A Quick Way to Ditch Doomed Startup Ideas

Most hopeful entrepreneurs jump into the startup world ice cold.

Even if you’ve worked at a startup — even if you were the first employee — you have zero context for picking and pursuing an idea from scratch. And that’s fine. But, you likely won’t get the 5 or 7 or 10 shots it would require to become a domain expert in picking ideas with potential. We don’t have time for you to touch the hot stove and learn from it.

And this is the exact way to approach startups. To take Charlie Munger’s approach and try to avoid being stupid rather than trying to be smart.

This starts with the idea (problem) that anchors your business.

There are a bunch of solid filters that catch bad ideas, but this is my favorite: the Pain and Complain Map:

It’s simple. For your first customers, where does the problem you’re solving live?

Every good startup Tacklebox has worked with, without exception, has built their business on a problem that lives in the green zone:

Pain and Complain make a great scorecard because they’re a proxy for core startup fundamentals:

First, the Pain axis. If people are in enough pain, they’ll likely try anything to get out of it. Even something you built. You’ve given yourself a shot.

The logical next question from you should be, “How do you measure pain? It’s subjective.”

Correct. Which is why we don’t try to measure the pain itself — we measure reaction to the pain. The worst pain causes consistent action. People in pain do things to try to stop that pain. They try new products, post online asking for recommendations, etc. So, that’s really the pain gauge — how frantically are people trying to stop the pain?

Pain is a great proxy for first customer adoption.

Second is the Complain axis. How frequently do people complain about the problem?

This is usually correlated to how frequently the problem pops up, but it goes a bit deeper than that. Your job is to find out when people complain, who they complain to, and what they say. Every complaint is an opportunity for one of your customers to jump in and pitch your solution.

Complaints are a great proxy for organic growth and customer acquisition cost.

A painful problem that people complain about a lot will give you a real chance to build a business.

Anything else…gets a bit tricky.

So, how painful is the problem you’re solving? What does your customer do now to stop that pain?

And, how frequently do potential customers complain about the problem you’re solving? To who? And what do they say?

Pain and Complain, baby.