Ged: [00:00:00] Good morning, Vancouver. How are you, Milan?
Milan: Good morning to Sydney. Good afternoon to Vancouver. Now I’m almost
Ged: Yeah, the time difference always throws me. Mm-hmm.
Milan: Yeah. How many times do they do, do the math wrong? You know, talking to a client in Europe or all, all the time. All the time. So, yeah. I
Ged: I,
Milan: You. I don’t blame you.
Ged: I sent you a meeting invite for this session that was an hour out, and I checked and I thought I was spot on, but obviously I was wrong. I was wrong. Mm-hmm.
Milan: Oh, yeah.
Ged: Yep.
Milan: Savings or something like that into the mix and Oh my goodness. Yeah. The worst.
Ged: Yeah. Then it gets complicated. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yep. So for our card cast today, Milan, what are we gonna be talking about?
Milan: Love the problem. That’s a funny one. That’s a funny one. It’s, it’s a short card. So maybe this will be a shorter episode, as
Ged: Yeah,
Milan: You know, we’ve said it before about other cards, haven’t we?[00:01:00]
Ged: We have, we have and, and is this a relatively new card?
Milan: To be perfectly honest, I don’t even know. I would have to look at which number it is. I don’t have it in front of me, but you know, there is over 50 cars at this point. So what really is new, right? We are recording these slower than the new cars are written, so I think that will be outpaced pretty soon.
Ged: Well with, with repetition, we’re getting better at this and faster. So maybe we can catch up here.
Milan: Let’s
Ged: So love, love the problem. Doesn’t every entrepreneur love their problem?
Milan: No. Sometimes they love the perception of a problem or sometimes they love what they think is a problem that people should have. And of course, you know, there is a lot of very successful businesses that started with solving a particular problem for, people who created like a, you know. I found a solution to my problem.
I think that [00:02:00] it was Greg Crabtree who said that you really have three stages of the business, right? Identify a problem, identify a profitable way of solving it, and then tell everybody you know about it. That is the good way of doing it. But very often. People start from the idea, from the solution and they fall in love with the solution without really qualifying.
Is there a problem out there that is going to be solved? Is there a pain? Right? And then you go to tools, like a value proposition canvas and say, what is it that we are actually trying to solve here? And why would somebody pay for it? Right? It the build it and their come doesn’t really work that much.
Ged: A solution looking for a problem.
Milan: Oh yeah. Yet
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: Another very, very, very good way of putting it. Yes.
Ged: I, I remember years ago I, I don’t watch Shark Tank anymore, but I watched an episode of Shark Tank and an entrepreneur [00:03:00] had come to the Sharks and this, this must be 10, 10 years ago at least, if, if not more. And his solution was a, an app that allowed you to. To basically break down your mobile phone calls into business and personal so that you could basically charge for the personal calls. And as he did his introduction, one of the sharks stopped him and said can I just stop you there? Over the last year, nearly every telco in the world has moved to unlimited calls.
What problem are you solving here? Because you’ve got a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist anymore. You know, have you just missed the market? Have you just missed the timing? And he was so close to his solution that he hadn’t even realized that the world had changed around him and that what he was building, what he had built, no longer had a a purpose.
Milan: There are [00:04:00] two really sad things about this story. One is the story itself, the second is that it’s far from unique. Right. It happens so many times. Yes. The market could change around you as, as you were talking about Shark Tank. I don’t know if it was Shark Tank or Dragons then, which is the version.
I don’t even know which one’s. American, Canadian, whatever that is. And there was somebody who was who was pedaling a battery charger. Like what? Right.. Eh, same thing or Right, same thing. Like is there an actual problem that is being solved? We run into software often with software companies, like in order they’re building something and you’re like, okay, again, what is the problem?
You’re being solved. Why would somebody paying you for this? What is the ROI? Right? Those are the questions that need to be asked. Otherwise, you can get [00:05:00] really, really far down the rabbit hole without realizing that, you know. No rabbits.
Ged: Yep. I, I, I often speak to sort of know in early stage startups where now they’re building another one of a thing. And there’s already 10, 15, 20 of those things out there on the market. And I think they’re blind to the facts that they’re basically just trying to build a copycat of something that’s already there.
But in their mind, what they’re doing is so unique, so different, but no one else can see that uniqueness or difference. So they’re trying to enter what is a sort of a congested market already. With, with a solution that they think is different, but in reality is, is not. And that’s a difficult conversation to have with someone because they’ve got so much energy and emotion invested into their solution that they can’t see it.
They just can’t see it.
Milan: I’m just trying to think about counter example, right? When doing [00:06:00] something that’s already on the market is not necessarily a bad thing because the fact that it’s already on the market is actually probably proving that there is a problem being solved, right? And maybe there are some edge cases of the problem or maybe there is a geographical differences or something like that. So. You know, picking up a business model or a solution of somebody who’s already doing it and then applying it to a different market or to different place, or doing it better, it’s not necessarily a bad thing because again, existence of different companies is. A data point, if not proof, a data point that there might be an actual problem being solved and you just might be able to do it better.
I think that the bigger problem is where somebody’s developing something that doesn’t exist and it doesn’t exist for a reason because there just isn’t a need. Right. And I see that at least as often as copycats and some of them quite [00:07:00] successful.
Ged: I’ve had several conversations with a, with an entrepreneur that’s gone along the lines of, you know, me, me, after hearing their platform, their app, their solution. But it’s just, it sounds exactly like X and their response is, ah, yeah, but we’re using ai. And my answer to that is everyone is using ai X is using ai.
Milan: No yeah, of course. Well, you know, now we, now it’s ai. Before it was blockchain, right? Like it’s,
Ged: Hmm.
Milan: It, it doesn’t matter. Again, the technology, that’s, that’s the solution, right? Or we can do it better with
Ged: Yep.
Milan: But again, you understand the problem you’re solving? Do you understand who the customer is? What is the size of the pain caused by this problem? Therefore, how much are they going to be willing to pay [00:08:00] you for whatever your solution is, right? The. I said three sentences before I go to the word of solu to our solution. And that’s the important thing. You need to go through this qualification work before you spend money on developing or r and d or anything like that. Is there a problem out there? Right. Old adage says that the cheapest prototype is a press release, right? Say you have something, even if you don’t, and see if somebody cares. Right.
Ged: Yep.
Milan: They do,
Ged: Yep.
Milan: It’s worth building. If they don’t, should think really hard.
Ged: Or a landing page that says, register your interest. We are building one of these. Would you like to hear more? Yep.
Milan: Yeah. Read over, subscribe. It’s not a bad methodology to get to that,
Ged: Yep.
Milan: To get to that point. Yeah.
Ged: And, and what, whilst we’re talking, you know, this takes my mind back to Michael Porter’s definition of strategy. Know a [00:09:00] unique and valuable position involving a different set of activities. And I think a lot of people miss the valuable bit. You know? Yes, it has to be different. Yes, it has to be unique, but it’s gotta be valuable enough.
To enough people to make it viable or else you’re just building something that’s different that nobody wants, and it doesn’t really matter how much time you put into that or how unique or different or what your differentiators actually are. If it’s not valuable enough to a big enough segment of the market, you’re not gonna get anywhere.
Milan: And I would just add that. Whenever you use the word enough in your last couple of sentences, it’s always relative, right? ’cause it
Ged: Mm-hmm.
Milan: On your business model. Might be valuable enough to one person and it’s still worth you proceeding on that. Or it might be of little value, but lot of people.
Ged: Yep.
Milan: Long as it can support the business model. As long as you know your flywheel starts spinning around that [00:10:00] concept then you might have something, but you really need to know, and you really need to do the homework to realize that. And the best. A tool for that is customer interviews, right? Talk to people who could potentially be the customers for this. Talk to them about this problem, and then you can, in your head, start mapping, does my solution actually solve this? And to, to what extent do.
Ged: In, in your, in your card, you use the notion Jim Collins notion of market push and market pull. Talk, talk, talk about that a moment.
Milan: Well, every time you have this conversation with a young entrepreneur, entrepreneur, they will tell you when nobody wanted an iPad. Right, which is not necessarily true. You know, the tablet market existed, just the technological solution wasn’t there. And yes, it took a great insight of somebody who [00:11:00] was just really good at that, right?
To figure that out, but realize what was Steve Jobs experience until that point. That was the second round of Apple after Pixar, after all of those other things. Right. You really think as a 22-year-old entrepreneur that you can create that market push? It also took a lot of money, right? It was the whole
Ged: Yep.
Milan: Getting the product, getting the marketing, and know, I am sorry. I am sure there were focus groups.
Ged: Absolutely. And they didn’t get it right to begin with. You know, it was, it was probably three, four iterations of the iPad before people found it useful enough to make it mass market.
Milan: I bought the first one..
Ged: At the first one is horrible.
Milan: I am, I am not an early adopter when it comes to technology, right. [00:12:00] But they got me at a time I had, I still had the first wheel iPod. It was just fabulous. And then I was like, oh, somebody’s going to do this with books. That’s the next thing. And then Kindle came up, right? So I have the first Kindle
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: That was brilliant. And then the iPad was just a log logical next step. So yeah, they got it right. And I am sure that there were a lot of people interviewed and a lot of people. A lot of work done behind the scenes. It wasn’t just, yay an idea. Let’s throw a couple of million dollars on this and let’s send it out there.
Ged: So love the problem, not the solution. Make sure there’s a market for what you’re doing. Go and speak to customers, get validation, and if people aren’t prepared to put money into an early version of what you’re building, you probably haven’t proved demand or market fit.
Milan: Yeah, I would like to add one more thing. If you remember Louis from your podcast podcast, he actually commented and say, you know what? I [00:13:00] don’t necessarily agree. I think that you need to look at a product as well, and that the CEO or the entrepreneur needs to be in love with the product, of course. But I think that what we’re trying to do. Say here is you need to be in love and understand the problem first before you can make the next step
Ged: It’s an and not an or.
