1. Ideation

Brainstorming Problems Exercise

Approximating Market

👉🏼 To start off, read this densely valuable 2-minute read of

Gaby Goldberg’s Framework for Evaluating Early Stage Consumer Companies⁠

as an initial intellectual launchpad to get in the headspace of what constitutes amazing consumer products.

🎯 Get the Problem Right First! Think Solution Later

🤔 Why?

A big mistake many founders/builders make is that they dive head first into building their “next big idea” for a product, but they do so with even bigger assumptions and biases about how good their idea actually is. Most likely, founders are building a solution to a problem they face personally. This is a huge double-edged sword since, although it is an advantage that you feel strong personal conviction to build this solution to solve your problem (which is super important), you can easily be blinded by your own bias since you are starting off with just one data point validating the problem, when you actually need hundreds/thousands to be onto a legitimate pain point that will convert to paying users.

VCs look first and foremost at what market the problem you are solving is operating within, then the competency of the team, and finally the solution. The product itself is actually the last priority of those three components of your business, with the problem space you are operating in as by far the most important. If you are looking to create a VC-backable business, know that pitching the problem is more important than pitching the product itself!

Of course you eventually need an amazing, defensible solution to the problem, but the problem should always be your guiding north star in navigating your product’s ship. To begin thinking about problems to solve, write down ten potential problems that you’d want to explore along with its attributes to eventually filter down to the problem you want to perform a deep dive into. We want to identify problems that are intensely painful that users are actively trying to solve by spending a lot of time and/or money into it.

Therefore next steps👇🏼

💡 Become obsessed with finding the right problem

1. Use the

Brainstorming Problems Exercise⁠

to come up with problem spaces to think about and compare the opportunity costs in pursuing.

2. After completion, go on to

Approximating Market⁠

3. If your proposed problem fails either of these exercises, repeat steps 1 and 2 until you find the winner!

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