One Of The Most Important Questions To Ask Yourself Before Starting A Startup

Most entrepreneurs forget to take a good dive into the reason behind their company’s idea. It’s important to realize the effectiveness of this simple question’s answer:

“Why hasn’t this problem already been solved?”

For example, Uber could have never started it’s carsharing company in the 1940’s for a simple reason: Because the necessary technology just didn’t exist yet. Whatever problem your startup is solving, the problem itself is only one component of the larger startup opportunity. The reason your idea can be implemented into present day people’s lives compared to our fictional 1940’s Uber, is because of a market shift allowing this.
Reading these market shifts and anticipating them will be a helpful and essential tool to building your startup.

Without a market shift, consumers don’t have a reason to change their current way of solving the core problem at the heart of your startup, which means they won’t have a reason to adopt your solution in place of whatever they’re already doing.

Let’s take a look at the 4 types of market shifts.

Technology shifts

Would we be having the same kind of privileges without our phones and laptops? Google, Youtube, Netflix, Spotify. All of their current success derives from one pivotal shift in society. Nearly everybody has a smart device and is able to continuously make use of these apps.

Cultural shifts

Sometimes the technology to solve a problem already exists, but people are just not ready for it yet. AirBnb could have started on the basic world wide web technology in the early 2000’s but there was still a lot of skepticism around online transactions. Besides, the world was used to a hundreds years old culture of hotels and inns. Some time was necessary for society to adjust.

Resource shifts

Resource shifts are the simplest type of shift to recognize but, often, the most difficult to overcome. Simply put, having more resources — time, money, space, people, etc. — allows entrepreneurs to solve problems they couldn’t have solved without those resources.

Legislative shifts

Legislative shifts occur when new laws allow markets to exist or operate in ways that were previously illegal. A prominent example of this is the emerging US cannabis industry. As states pass laws legalizing marijuana, they’re creating entirely new industries that previously couldn’t exist.