When you start a company, you are choosing to dedicate your life (or at least a major piece of it) to solving a problem. Perhaps you see an exit in the near future, but most passionate, successful founders are in it long term — to Mars and back. As founders, you are sacrificing time, money, relationships, vacations, weekends, naps, housing, healthcare, your kids’ youth, your hair…for this new organization, it makes sense that you invest it all in something you really believe in.
Surely, that’s not delivering people’s dry cleaning with cookies, helping your friends find new places to hang out on a weekend or making a new virtual closet app.
We can do better than this.
I put myself in this group of people who can do better, by the way. I want to put my skills to use at a company tackling something majorly necessary. Or even just necessary. At all.
We don’t need another ride sharing app. We have plenty of social networks, photo filters and live video services. Yelp already exists. Does the world really need more ways to stream music? No one needs Uber for beer. Or Airbnb for surgeons.
We have so many overwhelming, catastrophic problems in our world. Everything from natural disasters to homelessness to gun violence. California ran out of water a couple years ago. San Francisco is filling up with homeless youth. We lost nearly 16,000 lives in Japan when it was hit with a major tsunami in 2011. Skewed police violence against black people is more documented than ever. Mass shootings are haunting cities across the globe.
Break these problems down and you might find something you can actually make an impact on. Take homelessness in Los Angeles. Homelessness is pervasive problem, but the Mayor’s office recently moved 100 people into housing and asked local residents to help gather supplies for them. Obviously, homelessness is still a problem, but now, we have 100 less people on the streets of LA. That’s a tangible dent.
The list of startups on CrunchBase is curiously low on companies tackling these problems. Among the featured funding rounds on my CrunchBase homepage are:
- InfoSpace, a white-label search company, acquired by OpenMail for $45M
- Ripple Foods, a non-dairy milk company, just raised $30M
- MPB, a film/photography trading site that raised $2.7M in their A round
- BookMyShow, entertainment ticketing, $81.5M in Series C
- BevSpot, remote bar management software, raised $11M (Series B)
There’s a major disparity between our most painful problems and where our money and time is going. In my experience, this comes from founders solving problems for themselves, trying to make quick cash or those who, as I recall David Hendee once saying, want “Startup — The Disney Ride.”
If you’re considering starting or redirecting a company, here’s how you can try orienting around the problem:
Think broadly
There are likely tons of problems out there that you or I have never encountered. Spend time in different neighborhoods or even continents, going to events for things you didn’t think you’d be interested in, invite people for coffee who seem like they could teach you something. Read immensely, watch lectures, listen to the radio.
You don’t necessarily have to solve something massive. There are also more approachable spaces that still need your help. For example:
- helping kids stay in school
- keeping innocent people out of prison
- making neighborhoods safer for everyone, especially kids
- providing resources for people with mental illnesses
- supporting people searching for low-cost housing
- helping people conserve water or electricity at home or work
- solving the first mile/last mile transportation problem
Perhaps you don’t feel equipped to solve global warming, but maybe you could help bring awareness around it. Homelessness is a immense one, but there might be a way to foster after-school programs for homeless kids in your neighborhood.
You will surely identify many, many potential opportunities. You can narrow the range by doing some business model work and researching the most promising ideas for market pain and who will pay to solve it.
Resources:
Human-centered design methods from the d.School and Ideo
Gamestorming
How to mind map
The mission-driven canvas
A song to inspire you
Research richly
Once you’ve got a problem you believe needs solving, spend a month (to start) understanding it deeply. Immerse yourself by researching existing alternatives, talking one-on-one to people you believe have this problem and observing the problem occurring in real-time.
Earlier this year, I interviewed Pete Shalek and Steve Marks, the founders of Joyable, who worked with my team at Carbon Five. Joyable is my favorite example of a problem first startup. Pete shadowed ER doctors while he was in business school and witnessed a pattern: people were coming into the emergency room thinking they were having heart attacks when they were actually having anxiety attacks. From this insight, solution ideas emerged and Pete pursued them through a series of low-fidelity interviews and tests. Problem first, solution second. Now, Joyable is successfully growing as a company that solves pain first and makes money as a result of their deep understanding of their customers’ lives.
Even if you’re not able to get in front of your customers in their real-life situations, make a serious effort to get to know them early. No less than one month. This will pay off in two ways — one, you’ll get a sense of how ready your audience is for a solution and two, you’ll have a growing list of interested users before you even launch.
Resources:
Four Steps to the Epiphany
Erika Hall
Ash Maurya
Beginner’s Guide to Customer Development
Hire diversely
Diverse teams are better at solving problems which is even more critical for teams that are actually solving real problems. People who bring vastly different experiences approach issues differently. They make your solution stronger and more resilient. They consider things you never would have. They question your perspective and make you a stronger leader.
Teams that have a bunch of people with similar perspectives — for example, they mostly live in San Francisco, grew up in the same socio-economic class or all went to Stanford — should diversify as fast as possible. Consider the backgrounds, skills and perspectives of your team now and identify some blatantly missing ones first. After all, you don’t need to hire people like you since you already work there.
It’s also helpful to have a few people on your team that have witnessed the problem or have a previous relationship to it. Sometimes, startups even end up hiring passionate customers. That’s best case scenario. If you can’t bring them on, consider making your most engaged users part of an advisory board.
Resources:
Techstars Diversity Resources
Bianca L. St. Louis’s Twitter
Kamilah Taylor’s Twitter
CODE2040
Black Girls Code
If you are like me, you want your life’s work to center on contributing to humanity. Contributions come in different sizes and timelines. All authentic contributions make an impact. I believe the more problem-focused these contributions are, the more impact they can have.
For all founders and makers out there solving giant problems, thank you.
Go out.
Find problems.
Real problems.
Do people have these problems?
Are you sure they are real problems?
Ok, now, solve them.
