Make Sure to Ask Yourself This One Question Before Launching a Startup
If you don’t have a good answer, you don’t have a good company
Imagine you’re a venture capitalist in 1950 and I’m pitching you my startup. The concept for my startup is simple:
Push a few buttons on a portable, pocket-sized device, and someone will pick you up in their car and take you wherever you want to go.
The idea I’ve just described is the basic premise of Uber. Even back in 1950, Uber would have been a great idea. However, if you were trying to build Uber in 1950, you’d run into a significant hurdle: the technology to create Uber didn’t exist. No cell phones. No GPS.
While you surely already know you couldn’t have built Uber in 1950, I’m pointing it out in order to highlight a mistake entrepreneurs often make when launching startups. Specifically, before launching their startups, entrepreneurs often forget to ask themselves a simple but important question:
“Why hasn’t this problem already been solved?”
In other words, every problem in the world that can be solved using entrepreneurship already exists, so there’s a reason the problem hasn’t been solved. Before building a company, you need to understand that reason.
