Your idea might be brilliant. But is anyone actually struggling without it?

Every founder I've spoken to lights up when they talk about their solution. The features, the interface, that one clever mechanic that makes it different from everything else on the market. And I get it - that's the exciting bit. That's the thing that made you grab a napkin or open a Notes app at 2am.

But here's the uncomfortable question nobody asked you yet: what's the problem?

Not your problem. Not "I couldn't find an app that did X." The problem that a meaningful number of people are losing sleep over, working around, or throwing money at a bad alternative to fix. Because if that problem doesn't exist - or doesn't hurt enough - then it doesn't matter how clever your solution is.

The graveyard is full of brilliant ideas

Let me give you some expensive examples.

Juicero raised $120 million to build a Wi-Fi-connected juicing machine that squeezed proprietary fruit packs. Beautiful hardware. Serious engineering. One small issue: Bloomberg reporters discovered you could squeeze the packs by hand and get the same result. The product was a gorgeous solution to a problem nobody had. It shut down within 16 months of launch.

Quibi burned through $1.75 billion on premium short-form video content designed for people on the go. The founders - Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, hardly amateurs - assumed commuters were desperate for high-quality ten-minute shows. But people already had YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram filling that gap perfectly well. Quibi lasted about six months.

And then there's Google Glass. Arguably the most technically impressive product on this list, and one that answered a question almost nobody was asking: what if I could check my email without looking at my phone? It turned out people were fine looking at their phones.

These aren't cautionary tales about bad execution. The execution, in most cases, was extraordinary. They're cautionary tales about falling in love with a solution before properly understanding the problem.

Solutions are hypotheses. Problems are facts.

Here's a reframe that's worth sitting with for a moment.

Your solution is a guess. A well-informed guess, hopefully - but still a guess. The problem, if it's real, is the one thing you can actually stand on.

When we work with founders at Rise, we start here. Not with wireframes, not with feature lists, not with "can you build me an app that does this." We start with the problem. Who has it? How often? What are they doing about it right now? And critically - how much does it actually bother them?

Because there's a meaningful difference between "that's annoying" and "I would pay money to make this go away." One is a mild inconvenience. The other is a business.

Put another way: if you can't describe the problem without referencing your solution, you might not understand the problem well enough yet.

Why this is actually good news

If you're reading this and feeling a knot in your stomach, relax. This isn't about killing your idea - it's about stress-testing it before you spend six months and tens of thousands of pounds building something that doesn't land.

There's a concept in product thinking (sometimes called Jobs-to-be-Done, though the name makes it sound more academic than it is) that boils down to this: people don't buy products. They hire them to make progress in their lives. Your mum didn't buy a drill because she wanted a drill. She bought it because she wanted a shelf on the wall.

So what job is your product being hired to do? And is anyone currently hiring a worse version of it - a spreadsheet, a WhatsApp group, a pile of sticky notes - because nothing better exists yet?

If the answer is yes, you're onto something. And now your solution has a foundation.

What this looks like in practice

When a founder comes to us with an idea, we don't say "great, let's build it." We say "great, let's test it." That usually means a few things:

• Talking to real people who should have the problem you think exists, and finding out whether they actually do.
• Mapping what they're currently doing to work around it - because workarounds are gold. They tell you the problem is real enough that people are already spending time or money on it.
• Defining the problem clearly enough that your solution becomes one of several possible approaches, not the only conceivable answer.

This isn't busywork. It's the difference between building something people want and building something you hope people want. And that distinction, frankly, is where most startups live or die.

So, what's the problem you're solving?

If you can answer that question clearly - without mentioning a single feature - you're in better shape than most founders at this stage. And if you can't quite articulate it yet, that's fine too. That's exactly where a good conversation helps.

We run problem definition sessions with founders at every stage. Thirty minutes, no obligation, and you'll walk away with a sharper understanding of whether your idea has legs - even if you never work with us.

Book a free problem definition session →