I recently watched a video of Josh Petersen talking at the Seattle Startup Day 2009 where he mentioned the concept of finding business ideas by solving your own problems. When I thought about this concept I realized that this is quite a powerful but simple method which I have already used many times without even being aware of. When I started my first project Movie-Trade in 2001 I just solved my own problem because I wanted to show people a list of movies I owned but excel or word files were just so damn inconvenient. Josh explains in his talk that by solving their own problems the founders of startups/projects like Basecamp (www.basecamphq.com) and Ruby on Rails (www.rubyonrails.org) found their (business) ideas. Pretty simple but very effective.

Actively looking for problems in need of a solution

The reason why I wanted to post this on my blog is that I wanted to encourage both, myself and my readers, to actively watch out for problems that we have and could potentially solve. I guess we often deal with problems and acknowledge that there is either no solution or just really bad ones. Therefore the first step should be to actively recognize that we have a problem and then think about a potential solution. That’s the theory but let me give you some real life examples.

• It is almost impossible to find a reliable mechanic online
  I just recently had to find a mechanic who would do the regular annual checkup of my car here in Frankfurt so I asked my colleagues whether they knew any mechanic they had been happy with. Unfortunately, the answers I got were not really satisfying because either people had no car or they had only been to a mechanic once and weren’t really happy with the service. So I went on Google and did some research. There were tons of auto repair shops in my neighbourhood but it was just impossible to judge whether they were good or bad at what they’re doing. Only one shop had a review (a positive one) and I ended up choosing this one. I was happy with the service and the price was fair. But having gone through this process I realized that there is no website dedicated to reviews of auto repair shops!
• Tracking todos, meetings, emails and notes electronically isn’t very convenient
  We use Outlook for emails and meetings (calendar) at work which is OK. It is not great but it does a decent job (I think). However, we do not have any system that could handle things like notes, todos or bookmarks in a quick & easy way. I know, Outlook can do these things as well (at least notes and todos) but it just does not offer the slim, nice & easy solution I am looking for. I use iGoogle for my todos and notes now (which is ok but certainly could be improved) but that way I am using two systems (Outlook and iGoogle) which I’d like to avoid. So I thought why isn’t there a simple, slick system a la iGoogle with 37signals style that I could use as my startpage and manage all those things on one page?

These are just two examples I came across during the last weeks by recognizing the problems I had. Probably not the most surprising ones but I guess they might still be valuable input when trying to find a business idea. I’ll do some more research on that in the upcoming weeks and post the results.

Why I think solving your own problem is no Panacea for finding business ideas

I think a weakness of the the ’solving your own problem’ approach is that it requires you to be aware of a certain problem. When I look at some of the recent startups, however, I find that they often solve a problem I was not really aware of before. Some good examples for this are Groupon, Foursquare or the german startup MyMuesli. I personally would not have come up with their business idea because the problem they solve wasn’t really a problem for me. I now use their product/services because the benefits they offer made me realize that I did in fact have a “problem” – it was just a latent one. When using this method as an entrepreneur, however, you should realize that the set of business ideas you’ll be able to find is limited to the problems you have and you are aware of. It will not allow you to find the ones that address your latent needs.

What do you think about this approach? Have you dealt with problems that you think could be solved? Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email.

Filed under: Business Ideas, Creativity by Stef
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