05: Kill your ideas, not your momentum

Last week, I started a new venture.

Today, I'll tell you how and why I killed it in just one week, and what that means for The ProblemKit Method.

Brace positions 🛬

🥜 Kernel

Kill your ideas, not your momentum

ProblemKit is about unsticking.

It's an antidote to the fog of war which surrounds the entrepreneur who doesn't have an idea (yet).

👩‍⚕️ Doctors are doctors even when they have no patients.

👨‍✈️ Pilots are pilots even when they are on the ground.

👨‍💻 Writers can be writers without volumes to their names.

But founders? Founders of what? That's a hard place to be.

We often talk about the shame associated with failure, but I think it's actually an intense fear of the blank page – not knowing if we can pull it off again – that stops us from killing a bad idea.

So, today's Kernel is simply a reminder that having a reliable method for finding better problems can liberate us from a broken idea because we no longer fear the uncertainty of beginning.

Here's how that played out for me last week.

🦧 In the wild

One of the things I'm trying to do here is show you that failing, even in public, and perhaps repeatedly, isn't really that bad. With one caveat...

You have to fail well.

And that means doing the work.

Look, we're going to fail anyway because business is hard. But we can limit the bruising by ensuring the story is one we'll be proud to tell.

As long as we're not failing because we twiddled our thumbs on the sofa for a week, committed fraud, or tried to start a driving range that replaces golf balls with hamsters, I think we're good.

Last week's edition was titled 'How I started a new venture this week using Problem Harvesting'.

I documented how I identified the following problem statement from my weekly plant care routine:

As someone with a range of plants originating from around the world, I want each species to thrive by replicating its natural environment but each one is sitting in the same basic houseplant soil from a gardening shop.

I'm not saying this is the perfect problem statement. Far from it.

(And I'm also not saying it was clever to tell the world I was starting a new venture within 24 hours of a dimly flickering idea lightbulb 💡 appearing over my head.)

But it did the one thing I needed it to do: it lit a fire under my a** and got me off the sofa.

I fired up Canva and brainstormed a few ideas.

One concept in particular took hold of me, so I challenged myself to get it on paper and put it in front of five friends before lunchtime:

When we started Fawn Technologies, it took us a couple of weeks to come up with the name, testing hundreds of variations and using it as an exercise to find the brand identity of the company.

I even read an entire book about naming.

I didn't want to wait two weeks this time, so I gave it the first and most direct word that popped into my head: Inoculum.

I WhatsApped the picture to a few friends whom I knew had houseplants, measuring for one thing only: intrigue.

This ain't my first rodeo, so I know what it looks like when my friends think my ideas stink: they'll never say they don't like something; they just won't ask any questions.

But with Inoculum, I got lots of great questions like:

• How much does this cost?
• How do you make this?
• Does it work for all plants?
• Does this replace my fertiliser?
• How come this doesn't already exist?
• Can I send this to my girlfriend? She's terrible with plants.

And, critically:

• When will it be ready?

That's a hit!

Or, at least, enough to take the next step forward.

If I had at least some notion of the technical feasibility (how I might actually scramble together a minimally viable product), I might just go ahead and try to get some pre-sales as validation.

There's no substitute for people actually putting down money.

But this was a case where I had only a faint sense of the feasibility. I've grown mushrooms before, and I've grown plants before, but I've never grown fungi for plants.

I knew it was my biggest risk, so I decided to listen to my gut and double-click on the technicalities before proceeding.

It's lucky I did.

The rest of the week went something like this:

• I did a thorough search of the market. There are no products with species-specific fungi + bacteria for houseplants.
• There's a lot of buzz about the topic in agriculture circles, but the closest thing to a leading consumer product, 'Dynomyco', seemed to be a favourite of cannabis growers 🌿 and had limited evidence behind it.
• I trawled vibrant debates on Reddit about the myriad 'mycorrhizal' (fungal supplement) products on the market. As a consumer, I quickly became confused. As a founder, I became excited to cut through that confusion with a better product.
• I trekked out to my nearest plant shop, Jekyll & Wild in Clapham. They'd never heard of mycorrhizal inoculants, but they loved the theory behind them and wanted to stay in touch as I explored the concept. They speculated that Inoculum might also be of interest to their suppliers in Holland as a way to reduce stock losses during transportation.
• I bought a stunning bromeliad from the plant shop because my lovely fiancee wasn't there to stop me.
• I spoke with my friend Mac Van Dam, who recently co-founded ZINC VC-backed 'Nunature', a startup developing novel living wall systems, who confirmed they're interested in ways to bolster the ecological stability of urban vertical gardens.
• I read blogs and papers about quality control issues with living mycorrhizal inoculants, and how many of the organisms are actually dead by the time they reach the plant. Despite this, people continue to search out and buy this stuff...
• I quizzed the AI chatbot Claude. Claude loved my idea, explaining which species of fungi and bacteria are likely to be promising candidates, and how I might go about validating the feasibility. I didn't trust Claude's business intuition, but it did give me the technical vocabulary that I needed to contact experts and dig into scientific papers.
• I reached out to researchers from places I was familiar with like Rothamsted, Kew Gardens, and Imperial College London. I had an excellent 30-minute call with Professor Martin Bidartondo from Imperial, who was more than happy to examine the idea with me and seemed optimistic about the potential.
• I learned that mycorrhizae happen to help with the uptake of phosphorous, a scarce resource that fertiliser companies are under pressure to limit the use of, and another problem that Inoculum might help to solve.

But as I waded through more papers, I realised how much more basic scientific research needed to be done on the fungal relationships that houseplant species form in the wild.

There was nothing.

I also accumulated an understanding that plants form these relationships in nutrient-poor soil as a compromise, trading sugars for water and micronutrients, so it would likely be difficult to prove stronger growth in the absence of plain ol' Miracle-Gro.

The potential benefits of mycorrhizal inoculants remains a valid and open question, and perhaps I could have set about a plan to initiate that research as part of Inoculum's strategy.

But this is where I decided to draw the line on technical feasibility.

It's not that the business would never work – it might – especially following the trail of low-phosphorous alternatives to traditional fertilisers for big nurseries.

It's that the timeline and risk profile are not right for me as a founder at this time.

It's not a journey that I have enough conviction to embark on, and I'm glad to have learned that pretty quickly.

And while it took some guts to recognise this after a week of hard work, piles of notes, a new bromeliad, and my ego on the line, it was so much easier to acknowledge because I knew that I could start a new thing again the next day.

Which is what I've done... 🫣

And it's a terrible idea. You're going to hate it.

More next week.

🍭 Weekly problem

As a person with shorter legs than most, I want to be able to buy affordable trousers that are exactly the right length, but most shops don't do in-house alterations and, if they do, they often take a while and charge extra.

Save the short-legged gentleman.

🛸 Misc.

Look, some people take coffee too seriously.

I've been guilty of this, despite never really detecting the difference between a 'toasted hazelnut' and a 'burnt chocolate' tasting note.

But if you buy fresh coffee beans and you live in London – or anywhere that the water is particularly hard – and you're not accounting for this, you're basically throwing money away.

I promise you can dramatically improve your morning drip filter or espresso with only two changes:

• Don't boil to 100ºC. Try to land it between 90-96ºC.
• Use bottled water with a better mineral balance like Tesco's Ashbeck, which is only £1.45 for 5L.

You're welcome!

As usual, nothing in today's email was sponsored 🤤

Wishing you lots of problems,

Alex