In Uri Levine’s recent book “Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution“, Waze’s cofounder said that founders needs to have the humility to accept that their business ideas might be wrong, regardless of how much work they’ve put into it. The solution won’t be valuable until it’s been successfully tested and used by the customer.
In my line of work as a startup and fundraising lawyer, I get to hear a lot of business ideas from aspiring founders. Usually, if it’s a first-time founder, we may end up being the first outsider to hear an idea (as first-time founders tend to be so concerned that anyone hearing it may steal their ideas).
Aspiring founders should take the time needed to figure out the problem, validate the market by doing surveys and interviewing people to see if it’s really a problem worth solving, and build a ‘minimum viable product’, or ‘MVP’, essentially, a basic product with just enough features to attract early adopter customers and validate an idea. Repeat these until you get the product-market fit.
Ideas are not precious or worth a dime to anyone, but the problem is.
