The meta problem

I’ve noticed over and over that while you’re working on building your company, the much more valuable opportunity often is to solve the problem(s) you encounter along the way.

Maybe you want to sell something online and realize that there’s no good lightweight online store out there… or easy way to accept payments for that matter.

Maybe you want to buy and sell Bitcoin but that’s also a whole painful process.

Maybe you really want to build a video game and the internal messenger you’ve built at your company ends up being much more exciting to people.

There are so many stories like these.

For the problem you initially set out to solve, it’s not always clear if a) people want what you’re building and b) how big the opportunity is.

But when you encounter the meta problem, you know that people want this (because you do), and if you are a company encountering this problem the market is likely very large.

So zoom out and consider building the picks and shovels for others like you who are also trying to do something but feeling stuck because of some clunky existing solution.

As usual, it’s just about paying attention.