Hi all,

I've wasted a lot of time trying to solve problems that were too big, too small, uninteresting, or downright invalid.

If you've read my previous posts, you're now generating reams of problems you could potentially solve. So now I must help you select the ones worth spending your precious time on.

If you need ONE problem that will absorb you for weeks and months to come, read on...

So you’ve set up a low-friction workflow for capturing problems. You’ve executed a Problem Harvest. You’ve accumulated a long list of first-hand problems, and written them cleanly and clearly in SGF format.

Lucky you! You're now 'problem rich'.

But...

Which one do you pick?

I answered this question last week on Reddit, sharing the four simple criteria I’ve been refining over the last couple of years.

These four questions help me rule out the vast majority of problems from my log. They also help me compare 'apples to oranges' for the remaining ones – no matter how unrelated they are – so I can prioritise the ones that are most likely to yield interesting projects.

Here they are:

1. Pain. How bad does it hurt?
2. Prevalence. How often does it happen?
3. Tractability. How solvable is it?
4. Intrinsic interest. How much does it energise you?

Let's dive in and show you how to apply these questions in practice, using the problem that led me to start my current project, Sweat Lickers.

🦧 In the wild

If you haven't read letter 06, the Anti-moonshot problem statement I've been working on over the past three weeks is this:

As a gym-goer who's started growing his hair out, I want to keep my hair from falling into my eyes while I train, but hairbands and clips make me look like a schoolgirl, wearing a hat indoors makes me look like a serial killer, and there's no such thing as a cool sweatband.

This problem statement led me to launch Sweat Lickers, a retro-inspired sweatband business for dudes who train with longer hair.

Now, setting Sweat Lickers aside for a minute, let's look at how I built enough conviction in the problem statement to give it a fair shot.

1) Pain

Pain is how badly a problem hurts, scored as the monetary amount you would pay to NOT have the problem each time you encounter it.

Here's why we use monetary scoring as a proxy for Pain, rather than a qualitative measure:

1. It's standardised, so we can compare the pain of very different things like 'inconsistent communication from an agency' to 'my shoes are rubbing on my heels'.
2. It feeds nicely into a rough market-sizing calculation, so we can estimate if a solution is likely to be commercially viable.

‼️ Critically, when you score pain monetarily, do not imagine a solution (like a sweatband) and simply 'price' it. We're trying to put a figure against the value of the unmet need, not the price of a future solution (which is influenced by many other variables).

2) Prevalence

Prevalence is an approximation of the total number of times this problem is experienced by all people within a given market, within a given year.

1. Take the number of people who have the problem.
2. Estimate how frequently each of them has the problem.
3. Multiply them together.

It might seem scrappy – and yes, there's a risk of false precision here – but we only need a quick and dirty estimate to arrive at a go/no-go decision. Here's how I do it:

• How many other people (or businesses) have this problem? Take a look at the 'Subject' in your Subject-Goal-Friction problem statement. How many more of you are there in that group? Do they all have the problem?
  
  (Also give some thought here as to whether you want to solve the problem for your local community, nationally, internationally, or globally.)
• On average, how often do you think those people encounter the problem each year? If it's a daily problem, score it 365. Weekly would be 52. Every two years would be 0.5... you get the idea. And yes, you should ask people!
  
  ‼️ If you're looking to build a SaaS business with monthly recurring revenue (MRR), you should be looking for a problem that occurs daily or weekly for most people in your target niche.

We can now use Pain multiplied by Prevalence to give us a very, VERY approximate figure for the total Problem Value.

Problem Value is the first estimate of our future market size, agnostic to the category of solution we might later build.

The idea is to get a rough idea of whether a space is big enough for us to play in.

For example, if you want to build a 'lifestyle business', a few million £'s of annual unmet need might be sufficient for you to carve out a gig.

But if you want to build a startup, you'll need to be in the billions.

‼️ Keep in mind that this doesn't tell us anything about the competition dynamics, the scope for expansion into new markets, or the cost of developing or delivering a solution (affecting our profit margins).

‼️ Note that we likely won't capture all of the problem value (AKA market share) with our business, and certainly not straight away. We just need to see that there's enough room for us to play.

3) Tractability

Tractability is a slippery subject.

Tractability is your perception of how easy it would be to make progress in solving a problem, given your skills and resources.

I prefer the word 'tractability' over 'difficulty' because the latter predisposes us to think about the reasons we can't solve a problem, rather than the reasons we can.

For scoring tractability, I think the following qualitative categories are useful in this case:

🥱 Easy. You know this is possible because you've done something similar before, and you know exactly what you'd do this time around.
😊 Medium. You're reasonably confident it can be done. You might not know exactly how, but you don't see a big reason why not.
😅 Hard. You know this will be hard to solve, and you probably know why it will be hard... but not impossible.
🫨 Fiendish. This problem is probably impossible. You have no idea where to start. You're probably going to get hurt trying.

‼️ Try not to get bogged down in coming up with a solution at this point. Solving takes time and is notoriously hard to predict. Instead, think more about the type of problem, your experience with similar problems, and a general hypothesis for why it could be possible.

4) Intrinsic interest

Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, we need to pay close attention to our Intrinsic Interest in solving this problem.

Problems are Intrinsically Interesting when something about the problem or the process of solving it would give us energy, rather than take it away.

I call it 'intrinsic' interest because I want you to find something about the nature of the problem or solving it that motivates you, rather than an extrinsic factor like appealing to an investor or jumping on a trend.

This will form your 'why', to borrow from Simon Sinek.

It doesn't matter what your why is; it just has to be strong enough to carry you through to the end of the project.

And don't underestimate that.

Some examples:

• This problem terrifies you and keeps you awake at night. Perhaps this problem took the life of someone you care about, or threatens to disrupt your life in the future.
• This problem is intellectually interesting to you. Perhaps you're fascinated by optimisation problems, sociological problems, or aesthetic problems. There's something about this problem 'archetype' that you gravitate towards.

Summary

We now have consistent criteria to evaluate and rank problems against each other, showing us which are worth spending our precious time on.

For problems at the top of your Problem Log, ask:

• How Painful is this problem?
  • How much would I pay to make it go away?
• How Prevalent is this problem?
  • How many other people have this problem?
  • How often?
  • Combined with the Pain, is the Problem Value high enough for me?
• How Tractable is it?
  • Given my skills and experience, why is this possible?
• How Intrinsically Interesting is it?
  • What about this problem, or the process of solving it, will keep me motivated?

You can use these criteria to think about what type of problem you want to attack even before you find it. Here are some bonus questions:

• Do you want to build a side hustle or lifestyle business? Don't waste time on an intractable billion-dollar problem.
• Do you want to build a business with recurring or repeat revenue? Look for problems that require solving over and over, daily or weekly.
• Do you want to be a solo founder? Choose a problem that's tractable without lots of external support on day one.
• Do you want to build your Magnum Opus, digging deep on something over many months or years? Only settle for problems that score above anything else on Intrinsic Interest, even if they aren't as Tractable.

🍭 Weekly problem

As a proto-founder, I want to learn from the failures of others, but most of the examples I see online (👀 LinkedIn) are carefully sanitised and omit the most embarrassing but valuable parts of the story.

Hopefully, I'm some way towards solving this one with ProblemKit.

Have feedback? Email me at alex@problemkit.co

🛸 Misc.

Curious about taxidermy?

I'm not.

But if you are, here's a Mouse Taxidermy Workshop Manual I found on Amazon.

For Margot Magpie, this was clearly an Intrinsically Interesting problem...

Wishing you lots of problems,

Alex