What's the PROBLEM your product solves?
In the month that I've been here, I've been noticing a pattern in a lot of launches - strong demos, polished UI, clear outputs of "what it does."
But when I ask myself "What problem does this solve?" I sometimes have to dig for the answer. (I come by that thinking honestly - I've spent 33 years building and fixing businesses, so this is the lens I can't turn off.)
The products where the problem is obvious are the ones people actually buy - you see it, you go "oh, that's exactly my issue," and you're sold on it.
It also makes pitching easier. If you're clear on the problem, explaining your product to anyone - buyers, other makers, whoever - gets a lot simpler.
And it's a small tweak with a big payoff - naming the problem clearly in your launch messaging can be the difference between people scrolling past and people stopping to actually look.
Curious what others think: when you're checking out a launch here, do you look for the problem first, or does the demo/output usually sell you on its own?
Replies
For Lernex, the problem is not a shortage of explanations. It is that the learner has to manage the entire learning system themselves.
Their material is scattered across PDFs, notes, screenshots, videos, quizzes, and chat histories. Every tool starts from zero, so the learner has to remember what they misunderstood, ask for the right format, choose the right difficulty, and decide what to revisit next.
The product we are building tries to remove that coordination burden: bring any input, turn it into the output you need, and let the context accumulate so the system adapts around the learner over time.
Your framing is a useful launch test. “Adaptive AI learning platform” describes a category; “your learning tools keep forgetting you” describes the pain.
For FounderFlow the problem is pretty blunt: I was running a software company, a care home and a cafe at once and everything demanded equal attention even when most of it didn't actually need me that day. So the problem isn't features, it's knowing what to look at before you open a single dashboard. I'm the founder, so take that with the usual grain of salt.
Nowadays you have to signup to do the most basic tasks, and I thought it was stupid. So I made a website for open-source tools that work immediately in the browser. No signup or download needed.
Nautis
I completely agree. In fact, this realization is one of the biggest reasons we built Nautis.
The problem isn't that founders don't have enough software. It's that they have too much.
A typical startup ends up juggling a CRM, docs, spreadsheets, task management, fundraising tools, meeting notes, AI assistants, file storage, and more. Every tool knows one part of the business, but none understands the business as a whole. Founders spend an incredible amount of time switching tabs, copying information, and trying to keep everything in sync.
We believe the real problem isn't a lack of AI—it's fragmented context.
That's why we built Nautis as an AI-native startup operating system. Instead of another point solution, we wanted one workspace where planning, fundraising, documents, meetings, finance, and operations all share the same context, allowing the AI to actually understand what's happening across the company.
For us, the product is just the outcome. The real problem we're trying to solve is helping founders spend less time managing tools and more time building their companies.
The problem we solve with Skryber is painfully specific: creators and brands sit on hours of long-form video that never gets repurposed because the process is too fragmented and time-consuming.
You need one tool to clip, another to caption, another to dub into Spanish, another to schedule — and by the time you've stitched it all together, the moment has passed.
Skryber (skryber.com) collapses that entire pipeline into one workflow. Paste a YouTube URL, and in minutes you get AI-clipped shorts, animated karaoke captions, AI voiceover in multiple languages, and posts ready to schedule — all from a single platform.
The problem in one sentence: "You have great long-form content, but zero time to turn it into the short-form clips that actually grow your audience."
I spent many years in sales and solutions (recruitment and staffing companies mainly) and must have completed hundreds of presentations. Each followed a similar pattern. Pull together a slide deck, realise its too long, refine it down to an appropriate number and then rehearse it to check it fits in the time slot given by the customer.
Then, of course, in the room a stakeholder asks a completely different question that's not in the deck at all. Which leads to fumbling around, trying to find an answer... promising to follow up with more info... wishing we hadn't deleted the slide that covered this etc.
That's the problem that I have sought to solve with slideAcross. Non-linear, multilayered, interactive presentations. Layer slides under your main presentation flow in anticipation of questions you may get asked. Or generate slides in real time from source material like bid material, process/policy docs, case studies etc.
Of course it works just as well in education and in many other environments... as long as you have the confidence to pivot your presentation with content that you're already familiar with!
p.s. we're launching today if you would like to check us out... slideAcross. Thank you!
The lens I use is whether it removes a decision I am tired of making myself. More data rarely helps me, I already have plenty of that. What helps is something that looks at all of it and tells me the one thing to actually do next. I have tried a lot of dashboards over the years. The ones I kept were never the prettiest, they were just the ones that pointed at one thing and said, do this now.
Founder of FounderFlow here, so biased, but this is the exact question I built around. The problem isn't 'not enough data,' it's that founders running more than one business can see everything and still miss the ten small follow-ups that quietly didn't happen. The dashboard exists; the noticing doesn't.
I built an app (bondsai.app) for myself to follow-up with with people and remember what's important to them as I suck at remembering lol. I realized that caring about other people doesn't mean you will remember. Then life gets in the way and relationships drift.
I got my wife to use the app, and I noticed that she had became more curious to listen to other people's stories. Anecdotal, but its a good start
My Chrome Extension Slate Focus, which I launched today, started with the problem first. I hate reading large blocks of text. As a developer and coach, I am constantly reading documentation, emails, essays and other dense text from my trainees so I needed something to help me deal with the eye strain. So I made the extension first (although I knew it was something I would be marketing) with this problem in mind. The solution needed to be simple, a client side only reading ruler that helps me focus on text better. I find it useful because it solves a problem for me, and that means there is somebody else out there that would also find it useful! The best products in my opinion are the ones you would actually use yourself (in fact, I'm using it right now!)