We work primarily with scientists, engineers, researchers, who want to commercialize their technologies. These people are really smart and accomplished, and have succeeded in qualifying and earning their advanced degrees and have years of specialization in their fields. Some of them have even created new fields of knowledge and contributed to developing world-changing paradigms about our understanding of natural phenomena.
This being said, many of these people will not stay in academia. They will want to pursue careers that allow them to make tangible products and services that help society.
A common reaction when faced with the decision to embark on the founder journey or to, for example, get a job somewhere else, is that they could build a product that is based on their technology to solve what they perceive are hard problems. Examples of such problems I have heard in the past are:
- People want to run clinical trials much cheaper
- People need diagnostic to identify common diseases early and cheaply
- It take too long to develop a new material for novel applications
- Developing a new drug wastes too much time and resources in candidate identification
- and so on.
These are real observations on existing problems. However, if you have not already noticed, there are a couple of serious issues with embarking on an entrepreneurial journey with such insights:
- They are generic. They miss who has the problem, what is the concrete problem, why it is a problem, and what are they doing about it.
- They lack business framing. There may be real problems with clinical trials or with the development of new materials, but these are irrelevant in the context of creating a business.
The Generic Trap
One of my colleagues calls this the “Galactic Level” of thought. People have a strong intuition about a real problem, but because they lack specifics they keep it at a very high level. When ideas are high level, they are hard to turn into meaningful statements that can the tested by talking to people in the market.
They become truisms like: People want better medicines that work faster and safer. This is a real example I’ve heard. By making these statements more concrete and circumscribed to the realities of the market, the founder might have a better shot of confirming/denying the facts they had in their mind about how their desired market works.
Lack of Business Framing
The other issue is that whatever market problem these founders perceive, they typically create a product-tech centric narrative rather than a business building one. They say “my technology reduced water usage in desalination by 90%” and think this statement is enough for people to buy their water use reduction widget. What they don’t think of is that people:
- Are already trying to reduce water waste in many ways
- Have real-world limitation in considering new technologies
- May have other, more important and urgent issues that make this problem secondary
- May not be a strategic priority for them
- etc.
So, what seems like a no-brainer to the founder, becomes a hard reality check when they try to sell their widget in a market that shows no interest.
So, to avoid these two costly issues, don’t assume if you build your cool product based on your novel technology, they will come.