Take This Great Advice From STEVE JOBS!

Steve Jobs said, “you can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where to sell it.”

Identify a problem, validate it, THEN build a solution.

I was speaking to a founder of a now-defunct tech startup.

He and his partners came up with what THEY thought was a cool consumer mobile app idea.

They raised a significant amount of money to bring it to market.

They then struggled for several years to achieve product-market fit.

They learned a painful lesson:

❌ Customers won’t buy a solution to a problem they don’t believe they have.

After reliving the peaks and valleys of his journey,

He finally concluded that they built the product because they COULD.

Not because they had identified a new customer problem that had not been addressed,

Or an existing problem to which they felt they could provide a better solution.

They fell in love with THEIR idea and the challenge of making it work.

They made the app work. But in the end - it didn’t work.

So, just because you CAN build something,

Doesn’t necessarily mean that you SHOULD.

At least not until you’ve verified that a problem does, in fact, exist and that customers demand and will pay for a solution.

✅ The takeaway: Start with the customer, and work back from there.