The Rise and Fall of Solution-First Thinking: Why Great Founders Obsess Over Problems, Not Products

Here's why most founders get it completely wrong when building their go-to-market strategy — they start with a solution and then look for a problem.

I've seen this countless times, both in my own journey and in conversations with hundreds of founders. While we often hear that 90% of startups fail, what's less discussed is how many of these failures stem from building solutions nobody wants badly enough to pay for. Y Combinator emphasizes this fundamental truth right on their homepage: make something people want.

Making something people want seems like basic advice, but it’s such a crucial piece of building a successful company that Y Combinator has it plastered on their homepage.

The scenario typically plays out predictably: a talented team builds an impressive product fueled by their technical expertise and market assumptions. They spend months (sometimes years) perfecting features, optimizing performance, and crafting a beautiful UX. Then, they finally emerge from their building phase, ready to conquer the market... only to discover that nobody cares about their solution as much as they do or that the world has moved faster than they built.

Let's be clear — I'm guilty of this, too. There's a reason this happens so often in the startup world: we're builders by nature. It's why we started companies in the first place. We see technical problems and immediately start architecting solutions. There's something incredibly satisfying about crafting elegant code or designing innovative features. The dopamine hit from building is real, and it's addictive.

The Solution Isn’t What You Say it is; It’s What They Say it is.

I learned this lesson the hard way in my previous roles, and I see it every day in conversations with founders. When you start with a solution, you're forced to work backwards, trying to find people who might need what you've built.

This approach creates three major problems:

1. Limited Adaptability: When market needs shift (and they always do), you're stuck with a solution that might no longer matter. Countless startups fail because they couldn't pivot their solution fast enough to match evolving customer needs.
   Like Blockbuster, which filed for bankruptcy in 2010 because it couldn’t compete with Netflix or meet the rising demand for on-demand digital streaming.
2. Misaligned Value Proposition: Without a deep understanding of customer problems, you risk building features that solve the wrong problems or don't generate enough value to sustain your business. That’s what I like to call the "feature treadmill,” constantly adding new capabilities without ever addressing the core pain point that would make customers willing to pay significant money for your solution.
3. Weak Customer Relationships: When you're solution-first, you're always trying to fit your product into customer workflows rather than truly understanding their needs and adjusting what you’re building to meet them. This creates a transactional dynamic that makes it harder to retain customers, build true relationships, and gather genuine feedback.

The Problem is The Way: Some Real-World Examples

At Clarify, we're taking a very different approach. Instead of starting with assumptions about what CRM should be, we began by deeply understanding the problems founders and revenue teams face.

What we discovered was fascinating. The core issue wasn't that teams couldn't record customer data. There are plenty of tools to do that. The real problem was that sales teams were spending countless hours on manual data entry, context switching, and trying to remember the next steps rather than building actual relationships with customers.

This insight shaped our entire approach. Instead of just building another CRM, we focused on creating a system that automatically captures and organizes customer interactions, suggests next steps, and helps teams build better relationships.

Let me illustrate further with another example. We recently worked with a fast-growing home services technology startup called Volca. They approached us frustrated with their GTM stack, using multiple fragmented tools for basic tasks like call recording, data enrichment, and prospecting. The surface-level problem seemed to be tool consolidation, but as we dug deeper, we discovered the real issue: their team was losing 20+ hours per month just managing these tools and manually entering data.

This deep understanding led us to a solution that transformed how their team built relationships with customers through automated data capture and enrichment. We succeeded because we weren't forcing a "circle solution" into a "square problem."

The Framework for Problem-First Thinking

Now that we’ve established the importance of thinking about problems before solutions let’s look at how to implement this approach in your own strategy:

1. Start with a specific persona: Don't try to solve problems for everyone. Pick a specific customer type and become obsessed with understanding their world. What keeps them up at night? What are they willing to pay to solve? How does solving their problem change their life?
   The key here is depth over breadth. I'd much rather work with a founder who had 50 deep conversations with their target persona than 500 surface-level interactions with a broad market.
2. Focus on pain, not features: Instead of listing product features, document pain points. What are the emotional, financial, and operational costs of your customers' current situation? This helps you understand the true value of solving their problem.
   A useful exercise is to quantify what staying put is costing or will cost them in the future. How much time, money, or opportunity is being lost to this problem? Keep this in mind when you get to establishing your price point later.
3. Build relationships before code: Spend time with potential customers before you write a single line of code. The goal isn't to sell them anything–it's to understand their world so deeply that ideas for solutions naturally emerge.
   This means getting comfortable with uncertainty and resisting the urge to jump to solutions. Some of the best insights come from just listening to how people describe their challenges.
4. Test problem hypotheses: Before you invest in building, follow this checklist:
   + Is the problem significant enough to solve?
   + Are people willing to pay for a solution?
   + Can you deliver value in a sustainable way?
   + Does the problem exist across a large enough market?
   + Will solving it create defensible advantages?
5. Stay problem-focused as you scale: As you grow, it's easy to become solution-obsessed. Fight this tendency by regularly returning to customer problems and ensuring your solution still aligns with their core needs. This could mean checking in on customer advisory board meetings, getting in on founder sales calls, analyzing customer feedback, or gathering feedback from the people closest to both your business and your customers: your team.

The Future of Problem-First Thinking

In today's world of AI and automation, building solutions is becoming increasingly commoditized. Anyone can spin up a new product in weeks. The real competitive advantage lies in deeply understanding customer problems and knowing exactly what to build and why it matters.

The best founders I know wake up excited to solve problems for their unique customer persona. When you truly understand the problem space, you can adapt your solution as the market evolves. You build relationships that transcend any single product. You win—again and again.

Here's what I tell every founder I meet—your solution will evolve, your code will change, and your features will pivot. But if you stay committed to deeply understanding your customers' problems, you'll always find a path to value.