Where Do Entrepreneurs Find Problems?

No matter how an idea is generated, critical thinking skills are essential to understanding the breadth and depth of the problem.

Where can you find problems to solve?

• Find inefficiencies in the marketplace — are there things out there that don't work well? How could you improve them? How could you take a product or service and make it better?
• Find gaps in the marketplace — what is missing out there in the world? What do you find on a day-to-day basis to be missing?
• Can you improve upon an existing idea?
• Talk with people who have a particular problem. Listen. How could their problem be solved? Could you come up with a way to solve their problem? We call this customer discovery.
• Talk with people already trying to solve their problems. They could be early adopters to your future solution. Could the way in which they are solving their problem be a gap in the marketplace or an improvement on something already out there? Could you brainstorm more solutions?
• Could you take a unique spin off of other ideas out there? Could you make it even better?
• Could you focus on social problems that mean something to you and figure out a way to help solve the problem by focusing on one aspect of it? Not sure what a social problem is? Read "What is a Social Problem?" from the University of Minnesota's open source book Social Problems, Continuity and Change.
• Keep up with news and read articles — ideas can always pop up while understanding the problems, pains, and issues people face from all aspects of life.

Explore Great Example Problems

You are not responsible for reading them all, but try to look through at least 3.