I'm at a wits' end and I'm in over my head. Some days I'm drowning in problems, other days I don't know what my problem is.

I'm not crazy — I just started my first company.

I've read all the books on startups, business, and my favorite entrepreneurs, but none of them prepared me for this. So far this journey has taught me the single most important thing that none of these books talk about.

This one thing was constantly repeating in my business day after day, impacting every part of it. That one thing is PROBLEMS. But it's not what you think. It's not that the business had problems — we already know that — it's that every aspect of your company is a problem. The good news is problems can be solved. Let me show you how.

Two Kinds of Problems

There are typically two types of problems:

  1. Problems where you feel the need to solve urgently
  2. Problems that you keep pushing off

One isn't more important than the other. In fact, problems that you push off are usually bigger problems than the ones you feel the need to solve now. Both of these types of problems exist for everyone, whether you're a sprint-through-life type of person or laid back.

It's All About Perspective

Now that we've covered the types of problems we're faced with, we need to figure out how to solve them. I'll just tell you right now — it's mostly mental rather than lacking skill. Yes, you who has never started a business are more likely to fail because of your willpower over lack of knowing how to actually start a business.

Take any problem you have now. I can almost guarantee it's too big. Some of the most popular being:

  1. I don't have a good product idea
  2. I don't know how to code
  3. I don't know how to get my first customer

These problems are too big to solve. I've been thinking about and coming up with different product ideas since elementary school but I'm just now finding one that works. The problem of not having a good product idea can potentially take decades to solve.

Make the Problem Solvable

The first rule of solving a problem is to make it solvable. This sounds silly but it's true. You can only solve your problem once you make it solvable. There is no solution to the climate crisis — otherwise it would be solved. There are a million partial solutions, and the way we crawl toward the real one is companies each taking a single solvable piece. Nobody solves the planet. They solve the battery, or the grid, or the cement.

Take the problem of not being able to come up with a startup idea. Really the problem is you don't know what product to build. Why do you want to start a company in the first place? Common answers are: money (which is valid), leaving your mark on the world, and living a different lifestyle (trying something new, more free time, or not working for someone else).

The best product ideas people tell me about are almost never pitched as company ideas. I'll hear friends complain about a specific problem or process at work over and over again — and it never registers to them that that's their startup idea right there. We often think of startup ideas as Apple, Google, Amazon — these huge companies with massive success — not realizing that these companies started out entirely differently than they are today. Apple's initial product was not an iPhone. Google didn't start selling ads until two years after they launched, and the founders rejected the idea for as long as possible. Amazon started selling books; today their biggest revenue generator is cloud computing.

Diagnosing the Problem

Let's say you have a startup idea but you don't know how to code. The problem isn't that you don't know how to code — it's that you don't want to give up the time to learn, you don't know someone who can build it for you, or you don't have the money to pay someone. Take the time to learn, go to meetups with engineers, or start cutting back to pay a freelancer. My advice: use Claude Code. It has a low barrier to entry and it's a skill that will pay dividends. In the post-Opus world there is no excuse to not being able to create your own software.

The problem with your problems is that you're thinking about the outcome, you need to be focused on the nearest possible solution.

Go From A to B, Not A to Z

You can't jump forward to success. You can't start today and ship iPhones tomorrow. You need to start by selling those little wooden things Wozniak was hacking together. This is often referred to as an MVP in the startup world — Minimum Viable Product. Since we're not even at the stage of building a product, this will mean Minimum Viable Problem for us. Instead of thinking about going from A to Z, let's start by going from A to B. What is a problem that you see repeatedly or bugs the hell out of you? That is your startup idea.

Building a company is just repeating this process over and over again.