A Problem Only You Have

There is an aisle in every hardware store devoted to solving problems you have never had.

A device that cuts a banana into slices. A rack that holds seventeen pairs of sunglasses. Tongs specifically for corn. Somebody manufactured these, at scale, in a factory, after meetings.

And somewhere behind each one is a person who genuinely needed it. That's the part worth sitting with. The corn tongs aren't insane. They're the answer to a real irritation, experienced sincerely, by someone who then assumed everyone else was quietly suffering the same way.

That assumption is the whole thing.

Most weak problem slides are corn tongs. Not because the founder is wrong that the problem exists — they're usually right, it does, they've lived it. The failure is in the leap from I found this maddening to this is a market.

The tell is that the slide describes an experience rather than a cost. It's frustrating. It's manual. It's time-consuming. It takes too many steps. All of that can be completely true of something nobody would pay a cent to fix.

Investors are running three tests while that slide is up, and none of them are about whether the problem is real.

Who else has it, specifically? Not "companies like ours." A describable group you could list.

What does it cost them, in money or hours? A problem with no price attached has no budget attached either, and budget is where your revenue comes from.

What are they doing about it right now? This is the one founders skip, and it's the most useful. If the answer is "nothing," that's not a green field — it's evidence the problem isn't expensive enough to act on. If the answer is a spreadsheet, three contractors, and a process everyone hates, you have a market. People already paying badly to solve something will pay you to solve it well.

The strongest problem slides are almost boring. A specific group, a specific cost, and the clumsy expensive thing they're doing instead.

If the only proof you have is that it annoyed you, you haven't got a problem slide. You've got corn tongs.

---

More on the slide everything else depends on in The Pitch Deck Book.

Composite characters, invented companies. The mistakes are real; the people aren't.