Fumbles.
Missed layups.
Airballs.
Own goals.
Whiffs.
Shanks.
Poor landings.
Call them what you want, these sports metaphors all represent a moment where a “gimme” becomes anything but. It’s when you two-putt from three feet away. It’s the moment where the basic table stakes of business — continuity — breaks down because of poor human communication.
It’s painful.
It’s embarrassing.
It has direct financial consequences.
This picture is a screenshot from a (dis)ideation video that I made yesterday for Mike Vladimer at Nascent who is helping me work on a new business idea which I’ve code-named “Historiq”.
The idea of this (dis)ideation exercise is to separate “people in pain” from whatever my idea currently happens to be (in this moment) about the product I maybe want to build.
As an interface designer and UX professional, I am acutely aware of the fact that I could tinker all damn day on a UI making a product — create new features, give it a cute little brand, build countless screens, probably even have AI help me do all that fast and cheap.
In other words, totally sell myself on my own bullish*t about how good my idea is.
All of this is delusional.
The idea of (dis)ideation is to intentionally separate (my idea) from (what pain people have) in order to determine what I should be building at the start of a new business. What I want to build doesn’t matter when I have no customers and just a kernel of an idea. My goal is to find people (that I can reasonably get access to) with pain that’s strong enough that they will pay to alleviate it.
My hypothesis: the core “people in pain” to target for my startup are small business owners who have employees in long-term, key roles that are separating from their business after an extended period of time, often because of retirement.
I currently think one of the biggest pain-points business owners face with the prospect of replacing a legacy employee is the *actual financial consequence* of “dropped balls” and the *anxiety/fear associated with thoughts* about bad role/responsibility hand-offs and how that could cost them money.
I think it forces them to make all sorts of unwise decisions like:
👉 Keeping that employee much longer than is productive
👉 Delaying re-hires because they can’t find a 1:1 match
👉 Not replacing people (at all)
👉 Dividing and sprinkling tasks of legacy employees on the org
👉 Hiring a bad replacement in a rush
👉 Generating bad SOPs the next employee can’t use
I think people will pay to make sure their business doesn’t drop balls. At least that’s my working theory.
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