Earlier this week I had the great fortune of moderating a fantastic panel on “Disrupt to Thrive” at the BSR conference in San Francisco.

One of the panelists, Andreas Raptopoulos, co-founder of drone delivery company Matternet, made an interesting point when asked, how one figures out if a venture is worth pursuing.

His advice was simply: “Start with finding a real problem.”

If you think about it – it makes a lot of sense. All too often we either try to find problems for a solution (we have come up with this cool widget and now try to find an actual problem to solve with it) or we pursue problems which are too small or too unimportant to make a difference.

I know this all too well. My first company was an electronic greeting card platform. Hardly solving a real problem our customers had. It was all fine as long as things were on an up, but once the dot-com crash hit, we went under.

Make no mistake – finding and solving a real problem is hard. But it’s also so much more fun (and so much more sustainable).

Weekends are a fantastic time to evaluate, consider and adjust. Find a real problem, solve for it and you will be fine!

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