🐒 The biggest monkey trap in early stage product
How to avoid building a solution in search of a problem
The biggest monkey trap in early stage product is building a solution in search of a problem.
Let's be honest: solutions are exciting. Especially for builders. Going from idea to delightful product that people love is invigorating (and addictive if I'm honest).
But you know what's not exciting? Building that product just to find out... nobody cares. It's outright demoralizing.
Many teams who reach this moment go into "let's figure out how to make people care" mode. Trying to make people care requires viewing the world through a lens that assumes what you've built is valuable; all you need to do is put it in front of the right people with the right messaging and it'll just click, right?
This approach is a mistake. You'll embark on a problem-finding mission in which you're blind to any problem that your solution doesn't address. This has been proven scientifically (look up "selective attention test").
I've never seen this approach work. Not once.
Here's my preferred way to prevent building a solution in search of a problem:
Start by identifying an initial audience you want to serve and pick a big problem to solve for them. Understand that problem deeply by talking to dozens of prospective buyers and asking them what frustrates them the most in their job and what gets in their way from hitting their goals.
Explore completely different solutions to the top problem you want to solve and put an initial concept in front of buyers and shut up after giving them a 30-second explainer. Let them do 80% of the talking and listen.
Iterate on the solution based on learnings from 5-10 buyers and go back to them. This time, you're looking for customers who want to participate in the closed beta and it'll cost $__. Should you count them in? Let them talk and listen intensely.
That's it. By the time you're done with step 3, you'll have plenty of other problems to solve but you've essentially eliminated the risk that you're building a solution in search of a problem.
It's about getting addicted to finding problems and not solutions. The solution is the reward in your pursuit. Obviously it's fulfilling to get a solution out in the world, but you can have this same satisfaction by sharing and iterating on initial concepts.
I'm a strong advocate of building an effective process with your designer to quickly craft concepts, collect learnings, iterate and then repeat. There's always a way in any organization to do this programmatically so you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. It also allows the team to focus on finding the right problem to solve while getting to a potential solution without deploying code into product.