> So, why don’t just go and ask people what is their problem, and how you could solve it? [...] Elasticsearch. It was born when Shay Banon tried to build a tool to search his wife’s cooking recipes.

It's a cute anecdote, but I honestly have no idea how you would get from "my wife wants to organise her recipes" to "my wife wants a distributed multi-tenant schema-free json document full text search engine"

I've been working for 10+ years for the same company. We have kinda of a solid product in the market, and by "solid" I mean "it pays the bills for a bunch of people, consistently".

We're in no way a stellar company, we're more on the "dark side" of SaaS, and the reason as to why we have a selling product is that we cover, on the cheap, a real need from our customers.

I'm _just_ a developer, and even thought I have a personal relationship with the founders (10 years back it was just 4 of us) it's been increasingly difficult to get them to discuss product development based on "what the client needs". And that is after 8 years of development of a parallel, competing product that got nowhere except eroding our first one.

I think the first question to ask is if the people that can take the decisions are willing to take them.

"Talking to your users is your #1 founder’s task"

Saved you a click

And yet the (probably apocryphal) Henry Ford quote "If I had asked what my customers what they wanted they would have said faster horses" stands in counterpoint.

Talk to your customers, but leave room for your vision. If the customers knew the answer it wouldn't be a problem.

Identifying and understanding the core problem from the user might seem trivial for an experienced entrepreneur(who might have got burned couple of times earlier for not doing that).

But, you'd be surprised how common it is for a first time entrepreneur to not care for the problem, but to build something just because 'they can' and later find out that nobody wants it. PG has written an excellent essay on the same[1].

I've been thinking a lot about 'solving the problem of not identifying the core problem' in my work as a startup coach, which lead me to the creation of needgap[2] - A problem validation platform. Of course, creating another platform is not going to magically solve anything; my personal goal with the platform is to understand the 'language of the problems' to differentiate it with the 'ideas'.

So far, I've understood from the platform that - Identifying the core problem, is much harder than coming up with a solution aka the startup idea.

[1]http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html

[2]https://needgap.com

I wonder if this obsessive focus on what the customer wants from the get go causes startups to optimize to the local minima, as opposed to trying to go deep in an area and coming up with a radically new idea/technology that can then find unexpected uses. Reminds me of the quote "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Not necessarily a bad thing, but it does seem to me there are other ways to start a company.

The second thing, and even more important, that you will discover later and YC StartupSchool didn't teach you is how to do this. People lie, are biased & don't know what they want most of they time. You will probably learn this in the hard way or probably never, but you know, it's part of the journey of every entrepreneur.

> In a London apartment, Shay Banon was looking for a job while his wife attended cooking school at Le Cordon Bleu. In his spare time, he started building a search engine for her growing list of recipes.

This incidentally is one the big reasons why diversity is so important. Often the best software is written to solve problems we ourselves are having or those close to us. If we write software for people we would otherwise not have any contact with, there are going to be severe mismatches between what is written and what is really necessary to solve the issues. This is why I am happy to see startups and teams in places that are not Silicon Valley.

I'd add-on that talking to your users/prospective users weekly also means that you are selling weekly.

Is there a way for someone to give you money? Are you attempting to charge people money?

How do you expect your business to work without either of these??

If you're in the "talking with customers" phase, you should also check out "The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick.

http :// momtestbook .com (EDIT: I just noticed this is an http site... breaking up the link into pieces for now. Sill recommend Googling the book)

The tldr; is that as soon as you tell someone about your idea, it's going to bias their subsequent answers. They're going to lie to, try not to hurt your feelings, want to get rid of you, etc. So if you're trying to validate an idea, the most important rule is "Don't talk about your idea".

What "The Mom Test" recommends is to instead ask prospective users about their lives and specifically to recall individual moments when they had the problem your idea will supposedly solve. With this "unbiased" recollection, you (as the entrepreneur) have to put 2 and 2 together to figure out if people 1) really have a problem and 2) are open/looking for a solution.

> One-liner

What does this refer to?