The Looking Glass: Love the problem

I tell founders to think about the problem they’re solving, specifically my LUV framework:

1. Large: Is the problem you’re aiming to solve large enough—customers, users, spend, etc.?


2. Urgent: Is the problem urgent to your users/customers—will they be interested in a new offering, change their way of solving this problem today?


3. Valuable: Are people will

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As marketer and author Rory Sutherland puts it, many of the problems we face today are open ended. Yet we aren’t actually looking to solve these problems.

Instead, we’re looking to win arguments . Or as I put it, we’re looking to maintain our employer’s health insurance. Don’t rock the boat.

It’s because we often fall in love with our idea of the solution we want to build before falling in love with a problem that we experience while living in the future. “Falling in love with a solution” highlights the danger that founders, creators, or teams can become so enamored with their particular product or service—their “solution”—that they ov... See more

As a famous startup founder and PM lead, the author asks: if this solution you've applied doesn't work, what will you do? If you think you should change your job or the problem you work on, you have fallen in love with your solution. Someone concerned about the problem knows that it still exists, that those with this problem still exist, and they t... See more

When you find the right sort of problem, you should probably be able to describe it as obvious, at least to you.

Notice that we’re not defining technology as a solution to a problem, but rather a path to an end. Though many technologists see their work as “problem-solving”, problems are in the eye of the beholder; one first has to make decisions about what constitutes a problem before making decisions to solve it in a particular way. That decision-making proc... See more