Not every problem is worth solving
There are problems everywhere. The world is a long list of small inconveniences.
But most of them don’t support a product.
A problem worth building for has to clear a higher bar. It has to be felt strongly enough by enough people, often enough, that they’d change their behaviour to make it go away — and ideally pay something to do it.
Plenty of perfectly real problems don’t meet that bar. They’re mild, occasional, or easy to live with. People shrug at them. They don’t open their wallets.
The trick is learning to tell the difference early. This topic is about how to do that.
The five questions worth asking
Most of the work of evaluating a problem boils down to five questions. None of them are hard. The honest version of each is the hard part.
First: who ha...
