Are you curious what mindset it takes to be a successful founder?
The most successful startups solve a valuable enough problem that compels people to engage with them to meet their needs.
The corollary of this is that the number one reason startups fail is that they fail to create enough value solving a significant enough problem.
I continue to get curious about this and wonder if you might be too.
If you are, read on.
So what is the starting point for you to found a successful venture?
People often think it’s an idea, and it might be. For example, if you’re targeting a consumer, and have identified a latent need that could evolve into a meaningful desire that compels them to buy your product or service.
In the business world it usually starts with identifying a more blatant and critical problem that unless solved will have tangible and costly consequences.
In either case, the starting point is identifying a valuable enough opportunity or problem to solve.
See 
DEFINE the Problem or Opportunity (I’ve written more about about the overall process in my Startup Secrets series, leading to a 
Customer Value Proposition that you can read here .
But I realized that one thing was missing and that’s the mindset needed to keep not only define the problem or opportunity but also keep in touch with your customer’s evolving needs, because the only constant I know of in a startup is change.
Curiosity Killed The Cat, But Ignited Successful Startups
The mindset needed is simply a curious one.
Curiosity will keep you asking questions. Questions of yourself, your customer, their desires, needs, aspirations or their business, it’s problems, challenges and ongoing market developments and opportunities arising or indeed declining.
Again the only constant in our world is change so it’s vital that one stay curious about all these aspects of your venture to stay ahead of the game.
I can’t give you curiosity though. You need to feel that for yourself. Only then will it energize you to go the distance in your venture as things constantly change.
But what I hope might help you is a little inspiration and some frameworks to channel your curiosity.
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How well do you know the problem?
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Have you experienced it first hand?
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Who has?
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How would they define the problem?
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What would they say is the root cause of the problem?
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How could it be prevented?
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Is it possible to prevent it today?
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If so how?
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How could it be avoided altogether?
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How urgent is it?
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What will happen, and when if it isn’t fixed?
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What could be the consequences and cost of failure to fix the problem?
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Who might get fired if it is not addressed?
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What other problems might be more urgent or take priority over this one?
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What alternative solutions are there?
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Which of them have already been tried?
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Why did they fail to address the problem and what has changed since?
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What do you think might make this problem intractable?
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How might you break the problem down into sub issues?
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Which of these would offer the most immediate relief if adressed?
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(Getting to MVP)
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What part of this problem is actually part of a bigger problem
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What is that bigger problem?
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What other problems are part of that bigger problem?
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Which of them are of greater priority?
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Where should one start?
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Is there a logical order to solve them in?
- Who is accountable for solving the problem?
- Do they have authority to implement a solution?
- Budget signoff?
- Technical ability to implement ?
- Who else needs to be involved for each of these steps
- Who will evaluate the success of the solution
- In what timescale will any solution make a difference?
These are all sales related questions that will help when you come to define your qualification process for prospecting and running a pipeline
- How will they deem it to be a success?
- How could it advance the business once this problem is solved?
- What new opportunities might open up once this problem is behind us?
- What would be cause to recommend the solution to someone else, internally, externally?
These are all customer success related questions that will help you develop a strong retention and upsell business model
- What is the next problem that might arise?
- How could we get ahead of it? (avoid just shifting the bottleneck?)
- What is the big picture of how the business we’re working to solve this problem with, will advance once this problem is solved?
- How does the problem we’re solving help the business with its various time horizons associated with their vision, mission, goals and objectives?
… and endless more potential questions that will arise from a curious mind!
Now a question for YOU: What other questions can you think of that would be helpful to really defining, mapping, visualizing, organizing and communicating the problem exhaustively
Here’s my Startup Secret
Never make assumptions, instead, question everything
Conclusion
The principle behind all these questions is to be really curious, and keep getting more curious until you believe
- you could not ask any more questions without being redundant
- you could describe the problem in excruciating detail
- anyone listening to or reading your description of the problem would understand it so well that they would be compelled to suggest solutions
You can never be too curious about a problem or opportunity.
Think of it as the key skill that could guide you to find your way through the ups and downs of the startup journey.
Taking it to the extreme to make the point with an exercise in thinking. Imagine you’re in a perilous situation, blindfolded. How could you find your way out of the problem just by asking questions of the right people in the room? Don’t even assume you know who to trust! That is part of the curiosity you need to find the right people who really understand each facet of the problem and how it might be not just solved, but also paid for, implemented, and promoted both internally and externally. (This can make an excellent team exercise)
This level of curiosity will help you not only with defining the product or service, and engineering it, but also ensuring customer success and marketing to others. Thus all elements of your business will benefit from curiosity.
Are you curious to learn more?
Check out how this all plays into your 
Customer-Centric Business Model , or get a perspective on how all this fits together with a warm 
Welcome to YOUR Startup Secrets Sandbox .
🎙 Hear how Michael taught it the lecture, cleaned & woven in
▶ Watch the original lecture
Are You Curious What Mindset It Takes to Be a Successful Founder?
When you look across all the founders in front of you, you’ll find there’s a fairly typical thing they have: they are both fun and fundamental drivers. It’s not one or the other. For their own reasons they are excited, enthusiastic, passionate, and driven about what they’re doing, and they’re solving some fundamental problem. It’s very rare to find an entrepreneur who is in some way driven to do something significant who is also not enjoying themselves, because you just don’t have the energy otherwise. If it’s something you’re straining and laboring over, it’s very tough to drive yourself through a journey of many years. But imagine if every day you get up, and as one of my entrepreneurs said, “This isn’t work, this is my passion, this is what I love doing,” and you’re solving a fundamental problem. That combination becomes the fuel for the ungame, the competitive drive plus the underlying capability that gives you the ability to make a difference every day.
Some of you have been in my hiring class and might remember this question. What would you choose to do if today was your last day of work? It doesn’t have to be a day; it could be a week or a month. It’s a pretty good question to ask yourself. If that isn’t what you’d want to start a business around, I’d probably say forget it right there. Because if you’d be that excited about it, that it’s the thing you’d want to do if it was the last chance you had, then it’s probably a great basis. But if it’s just to scratch an itch, or to try it out for fun or experiment with, it’s very unlikely to turn into a huge business you’ll want to spend the next 7 to 10 years on.
The best questions are the ones we haven’t asked of ourselves, so any of this could be questioned. But the thing I seek over and over is entrepreneurs so driven that if you gave them every option and any chance to do anything else, they’d still pick what they’re doing. There’s nothing they’d rather do; they just can’t wait to get up in the morning and crack on and solve whatever problem they’re dealing with.
Founders are unconventional people, and in many instances this is their core makeup: that dedication, that absolute drive to see this through, that 90-99% perspiration. If you’re one of those people, you absolutely should be going after building companies. No matter what your idea is, if you’ve got that kind of drive and dedication and want to work through things, you can do it.
Rich Versus King
There’s a set of challenges around what role you play. Noam Wasserman, a tremendous professor at Harvard, wrote a great book, The Founder’s Dilemma, and one key idea is the dilemma of rich versus king. Ask yourself: are you doing this for the money or the power? Because it’s very unlikely you’ll have both. Trying to be a founder who runs everything, controls everything, and still makes it possible for the rest of your team to contribute is very tricky. You’ve got to leave room for other people to scale your business, people who are complementary to your strengths, contribute to your weaknesses, or can share in that power. If you’re a founder determined to own everything, go have the hard discussions with your co-founders and employees, and think about whether you’re willing to make the trade-offs it takes, before you say you’re ready to devote the next 10 years of your life to this. Those are real trade-offs.
How Did You Know You Were an Entrepreneur?
There’s no single story. The one thing that’s really interesting is that everybody creates their own path, for their own reasons.
Stephan Schambach: “I started my first company when I was 19, out of necessity. The Wall had just come down between East and West Germany and everything was in turmoil. At my university nothing much was going on, and my father had just died, and I needed money. The next best thing I could think of was to get a loan and start selling computers, shuttling them to my hometown from West Germany. I got it started and rather liked it, and pretty soon we were in contract programming and system design, and I never looked back. I never finished my degree. I was always an electronics geek, and I’d do a little software, but I never felt I wanted to run a company. That appetite came with doing it.”
John Hirschtick: “Probably a lot of things. I grew up with my father selling stamps on weekends to collectors as a side business (his regular career was as a lawyer), so I was part of a business growing up, and he told me a lot of lessons that came back. I wanted to make money and wanted to express ideas. The way some people turn to art or music, we turn to building; I’m an engineer, engineers want to build things. I’d worked in a big company and seen that getting your ideas built can be very difficult there. And there’s a sense of wanting to prove myself. A lot of entrepreneurs have some insecurities, and this is a way they say, ‘I might have been a nerd in school, but I’m going to show you something.’ Then opportunity: it depends what else is going on in your life and what alternatives you have.”
Gail Goodman: “To be honest, I got fired, so it wasn’t as big a risk as it might have seemed. I’d been at another e-commerce startup that imploded, and I was the third executive off the plank as they lined us up every quarter we missed. It was 98 going into 99, the time of great internet expansion, everybody becoming an internet entrepreneur. And maybe the ego thing: a bunch of people I’d worked with were getting CEO gigs and 10 million in funding, and I was like, ‘Damn it, I’m smarter than them.’ Combined with the fact that I really wasn’t that good working for other people; I always rubbed my bosses the wrong way because I was confident in my own opinions and a little pigheaded. I always say I was unemployable, which is true, as I became an entrepreneur. It wasn’t a great passion I’d had since age five; it was the right time in my life where I had the confidence to do it, the window of opportunity because I was unemployed, a lot of innovation happening, and I met the right team with the right idea.”
A strong motivator many entrepreneurs share: if you could never imagine being in an ordinary job being told what to do, you have about 50% of what it takes to become an entrepreneur.
What Should You Prepare Before You Start?
Gail: passion, willingness to invest your time, and recognition that it’s a hard journey, not an easy one.
John: everything’s hard and everything’s risky; we’re past the year of safe jobs. You have to be prepared for the long term and for ups and downs, and those around you (your partner, your family) have to be prepared and supporting you.