This is a list of problems that is intended to help founders that are pivoting and need a new startup idea (ideally in B2B SaaS). It’s a list of real and qualified problems that other founders or people in tech have faced. For each problem on the list, I’ll have personally interviewed the person experiencing it, and it’ll be run through a series of criteria to make sure it has unicorn potential. To get access, simply contribute a problem of your own (schedule a zoom call)! Each problem you contribute will get you access to 5 already qualified problems of equal quality or better in your industry + location immediately. If you’re a founder that is pivoting, you can gain access to more ideas by helping with validation.
Book a call with me here: https://calendly.com/error
(yes, that’s my actual calendly)
Or if you’re not feeling it, here’s a short form you can fill out: https://forms.gle/cMkH75WhGEfWvwDy6
If you don’t have a specific problem in mind, you can still help your fellow founders by doing a general needfinding interview!
| Name | School | Company | Description | Stage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bobby Zhang | uWaterloo | http://at.market | marketplace for vanity usernames | Preseed |
| Maddie Wang | Stanford | http://storymage.ai | Uses AI to turn podcast and video recordings into blog posts | Preseed |
| You? | Your school? | Your startup? |
Hello! I’m Bobby Zhang. I’m a uWaterloo Comp. Sci dropout who started a marketplace for custom email addresses called at.market. When I decided to shut it down, I decided to go through the needfinding process and try to start another one. But because I was so focused on building at.market, I totally neglected networking. So now, I had to go through a process in which the first step is “reach out to your network”, with 50 total connections on Linkedin.
I got some leads from my network, but not enough. I tried all sorts of crazy things to make up for it. I went to some random food court in Toronto’s financial district, and started sitting down at random tables and talking to people. The first person I sat down with was actually a wealth manager for high net worth individuals. I talked to insurance salesmen, lawyers, and financial analysts. I talked to a salesman for Eli Lilly on the train on the way there. I made a post on Reddit, saying that I’d pay $1000 for startup ideas. That did not work at all (”You want to make a billion dollars, and only pay me $1000???”). I analyzed several subreddits, and looked for posts where the poster seemed to be asking for a solution to their problem (with gummysearch.com).
Most of the people I talked to didn’t seem very interested in helping me. And why should they? I’ve never helped them and they have no expectation that they’ll get anything in return in the future. And even when they did, I mostly got problems that I couldn’t really quantify well (what’s the impact, how much would they pay for it, what’s the TAM, how easy would it be to sell, etc).