“If we can’t stop these cars, people will die and the company will fail”
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In the 1950s, American cars were being built with larger bodies, more powerful engines, and a focus on speed and style. This lead to vehicles that were not only fast but also notably heavy. This combination created significant momentum, particularly at higher speeds, which often overpowered the existing braking systems. Auto braking technology at the time wasn’t advanced enough to handle the mass and velocity effectively, contributing to longer stopping distances and, potentially, more frequent accidents.
Car companies felt the pressure. They passed that pressure on to their engineers. This is the classic challenge facing what Dr. Eric Von Hippel of MIT has called lead users. They desperately need to solve a problem. Current vendors and technology can’t solve the problem. They needed to adapt non-traditional solutions to their problems. You can read more about Von Hippel’s work on lead users here .
What was bigger, heavier and faster than 1950’s cars? Airplanes. Auto engineers figured out how to adapt hydraulic brakes, disc brakes, anti-lock braking and power assist to the problem. And the industry moved forward.
In my earlier posts, I have talked about why startups need to focus on big important problems that demand to be solved. Problems that customers feel and can’t not solve. Problems that keep them awake at night. Those problems that are the foundations of venture scale businesses.
After I wrote the first draft of this post a friend made a comment that was implicit in my thinking but needs to be explicit. A big hairy problem that people are willing to spend money to solve. People bitch about a lot of things that they won’t pay to fix. This is a crack that I fell into with one of my favorite entrepreneurs and lost money.
This chart provides some examples of valuable startups and the problems that they solved. These businesses have had their ups and downs, but they gained their original traction by solving a problem that incumbents often didn’t see. There’s an old expression that became a clichè by being true “I’d rather sell aspirin than vitamins”. Vitamins are nice to have. Aspirin gets rid of that headache that’s killing you.
The starting points of a great venture pitch are articulating these problems and how you are uniquely able to solve them. You can them amplify these points by showing that these problems are widely held and that people are willing to pay money to solve them. But the starting point is clearly identifying the problem that forms the basis on the opportunity.
In telling the story of your startup to investors, it’s essential to bring this story to life. To the extent possible, bring the customer’s voice into the room. How are they? Why does this problem cause them grief? How will their life be better when the problem is fixed? Why are they excited about your solution? Will they pay for it? How much?
Even if you have dreams of building a gigantic enterprise some day, the starting point is always solving one very specific and very urgent problem.