In Search of a Problem to Solve, Take 2

More like take number 322

Entrepreneurs solve problems. At the core, that’s what we do.

We find a problem, and craft a solution that the marketplace is willing to pay money for. That creates a business.

It’s a triangle. It requires the problem, the solution, and the willingness of others to pay money for it.

I wrote about this conundrum back in October, and felt like I had found a solution for it. But the way I crafted that solution was missing one leg of that stool. Which leg isn’t important, but missing it was.

So I’m back to thinking about this challenge, of finding a problem to solve. In all honesty, I had it pretty easy in my tax career, because the problems appeared of their own accord and they were obvious to see, at least to me. And also the solutions were easy to see, and it was easy to validate whether customers would pay money for the solution.

Other things aren’t as easy to see. Or the solution isn’t as easy to identify. Or validating the willingness of the marketplace to pay is harder. All amongst the myriad of other challenges of running a business.

In a recent conversation with ChatGPT, I asked it to analyze all of our previous chat history, and identify any patterns. One of the more intriguing things it brought to my attention was that I have a fascination with offer architecture, which is a fancy-pants MBA term for how products and services are packaged, priced, and presented to prospective customers. Just sounds like the classic textbook definition of marketing to me, but I’ll try to keep up with the times to keep the academics happy.

Before you can even being to conceptualize your service or product packaging, pricing, and promotional efforts, there has to be validation within the marketplace. E.g., “product-market fit”.

But, back to the original pseudo-question, what problem are we trying to solve in the first place?

Back when I represented tax debtors, the actual problem the customer wanted solved was NOT to pay their back taxes. Nope, not even remotely. The actual problem they wanted solved was to stop IRS revenue officers from showing up at their business, to stop the IRS from taking money out of their bank accounts, etc. They wanted enforced collections actions to stop — that’s what they really wanted. So, that was the actual solution I sold. The actual resolution of the tax debt was simply a byproduct of that, in the eyes of the client.

Over the past several years, since selling my companies, I’ve spent an exorbitant amount of time and brain energy trying to figure out what problem I want to solve next. It’s this thing I keep coming back to, and you can see it in the pages of this Substack blog, with the hit-or-miss content concepts, stutter starts, delay between posts, etc.

I’m still searching for that business problem I want to solve. I know it’s out there. But this question of identifying a business problem to solve when you’re actively looking for one… Well, I’ve put so much time into this question that it makes me wonder if that might be the problem to solve. Yep, very meta. So, so meta.

Instead of just looping this stuff endlessly through my brain, I’m going to spend some time documenting about it here. Kinda that build in public thing, even though I’m not sure what I’m building, or if I’m building anything.

In the comments section, answer me this: How did you identify the problem you started a business to solve?