boring but achievable but not particularly exciting. Often some of these types of ideas might be useful and relatively simple steps you can accomplish while focusing on your larger more ambitious ideas.
Now pick one, yes, just one, of your ideas to focus on as a business
Don’t give up on all the other good ideas (or the best elements from the not as good ideas) — but when answering the question of what PROBLEM your business solves you should find a way to focus and answer that question in a clear and simple way. Frequently as you start to grow and expand it becomes harder and harder to answer that question in a way that includes all aspects of your business. The impulse is then to start saying something like “we do this for these people and that for those people and are also working on this other thing for these other customers…” and fairly rapidly you have lost any focus and cohesion as a company or organization.
When you have the focused problem your business is solving all the pieces of your business start to make sense — you have a way to decide what to invest in directly in terms of facilities and staff as well as when and where to partner with others. This includes what customers to serve and seek out and likely will help you think about pricing of your goods and services and even the legal structure of your enterprise and how you will seek to fund it over time.
All from a seemingly simple question.
What is the problem you are solving?