I use an essay by Sam Schillace, “If It’s Easy It’s Not Worth Much” as a point of departure for where entrepreneurs should focus their problem-solving skills. What many find easy to do is not valuable.
What Many Find Easy To Do Is Not Valuable
“The right time to approach a technical problem is when it’s barely possible to solve it; when it’s hard, filled with unknowns, but not impossible. The best case is when you find something that’s unlikely or even seems irrelevant to other people, but you see value in it and put in the hard work to make it happen. Hard and non-obvious (at first) is where value lies. Obvious and easy is where low-margin crowds are. look for something worthwhile that is barely possible. Don’t confuse prior difficulty with present value or the ability to make something with a reason for making it.”
Sam Schillace in “If It’s Easy It’s Not Worth Much“
I like this approach for finding a niche. The key phrase is “look for something worthwhile that is barely possible.” Build on your own expertise and experience, even if the problem seems irrelevant to others. To verify “worthwhile,” you should have strong evidence, or at least a strong intuition, that solving it will allow you to deliver value to a niche market. There are a couple of caveats:
- Not every solution to a hard problem provides value to your customer or your employer: you should try to connect the dots to the new value the solution will enable. This may mean lower cost, faster cycle time, new revenue, or lower risk or higher process reliability.
- It’s wonderful when you unlock new possibilities, but you should have at least one practice or process that will be improved or obsoleted by what you have accomplished. If you tell people, “Now you can do X.” They may tell you they have no interest in X.
The sense of confronting new possibilities that have been heretofore “off the map” has been seeping into my intuition about AI in the last few months as I talk to more practitioners, so I found this paragraph from the same essay mirroring my thoughts:
“The hard part in all of this, which has made me feel unsettled for some time and is now more broadly impacting people, is that we have to find something novel and hard at the new frontier, when the frontier is constantly moving. It’s disorienting. And for many folks, unpleasant—not everyone wants to be in a constant mode of invention and creation. Many folks just want to have a set of instructions to follow. I understand the temptation and comfort of that. I am disoriented too. For those of us who have made our living doing hard, scarce things, the answer, while perhaps uncomfortable, is clear: find some new, hard, scarce things to do.”
Sam Schillace in “If It’s Easy It’s Not Worth Much“
Related Blog Posts
- Entrepreneurial Mindset: Create Value For Others
- The Shape of Firms to Come: Key Values and Architectural Philosophy
- Price, Value, and Your Prospect’s Perception of Risk
- 3 Equations & 3 Unknowns: Target Customer is Key Initial Value
- Price Based On Your Value To The Customer’s Situation
- Jim Manzi: Focus on Delivering Value to Customers at a Foreseeable Profit.
- The Robin and the Cherries: Sharing Value You Co-Create With Customers
- Early Sales Efforts Foster Value Co-Creation