Startup Growth
How to Find Real Problems Worth Solving with a Startup
A founder's guide to finding real problems worth solving: signal-rich communities, personal pain audits, and the 'expensive workaround' filter.
8 min read · June 11, 2026
The best startup problems are boring, painful, and expensive. They are also invisible if you look in the wrong places. Here is where to actually find them.
1. Personal pain audit
Log every task in your week that irritates you, takes over an hour, or costs money. Do this for two weeks. The recurring entries are your candidate list.
2. Follow the money in workarounds
Search for people paying for spreadsheets, Notion templates, virtual assistants, or Zapier stacks. Workarounds are validated pain with no software solution — the ideal starting point.
3. Read the 1-star reviews of adjacent tools
Every category leader has a wall of frustrated customers. Their unmet needs are your feature roadmap.
4. Talk to people whose job you'd hate
Talk to accountants, compliance officers, ops managers, warehouse leads. They live inside high-friction workflows most founders never see.
The 'expensive workaround' filter
Every candidate should pass a simple test: does the current workaround cost either real money or real time? If neither, the problem is not urgent enough to build for.
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