Start from a problem you have actually felt
Mint began with one engineer's irritation at managing his own money. The advice drawn from it is sound, and its promise is larger than the evidence.
Solve a real problem and the world is yours.
Aaron Patzer started Mint because he disliked doing his own finances. The desktop software he used expected him to type in transactions and sort them into categories by hand, and he spent weekends at a job that a computer could have done. Mint pulled account data automatically and categorized it, launched in 2007, and was bought by Intuit, the maker of Quicken, in 2009 for about $170 million.
The sentence closed an interview Patzer gave in 2008. In full, the advice was to watch everything in one’s own life, especially the things one hates doing, and to look there for problems worth solving. The short version drops that first half, which is the more useful part.
What makes a problem real is fairly concrete. People already spend time or money working around it. They complain about it without being asked. They have tried at least one existing solution and found it lacking. Personal finance met every test: millions of people kept spreadsheets, paid for software they barely used, or simply avoided looking at their accounts. When a product removes that kind of friction, users tend to arrive through word of mouth, because the relief is easy to describe.
A simple way to use the advice is to keep a written list, for a month, of every task that feels slow, repetitive or confusing, at work and at home. Most items will be trivial. A few will turn out to be shared by many people who have also given up on fixing them, and those are worth a closer look.
Starting from one’s own irritation has a further advantage. The founder understands the problem in detail, notices when a solution only half works, and can judge progress without waiting for surveys. Many durable companies began this way, with a founder building a tool for a job they did every week.
The second half of the sentence overstates things. A real problem is necessary for a business, and it is far from sufficient. The problem has to be shared by enough people, and those people have to be reachable at a cost the business can afford. Someone also has to pay, either the users or a party that values reaching them. Mint itself did not charge users; it earned money by referring them to financial products, a model that came with its own tensions. Plenty of founders have solved problems that were real only for themselves and a few friends, or real for many people who would never pay to have them solved.
Patzer’s own outcome also shows the ambiguity in “the world is yours”. Mint succeeded by being bought by the maker of Quicken, the leading example of the software that had annoyed him in the first place. That is a very good result for the founders and investors, and a sign that the market was not theirs to keep.
The honest version of the advice is to start with a problem that people already feel and are already paying to work around, then test the rest early: how many have it, how they can be reached, and who will pay.