In 2018, I sat across from a founder who wanted to build an app that would help people choose the right wine at restaurants. He’d spent six months on the concept. He had wireframes, a pitch deck, and a name.
I asked him one question: “Who told you they needed this?”
He paused. “Nobody, exactly. But I figured everyone has this problem.”
Everyone didn’t have this problem. The people who cared about wine already had apps they liked. The people who didn’t care about wine didn’t want another app about it. He’d invented a problem and was trying to find people who had it, instead of finding people with problems and building something to solve them.
This is the most common mistake I see in entrepreneurship, and I’ve seen it hundreds of times across 20+ years of consulting and running the Startup Burgenland accelerator. People start with solutions. The successful ones start with problems. I call this problem-first thinking — and it is the single most reliable predictor of whether a new venture will find traction.
Problems Worth Solving Have Three Characteristics
Not every frustration is a business opportunity. I get annoyed when my coffee gets cold, but I’m not going to pay someone a monthly fee to fix that. A problem worth solving — worth building a business around — has three characteristics:
1. Frequency. It happens often enough that people think about it regularly. A problem that hits once a year might justify a one-time purchase. A problem that hits weekly can sustain a subscription.
2. Intensity. People care enough about it to spend time, money, or energy trying to fix it today. If they’ve never Googled a solution, never complained about it publicly, and never tried a workaround, the intensity isn’t there.
3. Willingness to pay. This is the filter that kills most “great ideas.” Someone might have a frequent, intense problem but still not pay to solve it — because free alternatives exist, because the cost isn’t high enough, or because they’ve accepted it as normal.
When all three are present, you have a problem worth solving. When one is missing, proceed with extreme caution. When two are missing, find a different problem.
Where to Look: The Five Problem Mines
Mine 1: Your Own Life
The richest source of problems worth solving is your own experience. You already understand the context, the pain points, and the inadequacy of existing solutions.
When Adam Wilber and I launched Vulpine Creations, we weren’t guessing about what magicians needed. We were magicians. We knew the products on the market had terrible instructions, inconsistent quality, and no support. We’d lived the problem for years before we decided to fix it.
The key is to be systematic about it. Keep a frustration log for two weeks. Every time something annoys you in your work, your hobbies, or your daily routines, write it down. At the end of two weeks, look for patterns. Which frustrations come up most often? Which ones cost you real time or money? Which ones do you currently solve with ugly workarounds?
That log is a business idea goldmine, and it costs you nothing to create.
Mine 2: Online Complaint Forums
Reddit, Quora, niche Facebook groups, product review sections — anywhere people complain publicly is a problem mine.
Search for phrases like “I hate that…” or “I wish there was…” or “Does anyone know a better way to…” in communities related to your area of interest or expertise. Pay special attention to complaints that get multiple upvotes or “me too” responses.
The volume of complaints tells you about frequency. The emotional intensity of the language tells you about pain. And if you see people recommending expensive or time-consuming workarounds, that tells you about willingness to pay.
I have a habit of reading 1-star reviews on Amazon for products in categories I understand. Not to find problems with those specific products, but to understand what people expect and aren’t getting. The gap between expectation and reality is where businesses live.
Mine 3: Expert Interviews
Talk to people who are deep in a specific field. Not consumers — practitioners. The person who’s been doing accounting for 15 years knows pain points that no outsider would spot. The restaurant owner who’s been running a kitchen for a decade knows where the real inefficiencies are.
These conversations require a specific approach: don’t ask “what do you need?” (they’ll describe a solution, not a problem). Ask “what takes the most time in your week?” or “what’s the most annoying part of your job?” or “if you could eliminate one daily task, which would it be?”
I’ve found that three to five expert interviews in a single industry will surface problems that no amount of desk research would reveal.
Mine 4: Market Adjacencies
Look at industries that are one step removed from your expertise. If you know marketing, look at sales. If you know food service, look at food supply. Adjacent markets share similar structures but often have different maturity levels when it comes to solutions.
A tool that’s common in one industry might not exist in the next one over. Translation — taking a proven solution from one market and adapting it for another — is one of the lowest-risk business strategies available.
Mine 5: Regulatory and Technological Change
When laws change, new problems appear. When technology shifts, old solutions break. Both create windows of opportunity.
GDPR created an entire industry of compliance tools. The shift to remote work created demand for collaboration software. AI is creating demand for new kinds of tools and workflows right now.
Pay attention to new regulations in industries you understand. Pay attention to technology shifts that make previously impossible things possible. These changes create problem-rich environments where existing solutions haven’t caught up yet.
The Problem Validation Checklist
Once you’ve identified a potential problem, run it through this checklist:
Can you find 10 people who have this problem in 48 hours? If you can’t find them, they either don’t exist in sufficient numbers or you don’t know where they are. Either way, it’s a red flag.
Are these people currently spending money or significant time on the problem? Active spending (even on bad solutions) is the strongest signal that the problem is real and that people will pay to solve it better.
Can you explain the problem in one sentence that makes someone say “yes, exactly”? If your problem statement requires two paragraphs of explanation, it’s either too complex or too abstract. Real problems are felt immediately.
Is the problem getting worse or staying constant? Growing problems are better business opportunities than stable ones. If new technology or regulation is making the problem bigger, you’re swimming with the current.
Do you have any unfair advantage in solving this problem? Your experience, your network, your location, your skills — do any of these give you an edge in building a solution that others would struggle to replicate?
The Most Common Traps
The solution-first trap. You fall in love with a technology or approach and go looking for a problem to apply it to. This is backwards and almost always leads to solutions nobody asked for.
The personal-opinion trap. You assume everyone shares your frustration. They don’t. Your annoyance at a problem doesn’t mean the market cares. Validate with people who aren’t you.
The “big market” trap. You target the broadest possible market because the total addressable market looks impressive. But broad markets are hard to enter and expensive to reach. Start with a niche you can dominate, then expand.
The complexity trap. You find a problem that’s so multi-layered that solving it requires an enormous product. That’s not one problem — it’s seven. Pick the most painful one and solve that first.
From Problem to Action
Finding a problem worth solving isn’t the finish line. It’s the starting line. Once you’ve identified a problem that passes the checklist above, the next steps are clear:
- Talk to ten people who have the problem (not five, not three — ten).
- Map what they currently use to manage it.
- Identify the specific gap where existing solutions fall short.
- Design the smallest thing that fills that gap.
- Put it in front of real people within 72 hours.
You don’t need to solve the whole problem on day one. You need to solve the sharpest part of it well enough that people choose your solution over their current workaround. That’s where businesses begin.
Takeaways
- Start with problems, never solutions. The graveyard of failed startups is full of elegant solutions to problems nobody had.
- Use the three-filter test. Frequency, intensity, and willingness to pay must all be present. Two out of three isn’t enough.
- Mine your own frustrations first. Your lived experience gives you context and credibility that no market research can replace.
- Validate with real people, not assumptions. If you can’t find ten people with this problem in 48 hours, the problem isn’t widespread enough.
- Pick the sharpest pain point, not the biggest one. Solve a narrow problem well rather than a broad one poorly.
