A framework for evaluating startups as the intersection of customer, need, and solution. The customer matters most, especially their ability to pay and trust. The solution, your product idea, matters least at the start. Find paying customers with acute needs, then build what they'll buy.
Customer need and solution. I look at any given market opportunity, entrepreneurial business, what have you, as the intersect of 3 factors: a customer, a need, and a solution. You can think of them strategically in this way. So like you can look at your potential competition as people who are serving the same customer, the same need, but with a different kind of solution, or maybe your direct competitors, people who match all 3 and et cetera. But like when you are trying to evaluate how to get into a business, you're looking for empty space in there. And I think of them, the most Most important are the customer, followed by the need, and then distant third is the solution, which might be the actual ideas you have for the product. The customer is going to be the one that has the ability to pay, needs to have trust in you. If those two factors aren't there, there's very little that you can make happen. And then in the context of that, they need to have a need that is so acute they're willing to take a risk on something that's entrepreneurial and therefore definitionally high risk. And then after that, you're working on the product or the service to solve.
