Feel the Pain, Build the Solution

Do you understand the problem you’re solving? Have you, or someone you love, felt it viscerally? If not, you’ll probably lose to an entrepreneur like Scott Cook.

Scott founded Intuit, the financial software company behind Quickbooks, TurboTax, and Credit Karma. Back in 1983, Scott wasn’t a technologist set on writing code, nor was he an MBA that evaluated every market opportunity and picked the biggest one.

He was just a marketer trained at Procter & Gamble to gather feedback and listen to customers. One Sunday, he watched his wife balance the family checkbook at the kitchen table. She had to manually tally each individual check, the remaining balance in their account, and confirm each number.

Surely, there had to be a better way.

The universal pain his wife endured was enough to drive him to Stanford’s campus with a ‘Help Wanted' sign. He recruited Tom Proulx and together they put together a simple program for editing, printing, and calculating checks, called Quicken.

It was designed to help his wife, but the problem was relevant to millions of people. Today, the company is worth $113 billion.

Solve problems you can see and feel. That’s where your advantage lies.