What's the PROBLEM your product solves?

Hi Anna, I agree. Defining the problem clearly at the beginning is one of the most important steps in building a product. It helps avoid spending months developing something that solves the wrong problem.

Before building, understanding the market, validating the need, and talking to potential users can save a lot of time and help shape the right solution.

From my experience building products, I've found that a good demo can attract attention, but a clear problem is what makes people understand why they actually need the product

This resonates so much with me! I just launched a party game on PH today, and I've been thinking about exactly this.

The problem I'm solving: "Planning a party game night is annoying." You need paper, pens, everyone needs to come up with words, someone has to be the timer/scorekeeper... by the time you're ready to play, the energy's gone.

But here's what I realized — I initially pitched it as "a free online party game" which describes WHAT it is, not the PROBLEM it solves. After reading your post, I think I should reframe it around the friction of traditional party game setup.

To answer your question at the end — when I check out launches, I look for the problem first. A great demo gets my attention for 10 seconds, but a clear problem statement makes me actually try it. The demo shows me what you built; the problem tells me why I should care.

Thanks for sharing this — it's making me rethink how I describe my own product! 🙏

The problem is not that founders running more than one business lack information, it is that they cannot tell which piece of information actually matters today. I ran a software company, a care home, and until recently a cafe, all at once, and each one gave me plenty of data. Reports, dashboards, spreadsheets. None of them ever told me which fire to put out first.

The actual cost was not the wasted hours, it was catching the important thing a day late instead of on time, which in practice is the same as missing it.

FounderFlow is your AI Executive Chief of Staff. It watches your business, identifies what matters, protects your revenue, and tells you exactly what to do next. Right now I am inviting in the first 30 founders personally instead of opening it up to everyone.

Using your own test, the bleed here is not overwhelm in general, it is the specific moment you realize the thing you missed was obvious the whole time, you just had eleven other things asking for the same attention at once. Curious if that moment is familiar to you from your 33 years of fixing businesses, or if founders running one business at a time feel a different version of it.

For FounderFlow the problem is not unclear, it is invisible until it is too late. Founders running more than one business are not missing information, they are missing the moment they needed to look at it. A late invoice, a lead gone quiet, a number drifting the wrong way, all of it sits in some tool doing nothing until a person happens to open that tool on the right day. I did not build a dashboard, I built something that tells me which of my businesses actually needs me this morning and why, graded by how sure it actually is. The demo that convinces people is not the software, it is the memory of the week I missed something because I was looking at the wrong business at the wrong time.

That is the problem I want to solve: turning day-to-day developer activity into useful project updates without timers, manual busywork, or end-of-day archaeology.

For what I am building, the pain is the gap between real engineering work and the tools that are supposed to represent it. A developer may spend the day moving between tickets, commits, PRs, debugging, release checks, and small context switches, but only a fraction of that work ends up in Jira or a standup update.

With AI coding agents, that gap is getting bigger. More work is happening across more surfaces, more quickly, and it becomes harder to reconstruct what actually happened after the fact.

Then the demo has to show the relief, not just the mechanics: fewer forgotten updates, less context reconstruction, and a clearer trail of the work that actually moved the project forward.

Anna, the invisible problem is the hardest one for me to describe well. When I run more than one business at once, the thing that breaks is not obvious like slow onboarding or a confusing screen. It is a quiet gap, a lead that went cold, a number that was wrong for weeks before anyone noticed. Nothing looks broken because nothing looks like anything. I found that naming the specific moment worked better than naming the category, not poor visibility across multiple businesses but I found out three weeks later a client never got a reply. That specific moment made people nod instead of skim past. Do you find the same holds for problems that are about attention instead of a broken workflow?

The specific moment for us: we ran our own homepage through the 9-check machine-readability audit we'd built for clients, before launching it. Failed 6 of 9. No structured data, no llms.txt, no FAQ schema. That's the actual problem in one image, not "AI visibility matters" as an abstraction, but a real score with our own name on it saying we'd fail the exact test we were about to sell. Fixed all 6, published the before/after. The problem people actually feel isn't "am I visible to AI," it's "I have no idea, and neither does anyone else, until they run this."

One thing I've learned is that people often fall in love with features before proving the problem.

The problem I'm focused on is much simpler: many home service businesses don't realize how much revenue they lose from missed calls and slow follow-ups. They usually think they need more leads, while the real bottleneck is converting the leads they already have.

That's why I'm building tools around measuring the cost of missed opportunities first. Once business owners see the numbers, decisions about CRM, automation, or scheduling become much easier.

For me, if a product doesn't save time, reduce mistakes, or increase profit in a measurable way, it's just another feature.

The problem I keep coming back to, and I haven't been able to name clearly until reading this post, is this: "I want to stay informed from the specific feeds I've curated (Telegram channels, X accounts I follow, RSS).

However, catching up on those feeds feels indistinguishable from doomscrolling, and at the end of the "doomscrolling session," I feel fatigued and burned out. The existing tools either cover one source (Readsss was X-only, Xeder is X-only) or tackle multiple sources but remain in a text-dashboard format that still takes my eyes and my time (Feedly, etc.)."

The reason I hesitated about whether this is a real problem or just my issue is that the closest comparable product (Readsss on PH; X feed to audio podcast) was abandoned despite good votes, and the single-source Chrome extension (Xeder) used one-time pricing. The founder mentioned, "subscriptions for everything is exhausting." Both examples validate the idea, but neither could sustain a business.

So my honest question to this thread is: when the problem is real, but the paying audience for the solution is so narrow that the two closest comparables didn't survive, is that because "the problem isn't big enough" or "the product wasn't the right fit for the problem"? How do you determine the difference before building?

For me it's the moment right after you spend. You know you should log it, and you know you won't, because logging means typing an amount, picking a category, and if you live across currencies, doing the math too. So the app goes quiet and the habit dies.

The real problem was never the dashboard or the charts. It was the two seconds of friction that made "I'll log it later" win every time, and later never comes.

That's what I look for in a launch now: does it kill the small reason people quit, or only make the after-part prettier.