Pt 2 What problem do you solve?
What problem do you solve? Really, and what does that mean? Did you have a “blink” moment and arrived at the conclusion that the world needs another disruptive, curated, bespoke, artisanal solution to the problem?
And who has vetted the problem and your solution?
Is it a customer? You know, the person who pays for it.
Is it a user? The person who uses your stuff. They neither get paid extra or have extra time to learn and then use your stuff. Do they have a win here?
Is it someone who has skin in the game? It better be. Your investors have skin in the same, so do, those who are working for less then they are worth in the regular paycheck market, so do your customers, users, etc. If you don’t solve all their problems you better be aware of lots of surprises.
The following is a response to an entrepreneur who was building software for collection agencies. I have been in the business.
I look at the problems of the stakeholders, some of them follow:
Agency owner
Agency mgmt
Agency collector
Agency sales people
Debt owner
Debt owner representative
Banking relationship
Debtor
There are probably a few more.
Communication
Phone inbound/outbound
Mail
Email or other electronic communication
On Boarding and analyzing debt
In the movie business production accounts had a worksheet called estimate to complete. A similar service for agency owners would make sense.
Legal requirements for communication, this is a moving target.
On boarding of debtor credit bureau reports and skip tracing tools, neighbors, relatives, fb, linkedin etc.
Rules and timeline to do whats next.
Status reports. Again movie theatre owners would get a daily report of ticket sales of their theaters. They knew if the number was low that either it was bad weather or the last show on saturday night went into the managers pocket.
The hardest part of writing software isn’t writing the software its doing the spec and a big piece of any spec is solving the problems of all the stakeholders, no matter how small or how many.
Ive been working on one spec for 7 years. I just found out some facebook founders just raised $70mm for a similar but not as good as my idea.
Its not about your idea its about solving the problems of others.
I had a boat in Los Angeles. It was a nice boat. Some would call it a yacht. I didn’t. The guy across from me had a really big yacht. You know why he had a really big yacht is because his first customer funded his company and they didn’t take any equity. And he didn’t really invent anything. He was a salesmen. He knew what the customer wanted. He knew who to hire to get it built. His one job was to get at the customer. And he can thank both you and me for it because in a way, we all paid for it. The company is Oracle. The boat owners name is Larry Ellison. The photo is of Ellison’s boat and a sister boat. Should you want a boat like this copy and print it out the photo, put it in a nice frame and put it on your desk. I send this to clients. I send them photo of what their wish when they have extra money. You know, it works.