How to Find the “Suck” in Businesses

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal, my personal diary made public for the world. I'm your host, Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. Today I am talking about how to find the suck. I'll explain what that means in a second. But first, if you like Founders Journal, please share it with your network. It is the number one way we grow. The show is already growing really well, but the more that we grow, The more entrepreneurs that we can help and the more resources we can put into this show. So please help grow this alongside us. Now let's hop into the episode. Everyone loves thinking of business ideas, but just sitting down and thinking of business ideas, which is something I am definitely guilty of from time to time, is literally the worst way to think. of good business ideas. It sounds obvious, but I can't tell you how many entrepreneurs have manufactured what Paul Graham calls sitcom ideas, meaning ideas that sound great but don't actually solve a painful problem. Hmm. The reason they're called sitcom ideas is it's almost like if the writers of Seinfeld had to brainstorm a business for an episode of the show, they would come up with an idea that sounds compelling in nature, but they haven't actually done any of the research around customers or their problems. So it would be probably a shitty business, but it would sound kind of interesting and possibly good. Paul Graham even talks about how the idea of the sitcom idea and just thinking of an idea for the sake of building a business was a huge mistake that he made with one of his initial businesses. He said, in 1995, I started a company to put art galleries online, but galleries didn't want to be online. It's not how the art business works. So why did I spend 6 months working on this stupid idea? Because I didn't pay attention to users. I invented a model of the world that didn't correspond to reality and worked from that. I didn't notice my model was wrong until I tried to convince users to pay for what we'd built. Even though I took embarrassingly long to catch on, I was attached to my model of the world and I spent a lot of time on the software. So the question is, is how do you find a great business to build if you don't have a great idea today and you don't want to be a person who ends up building a business for years only to realize that there was never a business to build in the first place? My answer is simple. Find the suck. Businesses and business ideas are a vehicle for solving problems—problems that are painful for a group of people, are not being solved adequately yet, and that you can be paid to alleviate for them. So, how do you find the suck? First, you pick an industry or a specific type of customer who you would be interested in solving the suck for. For me, it is content creators, people who are experiencing mental health issues, or practitioners within the world of mental health, meaning therapists. and social workers, and finally entrepreneurs. So for the rest of the episode, I'm going to use mental health treatment, a.k.a. therapy, as the example so you can see the specific things that I would do to find the suck within the industry. So once you narrow your focus, for me it's therapy. For someone else, it may be customer success, and for someone else it may be, you know, the arts or Broadway. Now it's about finding problems. You want to build up a top of funnel of a bunch of problems that you see people experiencing within the space that you choose. And the beauty of the internet today is it's actually easier than ever before to start hoarding problems. Here are a few strategies. You can use advanced search features on social media platforms and type in keywords that combine your industry or customer with phrases like bad experience, money back, or refund. You can go to YouTube and use those same keywords. You can also look up reviews for your customer or industry or major companies in your industry, and you'll find a host of customers who share their reviews and experiences in the form of YouTube videos. You can go to subreddits related to your industry and customer and sort by top posts all time. The beauty of humans and human psychology is we love to complain, so inevitably you will end up seeing many posts sharing complaints from unhappy customers within your space. The final thing you can do generally is go to review sites and filter by 1 and 2-star reviews. Depending on the industry or the customer you're looking at, the best place to find angry customers can range from Yelp to Trustpilot to Glassdoor to Amazon to G2 to Zocdoc to the Apple App Store. So here's how it looks using my example of therapy. I went to 2 subreddits, one for therapists and one for therapy patients. I sorted by top posts all time, and I found a number of recurring complaints that therapists and social workers and patients have. They include career burnout for therapists, lack of practical training for some therapists, especially social workers. And then for patients, a lack of clarity around how they get the most out of therapy and also not seeing results from therapy as a result of not building a strong relationship with their therapist or finding a therapist that they find to be unqualified to actually provide support. Then I went to Zocdoc and looked up reviews for therapists in the New York City area, and I read exclusively 1 to 2 star reviews. And I did the same exact thing for big therapy startups that that, you know, have received a lot of funding like Talkspace or BetterHelp by going through their reviews on trustpilot.com. And so I saw the same issues coming up over and over, especially for these different companies on Trustpilot, which included therapists not actually showing up for calls for patients that they were booked with, customer service by these companies being horrible, and under- or unqualified therapists being matched to patients. So this process, you know, this is a very consolidated version of it. But this process helped me to find 5 to 10 recurring problems that could be interesting to solve. So it was like career burnout for therapists, lack of training, uh, lack of therapist-patient fit, poor customer service, et cetera. We're gonna take a quick break, but more from Founders Journal when we get back. Step 3 is about refining and qualifying problems until you get to the 1 to 2 problems that you want to test to solve. This step is more time-consuming, but it's also the most important because this is going to determine whether you actually end up spending a good amount of time and maybe some money developing a product to solve the problem that you're most passionate about. Step 3 is all about getting deeper insight from people that are closer to the problem. And so I haven't done this exact procedure for therapy problems yet, but here are a few examples of what I would do if I wanted to go through step 3. First, I would get in touch with therapists. I would start by reaching out to the 2 therapists that I've used in my life, and I would see if they'd be willing to take time to answer some questions I have about the industry. I would ask focused questions about the problems that I've already identified, like therapist burnout and training for junior therapists, to understand their experience with these problems and how painful they perceive these problems to be, as well as if they know of any good solutions for things like burnout and training on the market. But then I would also leave time in our conversation to ask about the most annoying or frustrating things that they personally deal with on a day-to-day basis, because maybe that will lead to new ideas that didn't come up in the previous step. If I ended up needing to have more conversations, then I would use my family and network to get connected to other therapists and social workers and have similar type of focused conversations. Next, I would talk to people who have built businesses within the industry. This will allow me to potentially have a shortcut in thinking about this set of problems and solutions on the market, because founders who have been building in mental health for the last, let's call it, 3 to 10 years have been thinking about this space and many problems in this space for a long time. And these conversations may also open my eyes to dynamics within the industry that I'm blind to and I should be aware of, as well as other problems that maybe I didn't identify in step 2 but are worth looking into. And the way I'd get in touch with therapy-focused entrepreneurs would be a combination of using my network, using my audience, looking up therapy businesses with momentum on Product Hunt, TechCrunch, and Crunchbase, and then cold DMing the founders on LinkedIn. And then I would also use expert platforms like Intro or GLG, which allow you to connect with entrepreneurs who have maybe had a ton of success within, let's call it, the mental health tech space, and they charge for their time. And I'd be happy to pay for it because they have so many learnings that would save me time. And then finally, And finally, I would talk to patients. I would interview family and friends who are in therapy. I'd potentially reengage in therapy myself to experience it firsthand, and I'd leverage my audience on Twitter or LinkedIn to connect with people who are open to talking about their current or previous experience going through therapy. And through all of these conversations, the goal is simple: narrow down from 5 to 10 top-of-funnel problems to the 1 to 2 problems that seem most painful for practitioners or patients, the most devoid of a great solution. And the 1 to 2 problems that I feel most excited to work on and potentially solve. I'll end up doing a full episode in the future on going from, call it, this picked problem to product ideation and demand testing. But my hope is that this provided a helpful framework for you to find a great business to build that is far more likely to succeed than simply sitting down, staring at the ceiling, and thinking of ideas. As always, thank you so much for listening to Founders Journal. Share the podcast with people in your network if you enjoy it, and I'll catch you next episode.