yongfook

Problem discovery is a challenge that every founder will face. How do I find a problem worth solving?

You’re not going to discover a problem worth solving by fantasizing with a cofounder along the lines of “wouldn’t it be cool if there was an app that…” and you’re not going to discover a problem worth solving by playing the this for that game.

However, here’s one way that will definitely work:

Do Something Mundane!

Go and perform some mundane task that normal people around you are doing every day. The choice is endless. Here’s a few to kick things off:

• Sell some stuff you own
• Help a friend move house
• Organize a group holiday
• Apply for a job
• Introduce one person to another
• Get your car serviced

Here’s the important thing. The point of this exercise is not to create a startup that solves the task as a whole. The point is that by performing a mundane task you will uncover an inefficiency at some point in the process. A “how the fuck do I…?” moment. How the fuck do I promote what I’m selling? How the fuck do I know if the company I applied to has looked at my job application? It might be just a small part of the process, but it might just be a big enough pain in the ass that someone will pay you money to solve it for them elegantly.

For a startup, that’s an excellent place to begin.

In response to this post.

The fairytale of an entrepreneur having an “aha!” moment - which transforms their business into a billion dollar public company - glosses over the months or years of wading through shit it took to get to that “aha!” moment.

The general sentiment of the author’s post is correct, basically: have tons of ideas (90% of them will be shit anyway), get used to failing, suck it up asshole! I just object to the romantic idea of the “Accidental Entrepreneur” - it is a poor choice of words to describe the reality of the process.

Nothing about what the author describes seems accidental to me. Among the examples given are Groupon transforming from a charity fund-raising website to the now publicly-listed group buying website, and Twitter transforming from a failing podcast aggregator (called Odeo) into the now ubiquitous communication tool.

I believe those transformations happened much more deliberately and painfully than the romantic story we are led to believe in the watered-down version of events we hear in the press. I think it’s much more likely that Groupon and Twitter in their early days had thoughts along the lines of:

Oh shit we have 2 months of cash left and no fucking revenue, what the fuck do we do now

or

Oh shit we have no traction after a year of futzing about, what the fuck do we do now

or simply

Oh shit what the fuck do we do now

People don’t just stumble upon game-changing ideas, those ideas evolve out of a desperation to survive or succeed. If there was neither the desperation to survive or succeed then Groupon and Twitter would have vanished into the startup ether the way they began, as that quaint fundraising site and that quaint podcast aggregator.

The desire to survive, succeed and the willingness to fail multiple times to get there sounds as far from accidental as you can get. To me that describes a much more deliberate behavior, it’s more hungry or stubborn than it is accidental.

The idea of an Accidental Entrepreneur is one that appeals to the lazy asshole in all of us. Accidental suggests if we keep plodding along with whatever bullshit idea eventually we’ll stumble upon something marvelous and turn it into gold. That’s not how startups pivot and that’s not how you’re going to be successful. Take the author’s advice - none of it is accidental, it’s all extremely deliberate, pro-active and self-preservatory.

In summary: Don’t be a pervert and fantasize about accidents!

Be a hungry, stubborn entrepreneur.

Amongst the sensational, polarizing chaos that spewed forth from my previous post, one question was continually posed by innocent bystanders - what’s this “value” nonsense anyway? I think it’s worth spending a few paragraphs exploring.

You have created value when you are solving a real problem for your user. Aim high! It’s an almost bulletproof way of ensuring the long-term viability of your business. Don’t create a pretty, shitty startup.

So you want to or have already started a startup. How do you know if what you’re working on is a real problem? How do you know if you’re creating value?

I am a huge fan of this way of thinking:

Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

If you can get a user laid, you have created value. Everyone wants to get laid, but not everyone can as much as they want to. If your startup can even act as some flimsy pretext to getting your user verifiably laid then you are on the way to success.

Taken literally, this seemingly applies only to dating sites and whatnot, but indirectly this applies to any problem-solving situation where you end up making your users look good, or get shit done faster (so they have more time to get laid) or make them more money (so they have more money to get laid. wait what).

Even something as seemingly frivolous as Instagram could be said to be getting its users laid - Instagram turns anyone into an instant “artist” and some of us no doubt know from painful experience that chicks dig artists. Repeat this across different “chicks dig men who are X” archetypes for a shot at startup success: DJs, rock stars, cooks etc.

However!

I think there’s an even better, clearer way to understand if you’re creating value. And crucially if you’re not, to get closer and closer to it.

I call it the Shut Up and Take My Money test.

I am of course referring to this. I like how the video is well-suited as a metaphor for MVPs as the product in the cartoon comes with a whole list of provisos (“doesn’t do this, that, this, that”) but for some reason the end user still just needs it.

If you describe the problem you’re solving to a potential end user and they react with “Shut Up and Take My Money”, you’re on the way to creating ridiculous levels of value for that user. You shouldn’t even need to show them a product or describe the features.

The optimum scenario is where the problem alone is so much of a pain in the ass for the user that they will pay you for a solution, any solution. If you can work on a problem like that, and find lots of end users like that, and then layer on top of it a well-oiled product in terms of design and engineering - you are guaranteed success.

The part I have left out is that this process is phenomenally difficult, frustrating and slow. That’s why it’s so important to invest time in it as early as possible. Don’t build anything yet! Don’t be a solution looking for a problem. Discovery or hypothesis of the problem is just the first step. The next step is finding the people who react with Shut Up and Take My Money.

If you’re lucky or smart, you’ll meet them fast. If not, you may have to tweak the original problem you’re solving or figure out how to explore pockets of users that you haven’t found yet to see if your idea results in Shut Up and Take My Money. You might even think about giving up altogether.

But don’t! Bounce the idea off as many people as possible. Tweak it as necessary. Find out what people are willing to pay for. Because the first time you hear Shut Up and Take My Money, an awesome wave of relief will wash over you and the clouds will part and the angels will sing. It’s an even better feeling than getting your users laid.

Update:

Readers have highlighted the disturbing lack of swearing or inflammatory language in this post. I’ll end with this - if you do all of the above and speak to 1000 end users and continually tweak your hypothesis and still don’t elicit the Shut Up and Take My Money response… then the problem space you’re working in is probably horseshit! (tm).

In direct response to: http://designerfund.com/infographic

I’ve created products / services in the past that have garnered praise for their design. I love good design in all forms - copywriting in particular fascinates me. I’ve never called myself a designer.

Here’s my pitch. This talk of designers as the new kings of startups is becoming increasingly overblown. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. For a startup, design is merely the barrier to entry to your product not getting lost in the primordial soup of startups. It is simply your ticket to a seat at the table of possible contenders.

Focus on value creation. Design enhances value, it does not create it. Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing. A product or service that is indispensably useful yet looks like ass is infinitely more likely to be successful than a product that solves zero problems but looks like a work of art. Stop this cycle of creating beautiful novelties, getting your 15 minutes, then disappearing. Create value.

I’m going to pull back the curtain. Here’s why so much smoke is blown up designer’s asses in the startup community:

1. Designers tweet and blog

We’re witnessing a simple selection bias. Designers are expressive creatures, they pontificate, tweet and blog about what they do. Ergo, in our little echo chamber of the web we hear more about the importance of design in startups than we do about sales, business dev, ops etc.

2. Design is a cheap way to appear like you’re creating value

It is to a massive degree much, much easier to spend a week designing a new landing page or launch email or signup flow than it is spending a week getting out of your office, finding people who actually give a shit about what you’re doing and figuring out how to solve their problem to the point where you become so indispensable that if you didn’t exist they wouldn’t be able to fucking live.

3. Everyone’s a fucking designer now

If there’s one thing you can bet everyone having an opinion on, it’s how something should “look & feel” from the layout to the user journey to the copy. That kind of stuff is the easiest, dumbest scapegoat for your time if you’re an early stage startup still figuring out what the fuck your customers actually want and how you can deliver it.

My life changed after reading Lean Startup. You should read it too. Whilst nowhere in Eric’s book does he claim Design is Horseshit, the whole point of the book is that above all else, figuring out value creation FAST is the one true rule of playing the startup game. In fact in the book Eric gives multiple examples of startups who in their very early stages were successful at creating value with zero visible product: no fancy website, no shimmering design, they just provided a service over the phone or in-person that people / companies really, really needed and wanted to use.

In the original list at http://designerfund.com/infographic there are successful companies - but these are ones who have solved a real customer problem. Their value is enhanced by their design, it is not caused by it. Chest-beating about design from a startup fund sends a misleading message to early stage startups about where their priorities should lie.

In the past I have been guilty of putting far too much emphasis on polish and design and not enough on value creation. I’m now even embarrassed by some of the things I’ve built, despite them garnering praise for their “design”. They didn’t solve problems! Who fucking cares how it looks!

No more pretty, shitty startups.

I’m not going to use their products, I’m not going to give them my attention, and if I ever catch myself accidentally starting one I’m going to punch myself in the face.

Update:

Some final words on this. Some people have interpreted this as me not understanding the value of good design. I assure you I do from experience, tweet at me if you want specifics.

However - create value before exploring how design can enhance the experience. Solve a real customer problem. If you’re an early stage startup with no revenue, don’t even think about design! Think hard about what problem you can solve that a customer will give you $10 for and work your ass off at delivering that $10 of value as fast and as cheaply as possible. It doesn’t even matter if you’re not aiming to make a paid service. If people won’t give you money to solve their problems, it’s not a real fucking problem. It’s just another novelty echo-chamber startup that you might get a chance to flip to a bigger fish if you win the startup lottery. Don’t be an idiot and buy into that. Solve a problem, live forever. The idea that design is what early stage startups should be busying their time with is a notion I find utterly wrong.

Update #2:

Ok here’s the last word. Only because I thought of a clever anecdote.

People are using Apple as a prime example of design being of vital importance to a company. You’ve missed the point. Apple is not a startup, they are a publicly-listed company that provides value to customers in a number of different ways, not just through good design. Your startup is not fucking Apple.

Your startup is like Apple when Apple was a startup. When Apple was a startup they sold computers made of wood and nailed together in a garage. Apple wasn’t concerned with design when it was an early stage startup. Goal #1 was figuring out if people even gave a shit about compact personal computers. So in 1976 they built computers, out of a garage, from wood, and sold them to people.

Don’t compare your scrappy startup to Apple the now publicly-listed company with superstar design team. That’s not how Apple started.

Twitter for soundbites and easy-to-digest observations on life, business and women. Facebook for gratuitous self-shot photos, party pictures and a whole catalogue of food pics both consumed and cooked. This blog for longer form text content where I feel the need to express an opinion. No pics, no frills, no penis-jokes.

Just raw yongfook.

I have it all figured out. Trust me.

Old, pre-manifesto archives are here.