All startup companies need to solve a problem. Choosing the right problem to solve is the first and most important decision you will make as a founder. If you choose the wrong problem, you can waste years of your life on something that was never going to work. Choosing right can mean you are building the next billion dollar business!

So, it’s surprising that many founders spend so little time choosing a problem. Often, they pick a problem that seems “good enough” and want to start building a solution immediately. Building is fun, and they rush to the fun. 

If you have a problem, the best thing you can do is to dig in and explore it! We work with founders to conduct over 100 customer research interviews with potential buyers or users about their problem, all before even considering a solution. If you fall in love with a solution, you will be a hammer looking for a nail. Find the right nail, and it’s easy to be the hammer.

Doing so many customer research interviews is time intensive, and can take months. But putting in that time and doing the work, you answer the critical questions:

1. Who has this problem? You need to get specific about who the ideal customer is, what they do, and why this problem is so important to them. Ideally, your problem is the #1 issue these people are facing today.
2. How urgent is the problem? It is not enough to have a problem, it has to be something the potential customers are desperate to solve. They need urgency, or else it won’t be possible for you to grow fast enough. You want them to beg you for a solution NOW!
3. How many people have this problem? You can find an urgent problem that is only important for a very small number of people. The larger the group, the higher your chances of success! While you might start with a small group of target customers, you should be sure there are so many people with this problem that you will never run out of them as you grow. 
4. Can you reach these customers? If you have a product that solves an important problem for Fortune 500 CMOs, great! But can you reach them to let them know your solution exists? You need to find ways to reach your potential customers, or there is no hope of getting started. 
5. What other solutions exist? Understanding what other options exist will help you understand both the competitive landscape and what does (and doesn’t) work. Competition is good, especially if their products or services are weak. Almost all problems have some existing solution, even if it’s just hiring more people, so dig in until you understand them.
6. How much is the solution worth? Knowing how much money you can potentially make from your solution is important. Your pricing won’t be exact in these early days, but understand what customers pay for similar solutions or what business models might be possible. Many companies launch free products hoping to make money from advertising, not realizing they need tens of millions of users for this to work. 

Those are a lot of questions! Even so, all of them are essential to ensuring it is worth solving the problem. You want to make sure there is a destination at the end of your journey. Sure, some founders ignore these questions and still find success, but some people win the lottery! The chances are so low as to not make it worth trying. 

Not every conversation will be informative and valuable, and any single conversation is too biased and narrow to be helpful. However, with a large number of interviews you can use the common themes to answer these questions and begin to shape your solution. Almost always, the problem changes and your potential solutions change as you learn more and more!

Recently, while researching a potential product, we were doing a lot of these kinds of interviews with potential users and buyers. While the interviews were useful, what was more interesting is what happened after the interviews: the people followed up and asked if our solution was ready yet! We didn’t yet have a solution, but the problem was so urgent that they couldn’t wait for it to be available. That kind of validation and insight is golden. 

Many founders start companies because they like to build, but building needs to wait. Building will always be the most expensive thing you do, and spending the time to make sure you have the right problem ensures that building time is not wasted. I’ve seen countless founders spend years building solutions for problems that didn’t exist, or markets that never materialized. 

Spend the time, choose the right problem, and make sure you are on the right path. That will make all of the struggle worthwhile in the end.