this will help you get started
knowing how to spot opportunities clearly
I spent a decade in tech working on 0-1 problems, so I don’t need convincing that problems sit at the center of the work. But two years ago, when I started my own company, I kept running into the same advice: look for problems. It sounds useful until you actually try to follow it. If you’ve ever sat down meaning to do exactly that and felt your mind go blank, you know how paralyzing it is.
Problems where? For whom? At what scale? Against what people have already built their day around?
When the search space is that wide, you end up seeing everything and nothing at once. Every bit of friction starts to look like it might be a startup, but almost none of it feels specific enough to build on. You can fill a notebook with problems and still have no idea which ones are urgent, which ones are structural, and which ones are just mild irritations everyone has learned to live with. It’s a strange kind of stuck, surrounded by possibility and unable to move on any of it.
What I’ve landed on over time is the opposite of that broad search. Don’t go looking for a problem in the abstract. Pick a process and stay with it.
It can be a workflow inside a company, a process inside an industry, or a category where people keep trying to get something done with tools that don’t quite fit.
What matters is that you narrow the frame down to something small enough to actually watch closely. An industry, a type of user, a recurring task, even one moment in someone’s day.
A constraint like that feels like it would shrink your thinking, but it does the opposite. Once you’re looking closely at one thing, the real problems start to surface on their own. Open-endedness creates paralysis, and a constraint creates visibility.
When you sit with a process long enough, you stop dealing in vague pain points and start seeing patterns. That is where the latent needs hide. The small leaks that show up again and again in how the work actually gets done.
A few of those leaks come up over and over. I think of them less as a checklist and more as lenses, and they largely fall across these 4 themes:
1. Fragmentation
Fragmentation is when the work is scattered across too many places to hold in one view.
The fix isn’t always to pull it all into one tool. Sometimes a process is split because different people genuinely own different parts of it. But when the split starts creating duplicated effort, dropped information, or disagreement about what’s even true, there’s usually something worth paying attention to.
2.Time
Most processes take longer than they should, but saving time is too blunt to be useful. The better question is what kind of time is being lost. Time spent waiting, time spent searching, time spent redoing, time spent stuck. Once you know which kind of time is leaking, you also know what fixing it would free up, and how to create value.
3.Resources
This is when a process demands more than it should. Usually more people, more meetings, more manual effort.
It’s clearest when you watch people spend their hours on work that doesn’t really need their judgment, and that’s often where the hidden opportunity lies.
4.Switching Cost
Switching cost is when people are stuck with something painful and can’t get out. The tool is buried too deep, the data lives inside it, or the whole company has been trained around it. The fix is not always replacing the whole system, but studying the process to understand where the current way of working is too embedded to remove, yet painful enough that people need help living with it.
When you study a process, these angles and patterns start to surface, and the leaks are usually where the latent needs and hidden opportunities lie. Over time, your eye gets trained to see where that need is really coming from.
So if you’re starting a company, or hope to one day, you don’t have to chase a big problem out of nowhere. Pick something real and watch how the work actually happens, and the problem will usually tend to show itself.