Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, so I'm trying to connect dots. The sharp problem is a little bit of that whole quadrant framework, which is what problem are you going to work on? I think that problems have predictive power of success if you actually solve the problem. And this is different from, I have an idea, yeah. I think that a lot of innovation can come from inspiration, but the best inspiration comes from understanding customers and their problems. So my advice to founders is pick a problem that is materially felt by your customers, pain points that steal their time, their energy, their money, their focus, the inability to afford their leisure. If you can solve those kinds of problems, and look, I know that it's broad, because it requires insight. The best founders often are people who felt a problem, understand it, understand that it's really difficult, and understand that there may be like five, 10, 20 billion people who feel it and they don't want to solve that problem versus I feel a problem, but only 100,000 people care. In which case, maybe it's not that intense anyway, unless you can charge them thousands and thousands of dollars. So pick those kinds of problems. If you have the narrative in your head that if you really solve this, people will pony up. That's what I ask people to find. Too many of us just have a sharp idea. Look, I've built a startup on a non-sharp problem, and I knew how it felt. Well, I also know working in companies that are solving sharp problems how it feels, it's a huge tailwind to do that. In fact, when you work on sharp problems, it's hard to fail because you can make mistakes and the customer's obsession will carry you, but if you work on something that doesn't have a sharp problem, mistakes can kill you because essentially you're having to pay a lot for marketing, you're having to pay a lot for word of mouth. People, when they get poor, they don't care about it, like recessions. Coming back to something you mentioned earlier about just how much pain it needs to be for people to care or how much pain it needs to solve versus the status quo, I think is a really important element of this. I think most founders like, no, I need to solve a problem. But usually it's not painful enough or it's not solving it enough, given either an example of something that you've tried or you've seen of just like that was a sharpish problem but not sharp enough and people didn't care, either a company worked or a startup you advised of just like, okay, it wasn't sharp enough. I don't want to create enemies because I know a lot of founders. But here's one, here's one. I don't know if you remember during the pandemic, this venture studio by I think one of the ex founders of Evernote created mmhmm camera, remember that?…

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