Here’s a Challenge For Entrepreneurs

You’re developing a note taking app.

You spend a lot of time reading around the area to understand limitations and are starting to carve out an understanding of a solution that would really fill a gap in the market.
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One such golden nugget, you find on a forum post reads:

“I do most of my writing in Word, where I have a Zotero plugin to add my citations. Adding my citation requires me to move my mouse, which is annoying–the [[]] command in Obsidian would be superior to what is available in Word+Zotero. ”

Here, a clear pain and possible solution are both expressed. It’s nothing revolutionary, but at this point you’ve found 100’s of these sorts of seeds of ideas for implementations. All of which have built a map in your mind of what the end product should be able to do and how it should do it.

Here’s the challenge:

You’re around 3–6 months away from feeling comfortable enough with your understanding of the market, problem, and solution to actually start trying to build a solution.

How do you remember, store, retrieve, and convey this detail accurately so much later down the line?

The answer, unless you are a particularly diligent near religious organiser of information, is that you probably don’t even bother in the first place. It’s only a minor idea, you can probably remember it.

Why do I know?

Because, more often than not, that’s me. And the more entrepreneurs I talk to, the more I realise it’s them too.

3–6 months later, maybe you remember it, maybe you don’t. You probably can’t find the original source again even if you wanted to. If you can, chances are you can’t remember or find some of the 100’s of other similar insights.

But what are you really losing?
- a pain point from a real and unprompted potential customer
- a feature specification for how a proposed product could solve it
- a primary source that prompted an “aha!” moment
- a potential first customer to reach out to
- a sales channel for you to promote to like-minded customers

Losing this small idea, or its source, loses much more than just a concept.
Good businesses are built on strong evidence. Why do we so often treat these golden nuggets like fools gold?

I’ll leave you with a quote

“If doctors practiced medicine like entrepreneurs practice business, we’d have a lot more malpractice lawsuits.”