Jacob Dutton uses TurboTax as an example of problem-solution fit: Intuit saw that tax filing was complex and time-consuming, built software to automate it, and charged only a percentage of refunds. He walks through a checklist for evaluating whether your idea solves a real problem people want to use.
Chapters
And I wanna show you before we get into this, probably my favorite example of problem solution forever. And if you're joining us from the US or you have been to the US and you've watched TV for more than 2 minutes, you'll be very familiar with TurboTax. So before TurboTax, like completing filing taxes was insanely complicated in the US, even more so I think than in the UK, hugely time-consuming, complicated process. A lot of people, right? They had to manually go through tax forms. They've got to read very dense tax code to understand what deductions they can qualify for. Intuit, who at the time were primarily known for B2B financial software— so they invented Quicken, for example— they recognized that there was a huge customer problem here and introduced what is absolutely a superior solution in TurboTax that completely automates tax filing for customers. And rather than paying for the software, it's completely free, right? Customers just pay a proportion of that refund. And so not only do I think it's great problem-solution fit, I think it's very, very clever business model. It saves people time, you know, it's reduced the risk of errors, save them a ton of money. And millions of people use TurboTax every year. And this to me is what finding problem-solution fit really looks like. And to establish whether the ideas that you're working on right now or that you have in your portfolio have it, again, I wanna give you some criteria that you can kind of measure against, right? So the first question that I'd be asking is, has the problem been clearly defined and understood? Does the solution effectively address the problem by meeting the needs and wants of customers? Do customers find the solution valuable, easy to use? Have we iteratively refined this solution based on customer feedback and testing? And the final question that I'd ask here is a really important one, right? Is this solution technically feasible and commercially viable?
