I meet founders all the time who start with the business model. They've got the pricing figured out. They've got the revenue projections. They know exactly how much they want to make. What they haven't done is ask the most important question: what problem am I actually solving?
That's backwards. And I know it's backwards because I've done it both ways. The businesses that succeeded were the ones that started with a genuine problem in the marketplace. The ones that struggled were the ones where I started with what I wanted to build and tried to find customers who needed it.
Every product I've built started with a real problem
Titus CRM didn't start as a product idea. It started because I was running NDIS and aged care services and the available software was either impossibly expensive, hopelessly generic, or both. Providers were managing compliance, rostering, HR, incident reports, and client records across five or six different systems that didn't talk to each other. The problem was obvious. Operators were drowning in admin and losing quality staff because the work was harder than it needed to be. I built Titus to fix that specific pain point.
Poto AI came from the same approach. Mentoring organisations in New Zealand were spending hours writing session notes by hand, struggling to produce funder reports, and managing safeguarding concerns without proper digital tools. The problem wasn't that they lacked software. It was that the software available had no understanding of how mentoring programmes actually work. Poto was built from inside that world, by someone who understood the daily reality of running those services.
GetSignQuote exists because sign and print businesses were losing thousands of dollars a month on quotes that took too long to prepare. By the time they got back to the client, someone faster had already won the job. The problem was speed. The solution was AI that could turn a phone call or a site visit into a professional quote in minutes instead of hours.
Valencia AI was born from watching providers pay $15,000 to $40,000 for compliance consultants to prepare documents that could be generated in minutes with the right AI. The problem was access. Small and medium providers couldn't afford proper compliance preparation. Valencia made it accessible to everyone.
Every single one of those products started with me watching someone struggle with a problem that shouldn't have existed. The product came second. The problem came first.
Why problem first works
When you start with the problem, several things happen naturally that are very difficult to manufacture the other way around.
You know who your customer is. Because you're building for a specific person with a specific pain point. You're not guessing. You've seen the problem. You've probably lived it yourself. You know exactly who will care about the solution because you know exactly who is suffering from the problem.
You know what to build. When the problem is clear, the solution shapes itself. You're not adding features because they seem cool or because a competitor has them. You're building the minimum necessary to solve the problem properly. That keeps your product focused and your development efficient.
You know how to talk about it. Marketing becomes straightforward when you can describe the problem in the customer's own language. You don't need clever copywriting or fancy branding. You need to say: "You have this problem. We solve it. Here's how." That simplicity cuts through noise in ways that brand positioning never can.
You know when you're done. A lot of founders suffer from feature creep because they never defined what success looks like. When you start with the problem, success is defined by whether the problem is solved. If the quote that took three hours now takes fifteen minutes, that's done. Ship it. Move on.
The profit follows
Here's what I've observed consistently across 20 years: when you solve a real problem well, the profit takes care of itself. Not immediately. Not without effort. But the fundamental economics of problem solving work in your favour.
People pay to solve problems. They don't pay for features, or technology, or innovation in the abstract. They pay because something is costing them time, money, stress, or risk, and you're the one who can make that cost go away. The bigger the problem, and the more clearly you solve it, the more willingly they pay.
The businesses I've seen fail from the revenue side weren't failing because their pricing was wrong or their marketing was weak. They were failing because they were selling solutions to problems that weren't painful enough. If the customer can live with the problem, they'll live with it. You need to solve a problem that they cannot afford to keep having.
How to find the problem
If you're thinking about starting a business, or pivoting an existing one, here's the exercise I'd recommend. Stop thinking about what you want to build. Start listening to what people complain about.
Go into the industry you know best. Talk to the people doing the actual work. Ask them what wastes their time. Ask them what frustrates them. Ask them what they wish someone would fix. Don't lead them. Don't suggest solutions. Just listen.
The problems that matter will come up repeatedly. You'll hear the same frustrations from different people in different organisations. That repetition is your signal. That's the problem worth solving.
Then ask yourself: can I solve this better, faster, or cheaper than what currently exists? If the answer is yes, you have a business. If the answer is no, keep listening until you find the problem you're uniquely positioned to solve.
Don't fall in love with the solution
The biggest trap is falling in love with your solution instead of staying married to the problem. Technologies change. Markets shift. Customer expectations evolve. If you're attached to your specific implementation, you'll resist adapting even when the problem requires it.
Stay attached to the problem. Let the solution evolve as needed. The best businesses in the world are the ones that solved the same fundamental problem for decades while completely reinventing how they solved it multiple times along the way.
That's how I think about everything I build. The problems I solve today, compliance burden, admin overload, slow quoting, poor data capture, those problems aren't going away. How I solve them will keep changing as AI evolves and as I learn more about what my customers need. But the starting point is always the same: what's the problem, and how do I fix it?
Start with the problem. Build the simplest thing that solves it. Let the market tell you what to add next. That's it. Everything else is noise.