Startups Solving Founders’ Problems are Failing

Here’s a problem that you might address as a startup founder: other startup founders struggle to find problems to take on, to come up with ideas to address, and to expose issues in industries, so that they might launch a successful venture presenting a solution to that problem.

How do I know this is a problem in need of a solution? Entrepreneur groups, startup social networks, and founder Q&A, are littered with questions about how to find and validate a problem to solve.

As I hope you’re aware, countless founders and companies are taking on the problems facing entrepreneurs themselves, and in a meta sort of self-referential way, it’s an incredibly interesting sector of the economy because if we’re going to enable greater success from entrepreneurs, we should tackle the problems they face.

In startup communities, we often talk about “dogfooding,” derived from “eating your own dog food,” which refers to when a company uses its own products or services to demonstrate confidence in them, which startup founders often do to test or validate their ideas. Solid advice, no?

What’s meta (and amusing) here is that this sector of entrepreneurship is like a film is about filmmaking or a book about writing books. The product or solution being created in this case is inherently tied to the founders’ own experiences as a founder, making it meta in a business context.

The problem I’m seeing with troubling regularity is that the work these founders is doing, is disappointing.

Startups solving founders’ problems are failing, and such founders, of all people, can’t be founding so poorly

I was asked the other week, “I built a website to expose pain points across industries, helping entrepreneurs save time by gathering problems for they can solve. Why is no one using the site?”

Now, I constantly remind founders to take advice with a huge grain of salt, and question everything they hear, but in this case, I replied so confident that I told them, “I am 100% certain in my answer, without even looking at your website nor giving a damn about your problem/solution statement or value proposition, because I can tell in your asking this that you didn’t do what matters, don’t respect what matters, or (and?) have advisors and a community of peers that are worthless to the point of harmful.”

And then it happened AGAIN, a different founder asked for advice of their solution for a problem they perceive founders face, a startup FOR startups, “ Wouldn’t it be valuable to have real-time communication tools that connect startups, mentors, and investors seamlessly?” The answer is unequivocally no, but the fact that the question was asked prompted both my explanation (which you can read here) and the more thought here; how and why founders trying to solve perceived problems in entrepreneurship are clearly and completely missing the mark. Let me ask you to stick around a bit so we can explore what founders are failing, and why founders for founders (if you will) even more seriously need to take this to heart…

Decades of research based in the reality of what works for startups, is that Marketing is the most important thing you do. Doing it well will drastically increase your chance of success whereas doing it poorly will contribute to your fail; while neglecting it entirely, is just ignorant, stupid, and harmful.

Yes, I intend to be that harsh. Society continues to doubt, question, or argue about *marketing* because it doesn’t understand what it actually is, and dumbasses, who pretend to be Venture Capitalists or advisors, want to keep proclaiming that Sales is most important, that Marketing doesn’t work, or that you shouldn’t risk investing in either, until you are ready to sell your service.

Such people are morons to the point that they are harming founders.

Marketing is NOT promotions, advertising, content marketing, social media, SEO, Google Ads, or TikTok Videos. Anyone saying such a thing is marketing needs to be called out on their stupidity.

Marketing is the work of the market so as to create customers.

All of the work of the market.

Meaning, before you do ANYTHING, you should be marketing to determine if you should, how, why, and where.

These founders clearly did not.

How do I know they didn’t? Let’s look at the first question for what it is — why is no one using a website created to help founders find problems to solve within industries:

1. I design and run incubators that help cities develop successful startup ecosystems. I’ve never heard of this website, nor the solution developed — is there not a more target customer or advisor than me? Asking the question suggests the founder just decided to make the website because they have experienced or observed entrepreneurs having trouble identifying problems. They’re not wrong, as I alluded previously, questions seeking an idea to address are prolific online.
2. They built a website and expected people to just use it? Did you ever watch Field of Dreams? The movie. In my experience, only academics, engineers, and product people, drank the cool-aid that “if you build it, they will come” is true. A fiction film based in fantasy, building a solution NEVER means people will use it.
3. They’re asking why people aren’t using the website, which tells us the founder knows nothing of content creation, social media, search, or other forms of freely available exposure. It’s not remotely hard to get people to use a service/website IF the service is worthwhile
4. So… either they aren’t doing or don’t know how to do marketing, so that people would use the site, OR they didn’t do marketing to know how to create a valuable service. One of these things must be true.

Now, what I’m not advising is that you go pay for advertising! We’re uncovering how a founder can avert having such issues and questions from the start, because finding success with a startup is not about playing the long odds of trying to win, it’s addressing everything known to result in failure — so that you don’t.

Marketing is explicitly that work and it’s work you must prioritize above ALL ELSE. If you didn’t, can’t, or won’t, you will fail. Which means that we also have a #5 in my list above, that I can tell this founder with a website didn’t do marketing because if they had prioritized it properly the first thing they would done is find a cofounder experienced with it. Incapable or inexperienced yourself, you’d put first ensuring you have that partner, get them on the team since it isn’t you, and allocating as much equity as necessary to help ensure the startup has a shot at success; having done that, the founder wouldn’t be asking this question… because a marketer would have told them from the get-go.

Let me temper my harshness…

None of what I’m saying means the idea(s) here are poor. In fact, they’re reasonable and easy to appreciate even from only the question(s) asked of me and no more digging into what they’re doing necessary. I work with dozens of cities every year, and hundreds of founders, and generally speaking it is clearly evident that two major issues in innovation are market research and communication — both issues these founders are trying to tackle. So, what’s wrong?

These problems persist because people don’t know and aren’t prioritizing marketing.

This exemplifies the Problem Within the Problem

When you’re trying to solve a problem as a startup, only the misinformed who proclaim they’re following Lean Startup, create an MVP to test a hypothesis.

Any modestly experienced and intelligent founder KNOWS there is a problem; they likely know a potential solution to that problem. Why on earth would you need to test the solution to prove it there is a problem and potential solution?

The answer to that, is because other people are ignorant, don’t believe it, don’t understand, or don’t agree. That, because investors, advisors, and potential customers in the market, are ignorant of what should work, they’ll ask you for proof (validation) that it does. Ignore them. That ignorance misleads you and encourages you to focus on customers, because *they* don’t know what else to advise (after all, getting revenue sounds like reasonable advice). They cause you to fail because that’s just misleading, dumbass advice.

The issue as a founder isn’t that there is a problem. The question to address is WHY there is still a problem.

Why has this not yet been solved? The Problem Within the Problem

When you create and launch a solution so uninformed by not doing marketing, you are conveying that you didn’t do marketing BECAUSE you clearly didn’t investigate why it remains a problem. Or do you seriously want me to believe that the brilliant people in research companies, agencies, search engines, AI, economic development, venture capital, and accelerators, have no idea that these are problems worth solving?? That, they’re all good at their jobs but oblivious to this possibility that maybe we need a website to uncover problems in industries because entrepreneurs can’t find problems to take on??

b.s.

MAYBE this is a problem because people don’t do marketing and MAYBE the reason 90% of all startups fail is because they don’t do marketing and MAYBE if they did marketing, this solution, such as it is, is irrelevant… or maybe it is helpful, but marketers know what they’re doing so they don’t need it, while other founders who don’t prioritize marketing aren’t seeking this because they think they know better.

A ha!

This is why no one is using a website that uncovers problems for would-be founders.

Marketers explicitly uncover pain points across industries so the very nature of proposing a solution as a founder, when it’s obvious why it remains a problem or it’s obvious (to marketers) why no one is using it, is the evidence inherent that the venture is going to fail.

This is the foundation of marketing taught in Marketing 101 in college.

But founders, you saw that people are struggling with a problem, in this case, with identifying pain points across industries… so you built a thing that solves the problem — for whom?? For people that don’t know how to do that? GREAT (seriously, great!) but then how and where are you going to find the people that are incapable of this core requirement of startup success?

If you fail to first address that people actually need the solution or fail to address how to capably acquire them, but have already built a solution, you should shut down now because you’re predetermined to fail.

Let’s get back to this focus on the website for entrepreneurs to uncover pain points in industries… I’ve never heard of the given startup — and I deal with this problem specifically, in cities, in countries, with VCs, and with founders… yet the founder didn’t even get my attention to talk to me, ask me, or engage me. Let’s not make this about me, have you not come across a startup pertinent to your industry and thought, “how the heck could you be at the point you’re at and I’ve never heard of this?!” Arguably, someone like me (like you in your case) is the most important person in the ecosystem, and the founder failed to connect with us.

This startup is hoping to go “direct” to entrepreneurs who can’t even figure out what problem to solve. Frankly, that’s a terrible target market. If they can’t figure out what pain point they might address in a sector, obviously they *aren’t* using search engines or social media to figure it out — in the process finding this website… negating the question to begin with because the website would have traffic — or the founder of this website isn’t familiar with search engines and social media properly to be found.

Which is it? Probably both. Can you see how they’re certainly going to fail and never should have built a website without first addressing these fundamental challenges?

Marketing is all of the work of the market. Founders, w hat does that mean so that you can identify the problem within the problem and create a solution that might work?

• Who are the competitors? Why do they fail?
• Who would pay for this? Why? Where are they?
• Do investors agree?
• Do companies, potential partners, and competitors, agree with your solution or will they work against you?
• What kind of team do you need in place to be successful? Why those skills? Where will you find them?
• What channels will efficiently scale awareness, influence, and demand for what you’re doing?
• Marketing is the work that *informs* the business if it needs to and/or should do advertising, hire sales, or run promotions. If you’re having to do that because nothing works, it’s because you’re not marketing to figure out what would work.
• Why a website? Why not an app? Why not consulting? If a website, should that be AI or a search engine? Maybe it should be crowdsourced feedback or a database or 3rd party research… I don’t know, the work of marketing is figuring it out.

Noted economists have pointed out notions such as, ‘if you have to do advertising, it’s because your marketing is failing,’ and ‘the purpose of marketing is to make salespeople extraneous.’

If you have questions about growth or finding customers, you certainly should not yet have a solution.

That list of bullet points is a brief list among many more things that define “marketing,” and anyone who tells you otherwise is harming your potential as a founder. Marketing is the most important thing you do, hands down, unequivocally, and I GUARANTEE you everyone who disagrees with my definition or my assertion is wrong.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that if you need to be doing those things, it’s because you aren’t doing what matters. And founders often come to me frustrated that investors won’t take their startup seriously… this is why.

Originally published at https://seobrien.com on September 30, 2024.