Hi all,
This post is designed to do two things:
- Break your understanding of what a problem is.
- Reassemble it in a way that will prevent decades of wasted time and heartache.
🥜 Kernel
Bears are not a problem
Know your enemy. – Sun Tzu, The Art of War
If we were out looking for bears, we'd be wise to peek at a picture of one before we marched into the wilderness armed with a stick.
Likewise, we should be familiar with some things that look like bears but really aren't. We don't want to waste time fighting beavers, scary-looking trees, or least of all, the shadows of actual bears.
The same goes for problems.
If problem-solving is the tradecraft of the entrepreneur, we should know with precision what actually counts as a problem we can solve.
Here's a list of things that sound like problems, but aren't:
- Climate change
- Peanut allergies
- Bears
Before I clarify, let's first define what a problem is.
Life = problems
Approximately 3.8 billion years ago there were no problems. Just rocks.
The next day, there was a BIG problem: something was alive, it wanted to stay alive, but there was a lot of stuff happening that made it easy to die.
To continue not dying, evolution solved a series of survival problems through natural selection. Along the way, it created some fresh problems, too.
Now, you and I are here, and we solve other people's problems through intelligent design in exchange for money and hugs.
(Any takers for overturning the dictionary definition of 'entrepreneur'?)
What I mean is that problems are a subjective property of life itself.
This problem statement recipe will save you decades of wasted time and heartache
It's not uncommon to waste years of time and investor money building solutions for a person who doesn't exist, or doesn't really have a problem.
Let's avoid that in the first 30 seconds of entrepreneurship.
Here are the three essential ingredients of an efficient problem statement:
- A subject. Problems are experienced. If a tree falls and there's no one there to get squished by it, it wasn't a problem.
- A goal. Seek pleasure. Avoid pain. Don't get squished.
- A friction. An obstacle (🌳 real or imagined) that makes a goal expensive in time, money, energy, material, negative emotion, or social status... etc.
If you see a 'problem' that doesn’t have all of these ingredients, it’s not a problem you can solve as an entrepreneur.
So I capture all problems this way:
As a [subject], I want to [goal] but [friction].
That's it.
Don't overcomplicate it.
Subject, Goal, Friction. SGF.
We can add bells and whistles later but, since we're going to be capturing a lot of problems, we're going to keep it simple.
This format also makes it easier to evaluate problems side-by-side; another thing we'll be doing a lot.
With fresh eyes, let's take a look at why climate change, peanut allergies and bears are not, strictly speaking, problems...
- Climate change. It's definitely a bad thing. But bad for whom? Example: as a Londoner, I want to live by the Thames but the river will flood my (landlord's) house if the sea ice melts. That's a problem.
- Peanut allergies. As a sufferer myself, I can tell you it's not the allergy that's the issue: it's that I want to know what Pad Thai tastes like but peanuts are one of the main ingredients. Problem.
- Bears. This one's conditional. Bears are only a problem if you're a hiker who wants to carry a week's supply of trail mix but you don't fancy your chances in the negotiation. Other than that, bears are not a problem!
Perhaps this sounds pedantic. I'm certainly not saying all problem statements written this way are perfect; most will need some massaging.
The idea here is to avoid 80% of issues caused by vague and mischaracterised problems.
We're avoiding the shadows of some very real bears.
🦧 In the wild
I almost didn't start Fawn.
My Co-founder presented me with an excellent problem that I actually didn't recognise at first glance:
Preconception care is a gap in public + private health services.
I didn't see it as a problem because I didn't understand who the subject was, what they wanted, and what was preventing them from getting it.
And, unlike my Co-founder, I didn't have a decade of experience working with parents and babies as a midwife. I'd also never tried to start a family.
How could I scratch my own itch?
💡Oh.
That was it: I'd never tried to start a family.
It's not that my fiancée and I didn't want a baby – we do – we'd just been delaying getting around to it. And so was everyone else we knew.
As it turns out, fertility rates are falling off a cliff and the need for IVF is soaring. It's especially bad in cities where we routinely work ourselves to the bone, pay eye-watering rent, and knock back IPAs every Thirsty Thursday.
Guilty as charged.
The result: global spend on fertility is forecasted to surpass $100 billion by 2030.
Using the SGF problem statement recipe, we reframed the problem to reflect our own 'itches':
As someone in a relationship, living in a city, and working full-time, I need to know my partner and I can hope to start a healthy family alongside our career plans, but we have no idea if we're going to be able to make a baby together by that time.
Bingo. We had a bear we could hit with a stick.
More next week!
✨ Weekly problem
As a renter in a major city, I DESPERATELY want a dog but my landlord is worried about damage to the house and doesn't seem to trust the available insurance options.
If you can fix this, I'll let you borrow my puppy.
🛸 Misc.
We started watching The Three Body Problem last night, which reminded me...
'Find better problems, hidden in plain sight' was an accidental homage to one of my favourite guilty-pleasure books: In Plain Sight by investigative journalist Ross Coulthart (not sponsored).
It's about aliens. 👽
Whether you're a believer, a sceptic, or neither, In Plain Sight is riveting context for some of the topsy-turvy headlines that have come out of the US in recent months.
From the Amazon blurb:
Bizarre, sometimes mind-blowing and utterly fascinating, in this new edition of In Plain Sight, Coulthart explains why there is cause for optimism that 'the biggest story ever' might finally be about to break.
Wishing you lots of problems,
Alex