Pick One

Why it matters

Twenty problems is a lot to carry around. This lesson is where you cut that down to one, using something better than a gut feeling — a simple scoring system that looks at four things: how often the problem happens, how much it actually bothers people, whether they’d pay to have it solved, and whether you specifically have any edge in solving it.

That last one matters more than it might seem. An “unfair advantage” doesn’t mean you’re already an expert. It might mean you’re inside a community outsiders can’t easily reach, you’ve personally lived with the problem for years, or you already have a skill — video editing, coding, writing, organizing people — that makes building the fix easier for you than for most people.

Picking one problem feels risky, because it means setting nineteen others aside. That’s the point. A business built on the problem you’re best positioned to solve, that enough people actually feel, has a real shot. A business built on whichever idea sounded coolest in the group chat usually doesn’t survive contact with a real stranger.

Score honestly. The winner doesn’t need to be the problem you’re most excited about — it needs to be the one the evidence actually points to.

What to watch for

Kevin Hale - How to Evaluate Startup Ideas

• Watch for the criteria: how popular the problem is, how often it happens, how intensely people feel it, and whether it’s growing.
• Notice how Hale talks about “unfair advantage” — it’s about your specific position, not about being the smartest person in the room.
• Skip the parts aimed at people already running a funded company; you’re evaluating a problem, not a business you’ve already started.

Start with Claude

Bring your Problem Inventory from last lesson into this conversation. Claude should help you think through each score, not assign the scores for you — you’re the only one who actually knows how often you’ve felt each problem.

I have a Problem Inventory of 20 problems from the Spark stage of Make First. I need to score my top 5 on: frequency (how often it happens), intensity (how much it bothers people), willingness to pay (would people actually spend money to fix it), and my unfair advantage (my specific edge in solving it).

Walk me through each of my top 5, one at a time. Ask me questions to help me score honestly instead of picking my favorite — for example, ask how I actually know people would pay, not just whether I think they would. Once I've scored all 5, help me think out loud about which one the evidence points to, but let me make the final call.