What's the PROBLEM your product solves?

Problem first, every time.

But the trap is the problems you've stopped noticing. I ran multiple products out of one CRM for months and just accepted that leads blurred together and deals died while no one watched the clock. It didn't feel like a problem. It felt like Tuesday.

The moment it clicked: the same lead sitting in three pipelines, and my team couldn't tell me which product he even wanted.

That's the sentence that makes the right person go "oh god, that's me." Not "product-scoped CRM." So my test now: does the copy describe the problem, or does it make someone remember last Tuesday?

Still working on getting mine there.

For Playistry, the problem is pretty simple:

Small businesses struggle to get customers to pay attention, engage, and come back—especially when they can't afford to constantly spend money on ads.

Most small-business marketing is still:

Post → Promote → Hope someone clicks.

Playistry turns that into:

Promote → Scan → Play → Reward → Return. 🎮

Businesses can create free QR-code games, giveaways, and reward campaigns that give customers an actual reason to interact with them.

The problems we're trying to solve are:

• 📣 Getting attention in an overcrowded marketing environment

• 🎯 Increasing customer engagement instead of just generating impressions

• 🔄 Encouraging repeat visits

• 🎁 Making promotions more memorable

• 🤝 Generating word-of-mouth and referrals

• 💰 Giving small businesses an affordable alternative to constantly buying ads

The simplest way I'd describe it:

Playistry helps small businesses turn ordinary promotions into interactive customer experiences—without adding another advertising expense.

👉 https://Playistry.com

@anna_ludwinowski I guess if I really think about it - it helps solve the 1 to many problem for lead capture - making every lead get something really unique at the end of the intake survey / quiz funnel VS being bucketed in a segment that MAY apply to them and their specific circumstance.

Here is the product and we're live today if anyone feels like poking around! @stacywycof83995 @oshylabs @thenameisarian @virko_kask if you feel like checking it out too - we'd love your feedback!!

To your closing question: problem first, always – and I feel this daily because we make "boring" utility apps. My test is brutal: can a user name the annoyance in one sentence without us explaining? Our longest-living product's problem has been "I just want to drop this file onto my iPhone and have it work" for a decade. Whenever we shipped something where the problem needed a paragraph, it flopped – polished UI never saved it. From your 33 years: do teams genuinely not know their problem, or do they dress it up because it sounds too small to brag about?

Problem first, every time, and I think that's actually the whole reason PH's own conventions exist. The tagline field forces you to state the problem in one line before anyone even opens the listing. When a maker skips past that into "here's what it does," I usually bounce before the demo even loads.

Building Merzify right now, still pre-launch, and this exact question shaped the whole positioning. Early drafts described features: bot detection, seller scoring, price analysis. All true, none of it landed. The version that actually gets someone's attention is one sentence: reviews get faked at scale now, and most shoppers have no way to tell before they pay. Everything else is just how the product answers that.

Where I'd push back slightly on your framing: I don't think a great demo can rescue an unclear problem, but I do think a clearly named problem can survive a rough demo. People forgive polish. They don't forgive confusion about why they should care.

Problem first, every time. A slick demo tells me what a product does, but it doesn't tell me why I should care — I have to do that translation myself, and most of the time I won't bother.

It's actually made me more critical of my own pitch. With Quovyn, it's tempting to describe the output ("an AI that remembers things for you") instead of the problem (the mental load of being the only one in the house who remembers anything — appointments, forms, what's running low, who needs what). The second version is the one that makes someone go "oh, that's my life" — the first one just sounds like a feature.

So I'm with you: name the problem first, let the product be the obvious answer to it.

Strong believer in starting with the problem, not just the problem that exists today, but the problem that emerges when an industry gets disrupted.

We’re building Clarno around that idea. With vibe coding, I think the bottleneck is shifting from “How do I build this?” to “What should I build in the first place?”

As tokens and development get cheaper, prototypes will become almost free. But that can also create a false sense of validation. It’s easy to build something impressive before knowing whether anyone truly wants it. That’s where Clarno comes in. Think of it as a startup simulator: market agents help narrow the wedge, challenge assumptions, and pressure-test features before you start vibe coding.

So yes, for me, the problem comes first. The demo should prove the solution, not explain why the problem matters.

Problem first, always. This actually resonated because we're getting ready to launch our own product. The problem we started with was pretty simple: brands have no idea how they show up in AI tools like ChatGPT. There are already tools that tell you whether you're being mentioned, but they mostly stop there. We wanted to build something that actually explains why you're not showing up, what your competitors are doing differently, and gives you clear actions you can take to improve instead of just another dashboard. I think it's really easy to get excited about features and forget that if people don't immediately understand the problem you're solving, none of those features really matter.

I definitely look for the problem first. A polished demo gets my attention, but if I can’t quickly understand why I’d need the product, it’s hard to care about the features.

I actually had to think about this a lot while building Writeara. The problem I’m trying to solve isn’t “AI can’t write content” — it obviously can. It’s that generic AI doesn’t know a company’s expertise, documentation, product knowledge, or Brand Voice, so teams keep rebuilding that context in prompts and then checking the output afterward.

That distinction changed how I explain the product too. The workflow is the demo, but the missing company context is the actual problem.

Founder here, and my problem statement is not a positioning exercise. It is something that actually happened to me: Amazon closed my Associates account because I did not refer three qualifying sales within 180 days. The site was live the whole time. It just was not being kept alive.

That turned out to be the real problem, and it is not the one most people assume. Building an affiliate site is the easy half. The hard half is month three, when prices have drifted, half the products are out of stock, nobody has touched the content, and the account the entire thing depends on quietly closes. It never fails loudly. There is no error page and no alert. The pages keep ranking with a conversion rate of zero, so the traffic graph looks fine right up until the position is gone too.

So the problem we solve is not "I want an affiliate site." Almost nobody actually lacks the ability to build one. The problem is that keeping product data, prices, stock and links accurate across three Amazon marketplaces is relentless, invisible work that nobody sustains for a year, and abandoning it is what kills the asset. We do that half on the customer's own domain with their own Associates tag, and they keep the part that actually differentiates a site: the opinion, the first-hand product knowledge, the audience.

Where your original point bites hardest, including for me: describing the problem is not the same as proving other people name it the same way. My clearest evidence is one paying customer whose first week broke five of my assumptions, not a survey. So a question back to the room. How did you find out you were describing your problem the way your customers actually experience it? Was it a specific sentence you heard from a customer that made it click?