Hi all,
And they said email was dead! I must have hit a nerve. Thank you for all the interest in ProblemKit, I’m thrilled to have you with me.
ProblemKit is for founders and entrepreneurs who understand that great problems are more valuable than great ideas, and want a repeatable way to sniff them out. If you find this content useful, please consider forwarding it to a friend who’s also looking to build something cool.
First, some housekeeping…
Oh, you moved the sofa?
ProblemKit is a ⚠️ live experiment where you can follow along from the comfort of your inbox as I optimise a methodology for finding juicier problems, faster. Expect the furniture to move around as I get feedback on what’s working and what’s not.
On that note, feedback makes the world go around. ✉️ Got feedback?
How to speed-read ProblemKit
Here’s a primer to make ProblemKit quick to consume, like a jelly/jell-O shot:
- 🥜 Kernel. The main idea. The thing you can apply today. If you only have a couples of minutes until the concert/meeting/wedding starts, read this.
- 🦧 In the wild. A time or place when The Kernel has worked, or failing to use it has caused the untimely demise of someone’s big idea. Expect a few embarrassing stories from yours truly...
- ‼️ Weekly problem. I’ll share a freshly harvested problem from my own experiments. It might not be the right problem for you, but also, it might.
- 🍭 Misc. A placeholder for bonus content. By which, I mean something totally unrelated (and more for my pleasure than yours).
🥜 Kernel
To scratch your own itch, give yourself Peruvian Warts*
Carrion’s disease is a classic one-two combo. If you manage to survive the liver swelling and jaundice of the acute phase, the chronic phase is characterised by a rash of giant ‘Peruvian warts’ (verruga peruana) that bleed. Profusely.
In 1885, the cause and transmission of Carrion’s disease was unknown and so, in order to identify the issue, medical student Daniel Alcides Carrión allowed himself to be infected with the wart blood of a 14-year-old patient.
The experiment was a roaring success! He subsequently died of the disease, proving that the transmission was via blood. Oh.
There are many such examples of self-experimentation in medicine – many of which led to Nobel Prizes rather than death. I think there’s something to this.
Autoethnography
‘Scratch your own itch’ is both the most sacred and most commonly violated principle in the world of innovation. Why?
If you haven’t suffered a problem directly yourself, it can be very slow and expensive to develop an understanding of someone else’s perspective. In my experience, this is because founders think that, in order to build a unicorn-scale business, they have to ignore their own niche-derived intuition and solve for the biggest market.
It almost never works.
Read the origin stories of successful companies and you’ll find founders who identified problems from their own lived experiences:
- Brian Chesky, Nathan Blecharczyk, and Joe Gebbia started AirBnB because they were struggling to pay rent while local hotels ripped off conference attendees.
- Tony Fadell started Nest because he was building a holiday home and found all available thermostats were clunky and hard to use.
- Nike was founded by Bill Bowerman, a running coach, and Phil Knight, a runner.
With ProblemKit, we’re going to be harvesting problems from our own life experience. I’ve come to understand this approach as a form of ‘autoethnography’ and, like all good inventors, we’re going to put rocket boosters on it.
More next week!
*Do not actually give yourself Peruvian Warts.
🦧 In the wild
I learned this principle the hard way working in the pharmaceutical industry, where we relied extensively on patient research organisations to unearth pain points rather than infecting ourselves with wart blood.
It was safe, compliant, and slooooooow.
Let’s be clear: I wouldn’t have it any other way. There’s really only one way to develop safe and effective medicines, and that’s through randomised controlled trials (RCTs). But it’s also the reason that developing a new drug costs over $1Bn and takes thousands of people 15 years to get to market.
Unless you’ve already suffered from a disease, you’re close to someone who has, or if you’re intentionally setting out to build something dangerous that needs to be put inside people, skip the queue and learn from first-hand experience wherever it’s safe and ethical to do so.
‼️ Weekly problem
Alright, humour me. It would be a shame not to kick this off with the problem I’ve decided to solve with ProblemKit, ‘The Problem Problem’ itself:
“As a founder-to-be, I want to discover a tantalising unsolved problem hidden in plain sight, but it’s devilishly hard to notice them and even harder to pick one to double down on.”
(Next week, expect something a little more off-piste… ⛷️)
🍭 Misc.
This is not a sponsored post! I just happen to have ordered x3 more of my favourite notebook this week and I use them frequently for jotting down problems.
I did an unholy amount of research into notebooks a few years ago and have been filling up Leuchtturm1917’s ever since. They blow Moleskine’s out of the water on material quality alone, but other thoughtful features like page numbering, a functional contents section, and laying flat on a table set them apart for me.
I use the black A5 with dotted pages as I can draw, write, and tabulate easily as needed. (Again, not sponsored!)
That’s a wrap! Thanks for bearing witness to the first edition of ProblemKit, it’s taken a little courage to put this out into the world. Tell me whether you loved it or hated it by replying to alex@problemkit.co – I’ll try to respond within a couple of days.
Wishing you lots of problems,
Alex