
How Generalised Problems Kill Startups - davesuperman
https://medium.dave-bailey.com/how-to-reconnect-with-your-purpose-as-a-founder-6d18e80ccc9c#.43r94gfqq
======
javitury
The real issue is that you can't solve the original problem upfront. You have
to work your way acquiring new tools, capabilities, ideas... And it is easy to
get lost in the woods.

Which reminds me of
[http://imgur.com/gallery/t0XHtgJ](http://imgur.com/gallery/t0XHtgJ)

As a side note I think most of the problems don't have a unique solution, but
have a set of solutions that lessen that problem to some degree. Some people
tend to get lost finding the perfect solution for which they need perfect
tools that don't exist.

~~~
AznHisoka
is that Walter White?

~~~
icebraining
No, it's Hal:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_in_the_Middle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_in_the_Middle)

(yes, it's the same actor)

------
ikeboy
>We all start businesses because we’re frustrated with something.

I disagree. Sometimes it's because we see other people frustrated with
something and think we can help, or more generally because we had an idea to
provide value to some group of people without necessarily being in that group
of people ourselves.

~~~
callmeed
I don't know. I have to say, most startup origin stories I've heard seem to
begin with personal pain. Kalanick and Camp started Uber because they had
problems getting a cab in Paris. Zuckerberg created Facebook/mash to have a
central Harvard student directory. Stripe because Patrick C had so much
trouble setting up payments for other projects.

At the very least, another person's pain causes you pain via empathy or some
sort of chain reaction. I had a successful website business that was born
solely out of a friend's constant requests for updates. I hacked a CMS
together and a business was born. His pain was getting his website updated–my
pain was him bugging me.

~~~
askafriend
Those stories are usually made up after the fact. People naturally have the
tendency to create interesting narratives to explain phenomenon in their
lives. It's also just better PR. I know this sounds cynical, but it's more
often than not true.

Kalanick may have had a hard time hailing a cab...but that probably wasn't
inconvenient enough to want him to devote his entire life to building a
company solving that one specific problem that he randomly had in his life.

~~~
tinco
Is that really so hard to believe? Building a social network or a ride sharing
app is something you do in a couple of months maybe a year. When it takes off
though, that's when you make the decision to dedicate your life to it for the
years to come.

------
fiatjaf
Why would anyone start a company to "solve a problem X"? You should start
trying to sell something people want to buy. In the meantime you may end up
solving a problem.

~~~
sharemywin
People buy things to solve a problem, not so you can sell them something. It
goes back to being focused on the customer and the whole disruption theme. If
your in the tiny nail business and make the best damn tiny nails in the world
that's great but when 3M comes along with that putty crap and your sales fall
through the floor then it hits you, you were actually in the help customers
hang stuff business.

------
gsharma
The author doesn't mention who the founders are pitching to; I assume he is
talking about pitching to investors or other people who might lead to
investors. IMO this is the actual issue rather than the "generalised problem."

"Generalised problem" is a by-product of not talking to the right people.
Talking with the target customers/users will lead to better understanding of
the actual problem.

------
kronion
Reminds me of the quote by V. N. Vapnik: "One should solve the problem
directly and never solve a more general problem as an intermediate step."

~~~
olewhalehunter
That quote would make sense if the quoted had say, isolated the medicinal
properties of penicillin, but Vapnik invented Support Vector Machines which
have solved generalized cases of classification but directly solved 0 problems
(if you say something like running an OCR algo on documents whose purpose
remain unamed that were: translated from human speech or thought, printed on
paper, then scanned; is solving a problem directly I question your ability to
speak of general and direct problem solving any further).

~~~
gridspy
Perhaps Vapnik was speaking from experience when he said that "generalized
problems suck."

------
yeldarb
What are some examples of this phenomenon in action?

~~~
wpietri
A classic example is Webvan.

The basic idea was that ecommerce was going to kill store-based commerce. The
founder was talked out of selling absolutely everything and focused in on
groceries. They spent a billion dollars building out warehouses, buying
trucks, etc, etc. They solved the general problem of delivering groceries.

However, nobody buys a general solution. Each person picks a specific solution
to their specific problems. And most people a) already had ways to get
groceries they were happy enough with, and b) WebVan never was particularly
great for anything, just adequate for a bunch of things. WebVan would have
known this if they had started trying to solve the problem for, say, people
living on a single block. But because they scaled up while solving a
generalized problem, they were screwed.

This is in sharp contrast to Amazon, which started out with book sales, nailed
that, and has spent 20 years gradually expanding to other products, markets,
and approaches.

~~~
Nition
There was another older service called HomeGrocer that was doing quite well...
until WebVan bought them out and converted them to WebVan tech.

From Wikipedia:

> In September 2000, stockholders approved a $1.2B all stock buyout by the
> cash-rich competitor Webvan of the much larger HomeGrocer.com. HomeGrocer
> was rebranded to Webvan, the management team fired and the technology and
> processes converted to Webvan. The Webvan technology did not work very well
> and their execution was poor. Most telling, the eight different HomeGrocer
> facilities converted to Webvan saw overnight sales declines of one-third,
> then over 50% within two weeks and never recovered. Formerly profitable
> HomeGrocer facilities quickly ended up with significant losses. Studies of
> what happened after the merger were not kind to the original Webvan
> management who spent over $500M before going bankrupt less than a year
> later.

~~~
lmm
How come WebVan was the cash-rich one then?

~~~
Nition
Huge amount of VC funding during the dot-com bubble, not from any actual
profits.

------
kristianp

        When we spend so much time resuming the details, it’s easy to forget them altogether.
    

"Resuming the details"? Should that be revising?

------
thallukrish
Being general or specific is just a thought process about an idea. You can go
from one end to another and vice-versa while ideating and even when you build
stuff. You can assume the whole world is going to use your product. But when
you try to define that first set of faces who may use, everything starts to
become specific and it questions the overtly general assumptions you made.

------
tedmiston
> This is paradoxical; it’s easier to pitch a general problem, while consumers
> purchase to solve a specific problem.

I'm not understanding what the paradox is here. This seems intuitive to me.

~~~
davesuperman
The paradox is that founders generalise a problem to make it sound more
valuable, and in doing so lose sight of the specific problem which is actually
more valuable. At least, that's how I understand it.

~~~
tedmiston
I mean that's how so many startups work though.

You start with a big grand vision, find fit in a specific niche / market /
vertical to solve a specific problem for a specific customer, then generalize
it back to more customers and more verticals.

~~~
davesuperman
Well, that's the story winners are incentivised to tell - they had some grand
plan and every step was designed perfectly to lead to the next.

------
TeMPOraL
TL;DR:

You have a very specific problem P you want to solve. It's too large when
specified to pitch successfully, so you compress it with a destructive, one-
way generalization function G, getting you a general problem G(P). You spend
so much time pitching G(P) that you forget what P was.

The problem: customers don't want you solving G(P), they want you to solve P.
But G is a one-way function, so you can't get P from G(P).

Solution: note the problem P down somewhere before you start pitching G(P).
Reread the notes when you get your funding.

~~~
andy_ppp
Thanks for that, the MVP craze makes G really small as well IMO - it's so damn
difficult to build something worthwhile in your spare time but I'm nearly
there! It's going to be so satisfying launching something I believe in even if
I have another 6-8 months of features to add to it!

------
kevlar1818
The real problem Medium is trying to solve is not to get you to read
interesting things, but to grow their brand.

No, I will not "tweet this".

~~~
a13n
I don't think Medium put that there, I think the author did... You can embed
tweets directly into Medium posts.

~~~
rdiddly
I've heard it all now. You can pre-select the things YOU YOURSELF SAID that
are especially profound/awesome/tweet-worthy? This is like, NOT EVEN an echo
chamber, because the sound never even makes it out of your own head. You're
your own editor, reviewer and audience. Tweet THIS! _grabs crotch_

~~~
nandemo
I hear you, but there's a insightful saying that explains that:

"Quoting yourself is cool, as long as you're cool" \-- nandemo

