How to know if you're solving a real problem.

A real problem is one people are already spending time, money, or effort working around — a spreadsheet, a manual process, a workaround they complain about but keep using. If no workaround exists at all, the problem may be real to you but not yet real to anyone else, and that distinction matters more than it first appears.

The workaround test

Before building anything, look for the workaround. Are people already solving this badly, by hand, with a tool that wasn’t designed for it? A messy existing workaround is often a stronger signal than a clean survey answer, because it costs the person something to maintain it — time, attention, occasional errors — and people don’t keep paying that cost for problems they don’t actually have.

A survey answer, by contrast, costs the respondent nothing. It’s easy to say yes to a hypothetical problem that sounds reasonable, and much harder to keep manually copying data between two tools every week for a problem that doesn’t actually bother you.

Ask what happens if you do nothing

A useful check: if this problem stayed exactly as painful as it is today, would anything change for the person who has it? If the honest answer is “not really,” it’s probably not the problem worth building around yet. This question cuts through a lot of politely enthusiastic feedback, because it forces a concrete comparison between the current state and a hypothetical unchanged future, rather than an abstract judgment about whether a solution “sounds good.”

It’s worth asking this question about your own reaction too, not just the people you’re interviewing. If you’d be genuinely fine walking away from the problem tomorrow, that’s useful information about how real it actually is to you.

Frequency matters more than severity

A problem someone hits daily and mildly dislikes can be a better foundation than one they hit once a year and hate. Frequency creates habit, and habit is what makes a product worth returning to. A once-a-year problem, even an intensely painful one, struggles to support a product people build a relationship with, because there’s no regular occasion to remember the product exists.

This isn’t a universal rule — some once-a-year problems are valuable enough per occurrence to justify a business on their own. But for most product ideas, especially ones intended to be used habitually, frequency is the more reliable foundation to build on.

Common questions

What if a problem is real but nobody has built a workaround because no solution seems possible? That’s a genuine edge case worth investigating further — sometimes the absence of a workaround means the problem hasn’t been noticed as solvable yet, not that it isn’t real. Look for adjacent evidence: complaints, avoidance behavior, or people simply not doing the thing at all because it’s too hard.

How do you find existing workarounds if people don’t talk about them openly? Watch behavior directly rather than relying only on what people say. Ask to see how someone currently handles a task, rather than asking them to describe it — the gap between the two is often revealing.

Can a problem be real for a small group but not worth building a product around? Yes. Reality and scale are separate questions. A problem can be completely real and still too narrow, too infrequent, or too small in reach to justify a dedicated product, even though it would justify a manual solution for that specific group.

Takeaway: don’t ask whether a problem sounds important — ask what people are already doing about it today.