269. Researching Problems & Customers for Startups for Beginners in 2026 | Bae HQ IncuBaetor 1/6

0:00Researching problems in customers. This is one of the most important lessons about being a startup founder and understanding it's not all about you. Let's go in stages. Problems first. I love this quote, be obsessed with the problem because the solution will always change. It's so easy as a founder to get really excited by the idea without really thinking about does it solve a problem that needs to be solved? And this mentality you need to break if you're going to be successful. you need to get really really obsessed with what's the problem i'm solving here why would anybody want to buy my solution because you might find your initial idea isn't what's right and you need to be willing to adapt so nav.sorny who's the co-founder of or is the founder of the washing machine project is the person who i heard this from and he was solving a problem that really mattered to him about how many people across the world who don't have access to running water and electricity aren't able to have the dignity of clean clothes and he kept changing his solution until he found something that worked.

1:06So how do you find a problem worth solving, a problem that's worth building a startup around? So the first place to look is your work life. So what is it that in your job maybe that you can't find a solution to, that is something really frustrating that maybe you know other people in your same position really struggle with too. Rim Shah, for example, he was product lead at Revolut in the financial crime part. And he realized there was so much manual work going on behind the scenes. So that's why he founded RVAI to solve that problem. Personal life. What's something you really suffer from and you keep looking for a solution, you just can't find it?

1:48That's the startup idea there. so one great example of this is clear by ahana so ahana banerji found it clear because she suffered with poor skin and she's looking for a way to have a real community a real sense of being able to find something which helps her in her own journey now it might not be a problem in your own life it could be those close to you so let's say for example you are looking after a loved one or somebody who's like a friend and you just can't find the thing that they need so that's really frustrating to you and you're like okay maybe there's a business here next is groups you care about this could be for example if you really care about elderly people if you're looking about young people maybe it's refugees where there's something which you're really passionate about and what you can do is then talk to them find the problems they're suffering with and see if you can find a solution, which is also a viable business.

2:46Second order effects. So everybody's looking at the news right now, and there's been a huge boom in defense tech. And it's obviously as a result of what's happening. So when things are happening in this world, you can then look at, okay, what's the demand going to be because of that? How is the world changing? And that's going to be a new problem, maybe, that wasn't as important in the past. country arbitrage so many many successful entrepreneurs are immigrants why is that because they've got a fresh perspective they've seen problems in their own countries and seen solutions or how people deal with it there so when they enter a new country they're like why doesn't this thing exist and a great example here is delivery by will shu so he realized that doordash existed in New York and DoorDash meant that you'd get food delivered to you but there's nothing really like this or in the same kind of level in the UK and that's why he found a Deliveroo.

3:44In the end as well DoorDash acquired Deliveroo so it's a very symbiotic relationship there if you see someone's working in another country maybe your home country isn't in the country which you're living in at the moment maybe you can bring that there. Next you can get industry so maybe you're very aware that in your industry that is lagging behind in certain regards and you think that other industries are doing things better that could be a startup idea right there one example here is say Hived by Merva Iqbal another example is Avaro by Freya Wemba so with Avaro what they're looking at is how the fintech world has been transformed by the likes of Revolut and Monzo and these kind of people so they were like why isn't that happening in pharmacy so by bringing their digital age to the pharmacy industry, they're able to grow rapidly and they're doing incredibly well.

4:35Next, you're looking at trends. How are things changing? How's consumer behavior changing? Is there now something which is getting more popular that maybe you can latch onto? And finally, is problems while building. So if you're a founder already and you're struggling to build your company, maybe it's because there's a tool that doesn't exist that if you created, it would make your life easier and great example of this is slack so slack was originally a video game company they built a in like a internal software that enabled them to communicate between the developers and then they then realize this is a problem that many other people suffer from too and they're able to build that out so what you should do right is have a little black book or have notes on your phone or whatever it is and start to keep track of these problems you're seeing and even if you think there's one problem you really want to focus on.

5:29Sometimes it's worth having a few ideas so you can compare and you can have that ability to have objectivity and really prove to yourself that you're building the right thing for the right reason. What I recommend here is now using what I call the problem scorecard. So I built this out and it's in the book as well, Stars for Outsiders, and you have the six different categories here and half of them are related to the problem and half of them related to your fear. So if you look at the problem first, number one is the intensity. And in the investment world, we like to talk about this as a hair on fire problem.

6:06Is this a problem which really needs to be solved where there are people who are suffering from it are desperate for a solution and are willing to pay for that solution? Then you've got yourself a product there. And you can also think about vitamins versus painkillers. Vitamins are nice to have. like it's good and it's a long term and yeah you know you should have it. Painkillers, I've got pain now, I need to buy painkillers, stop that pain. At the beginning you need to work out how do you get a painkiller type of problem before you can maybe build out that to a vitamin so you get that initial demand and that initial traction.

6:43The second element to consider is size. You can be solving a really really intense problem but if only a very few people in number suffer with it, if only very few people suffer with it those people need to pay a lot in order to for it to be a viable business next you have stickiness is this something which is a problem right now but actually people aren't going to continue having this problem and maybe like the way technology is shifting the way the regulatory systems are shifting actually you might be solving a problem that's going to go away soon anyway now checking your fit so we can get found a problem fit here right?

7:21So your fit, access. Do you have access to this market? Do you know potential customers? Are you a potential customer? If you don't have access, it's going to make your whole difficult, it's going to make everything much more difficult, right? You need to be able to reach your customers, you need to be able to reach the right people in order to make things happen. Second is your excitement. This is going to be a hard journey if you're going to build a startup. If you're not excited by it it's not going to go very far finally is your edge and there's a book here actually on my shelf i'm going to pull out so you've got this one so it's the unfair advantage by hassan kubber and ash ali and what they talk about in that is like how do you find what makes you stand out amongst everybody else who has this right because you can't just say i've suffered this problem that makes me good to solve it because every other person with the same problem could also build the same company.

8:13That's not a good edge. So an edge is looking at, do you have unusual access to money? Maybe for a great location, maybe you've got the right skill set and a unique skill set that means that you're going to be better than everybody else. One example, a company called Longevity. So one of the co-founders, so it's a longevity science company, but one of the co-founders is a professor of this subject. So she can very much say that she can build some better than the rest of the world because she's got so much more experience and knowledge than so many other people and you need to really define that edge well for yourself for BayHQ right with what I'm building that initial edge was that on the podcast side I'd already done over 100 and something podcasts in the US so when we started trying to build a podcast here it was a lot easier for me to get guests and other people I'd already done so many reps I had a big advantage.

9:10So as you're going through each of the problems that you're interested in, try to give each of these a score out of five. And the one that scores the highest is one with the biggest potential. And that could be one that you're going to then pursue and do more research into, as I'm about to show you. And their research is all about customers. So you need to find the people who are going to be able to validate whether or not this is a good idea. You really to understand who you're targeting here and that's on both the demographics demographics are what age are they what gender what job title location marital status wealth ethnicity education level and it could be some of these are more relevant and less relevant depending on what you're trying to build psychographics so this is their values their attitudes their habits lifestyle choices interests and beliefs what kind of person is going to have the problem that you're trying to solve so you need to really understand this well and when you're looking to find these people right you can do it with your initial network to begin with the challenge is that it brings into play your emotions where they might just be being nice to you because they know you or alternatively that might be being mean to you just because they know you.

10:25So what you want to try and do is try to find strangers or people you don't know as well in order to really validate the problem, is it as intense as you think it is, is the size as big as you think it is, and do you really have an advantage? And the ways to find these people to do the customer research on, you've got social media forums, industry events, old colleagues that maybe are more acquaintances now, and then friends of friends and friends of family and why this is good is that there's some level of connection but at the same time if they don't really find it that interesting they don't have as much of an emotional attachment to make sure that your feelings are going to get hurt you'll get a real answer referrals from complimentary companies paid ads and then cold outreach too so cold outreach is just randomly messaging people and hoping they're going to reply The big challenge, and this is now coming out in the end of 2025, early 2026, with cold outreach is that AI has just ruined the game because I get so much cold outreach, I just ignore all of it because I don't even know if a person's actually sent me the message.

11:32I'm just going to assume it's some kind of AI bot that sent it to me. You've also got to think about here, your early customer profile versus your ideal customer profile. And that's what we're building out here, right? Through the demographics and cycle of graphics, you're getting this idea of the customer profile but there could be a difference between who you target at the beginning versus the ideal person your early customer profile could be more somebody who's willing to take a risk it could be people are going to be early adopters maybe they're not the highest revenue potential segment the ideal customer profile are the ones that you're going to make the most money from they're going to be the ones who have got the biggest budgets they're going to be the ones who've got the largest number, they might be hard to access them.

12:15To say, for example, your ideal customer profile, maybe it's Microsoft or Amazon. It's going to be hard for you to sell a multi-billion dollar contract into Amazon or Microsoft at the beginning, unless you already come from extreme traction from your previous role. So think about that too. You've got to differentiate between who can you get as your early testers versus who do you someday want to build up to and there might be a bit of variance in between them. There's a great book which I recommend you read and it's cheap as hell called The Mum Test by Rob Sittpatrick and what he does in that book is really talk about this whole idea of how to do customer research properly.

12:56So I've got two sets of questions up on the screen right now right and have a think about which side is the good questions and which is the bad questions.

13:10so on the left is all the questions you shouldn't ask would you use this is this a good idea isn't this so annoying because what you're doing is you're leading the person they're just going to agree with you just because it's easy to agree with you rather than giving the actual opinion what you should be asking instead is just understanding how they think getting them to talk about their own thoughts and feelings rather than just validating what you're telling them so it's up asking open-ended things how do you currently do how do you feel what's the best and worst parts have you tried to do anything about it you want to validate because somebody might say it's a problem but they've never even bothered to google to see if there's a solution out there already tell me about the last time a lot of people might say they do something more regularly than they actually do i might say i go to the gym every day if you ask me when i last went to the gym or how many times I've been to the gym the last month, you might get a very different answer.

14:09Why does this matter to you? And then finally, how much do you spend on this? Because you want to understand, is there real budget here or not? And every type of problem you're trying to deal with here or every customer you're working on, you've got to understand what transformation is your potential product going to give them? What is your solution going to do for them? And at a very basic level, we've got three different resources as a human being. We've got time, energy and money. And your startup should be solving one of these types of problems, right? In these core areas, you're saving them time or you're increasing their time.

14:46So increasing their time is basically health tech only. Energy, are you reducing stress or you're increasing joy? And money, are you saving them money or making them money? and you should be very clear about whatever is problem you're trying to solve will fit into one of these buckets right if for example you're building something which is going to do something great to their health then okay you're one you're increasing their time but you're probably reducing their stress too if you're going to be building something which is about making them more revenue or a sales agent that's going to be on the making money side right so have a think about which of these buckets you slot into and then bringing it together your next advice now is to go through the problem scorecard again with the extra information you know and to really validate is this the right path is this the right problem by actually trying to talk to customers you can understand do you really have access to potential customers and off the back of this you can then decide what's the right path for you and what to take further.

15:51Hope you enjoyed this and keep an eye out for the rest of the series.