
Ask HN: What's an example of a successful “problem to a solution”? - mador
It&#x27;s common to criticize a startup idea by saying that it&#x27;s a solution in search of a problem. Are there examples of startups that started out that way and succeeded?
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borplk
I'm sure there are lots. The one that comes to mind now is Dropbox.

It solved this problem: [https://xkcd.com/949/](https://xkcd.com/949/)

The interesting thing about it is that it's one of those problems that people
wouldn't really recognise as a problem until a new solution was presented.

Before Dropbox if you came to HN and complained about file transfer, or
suggested that you wanted to make something like Dropbox the average response
would be "we have FTP and there's nothing wrong with it duh ..".

