Tell, what problem your product solves in 50 characters
If you are a seasoned player, you already know the drill of writing the problem our product solves using less than 50 characters or you might have even been annoyed when someone asked you to do it as I'm sure there are pages to write about your startup idea.
When we say 'startup idea', it adds too much noise to the initial validation process as the industry(Successful Entrepreneurs, Investors) almost unanimously agree that the first step is solving the right problem.
In my early life as an entrepreneur, I've failed multiple times since I didn't understand this difference between Startup ideas vs Problems. Understanding the importance of solving the right problem i.e. the problem with enough need gap, that people are willing to pay for getting it solved and of course the problem which we want ourselves to be solved played a huge role in me building successful products later on.
When I started coaching entrepreneurs, I found this again to be the common theme for failure among early stage startups i.e. building something just because they can and hoping everyone needs it. It became a professional necessity for me to come up with a way to validate problems/need gap.
So, I started building needgap a problem validation platform where problems are the first class citizens. Posts are created by the consumers(incl. entrepreneurs) who have a problem, want to find a solution for their problem, check if others share the same problem, how ever small the problem might be. Builders can post their products in the comments if it solves that particular problem or else discuss with others to create a product to solve that problem(There are couple of products built/being built for problems from needgap).
I'm not saying I've solved the issue of validating problems, far from it. I think I now have a direction towards understanding the 'language, grammar of problems and startup ideas' which might one day result in making validation easier.
Now, for the same reasons, I wish to hear from you all on what problem your product solves in under 50 characters hyperlinked to the website.
Deep facial image analysis and augmentation
-- https://fp.mut1ny.com
Hey, what problem does it solve?
Fair enough:
Recognition and enhancement of facial footage
That's better, let's see if we can improve it further to reflect the core problem Face Processor addresses.
Say, I have a problem and I'm searching for a solution in Google.
• Detecting and Analyzing Faces of any skin color.
• On-premise alternative to Amazon Rekognition facial analysis.
• One time cost ML/DL solution for face detection.
• Hair segmentation ML/DL model.
For which of the above search queries, would Face Processor be fit for a top result?(Should choose only one).
I know, what you feel now, it seems like Face Processor does all these things and more.
Here are some suggestions -
Choose the one which Face Processor does the best, better than its competitors, fulfils a need gap which the competitor doesn't address but people want.
Choose the the one which fulfils your Business goals i.e. some of the above search queries could be done only by a technical person i.e. an Engineer and some by Business Executives as well. But an Engineer is not always the one who writes the cheque.
Hey Abishek thank you this is actually really, really good.
Well yes you are right it is a tough one as they all address one aspect that is probably a plus but none of them are combined.
So If I had to choose one I would take for business reason the first one
"Detecting and Analyzing faces of any skin color"
as it is the broadest non-technical option and then as 2nd choice the last one "Hair segmentation ML/DL model" simply because there is currently simply no competition at all unless you do it yourself.
Great! I had issues with skin colors when using Rekognition for our product several years back and so included it in problem after exploring your video.
But, the thing is the actual customer who had those problems wouldn't have even been able to find your product since the website didn't do a good job at telling how Face Processor solves their problem.
The website copy is completely technical, where as the conversion expects a business decision(i.e. contact us for implementation and not a developer API).
I would recommend the following actions -
• Getting a better domain which reflects the product.
• Working on a new copy explaining the problem your product solves.
• Redesigning the site with enterprise focus(Now even the domain name is 'Hackerish') and Moving the technical jargons to a separate page or section.
Finally, to anyone reading this exercise. Problem validation needs to be done before we start building a solution and not the other way around. Because, what we did here wouldn't be possible for majority of products, because often they don't solve any real problem. Since Face Processor belongs to niche category and that it really addresses some need gap with other products, we were able to come up with better description for the problems it solves.
Thank you Abishek for your suggestion very helpful.
I understand what you mean. I just have a bit of an issue with making radical changes as I actually do want to address both not only the business goal orientated people but also those solution orientated.
Although we can write the whole end2end solution if required we usually just provide the tools to setup an end2end solution so this still requires some (even though far more limited) technical knowledge.
But I do get the point that it sounds a bit too technical
Interactive and multimedia platform that allows teachers and creators to produce engaging but still meaningful content.
What problem does it solve?
engaging content like animation or illustration is often very expensive and time-consuming to produce, and therefore often very short. This platform allows creators use multimedia to stack up various media to produce long but still engaging content.
Thank you.
I see, Are you building it now?
yes, and working with content creators as early adopters, which is obvious far more tricky than coding :))
You might be interested in this discussion - Simple Video editor for beginner youtubers , Although the problem being discussed there is different the suggestions there can help what you are doing as well.
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I appreciate your comment and I welcome if it is constructive criticism.
Problems are the first class citizen at needgap. Every problem title needs to be under 50 characters and the descriptions should be according to the guidelines. The guidelines are indeed very strict to ensure, problems get posted and not what one thinks is a 'startup idea'.
Instagram was developed because, phones sucked at taking pictures at that time and they improved it with filters.
It's a problem which the user the user has and no problem is small or big. In fact needgap community has even developed tools to Identifying letter O from 0 and vice versa.
You've misunderstood the problem and my suggestion on what could address it. As the problem stated it is 'Capturing good photos from any phone', not after effects or editing. Adobe is building a universal camera app to address the problem I've stated and it's on the same post.
Just because others failed it doesn't mean I shouldn't do it. I've explained the necessity and the role this serves in my work. More over, people who post the problem or those who build products to solve the problem posted at need gap doesn't feel the way you do.
Again, it's problem vs startup ideas, that's where most fail and it needs to be short as the people who are searching for a product which solves their problem isn't going to type a 10 page startup pitch in search engine.
This comment was deleted 5 years ago
Founders like to differ.
You also say,
So which one is it dude?
Problem title is limited to 50 characters, problem description and comment description are limited to 1250 characters. I understand that we are living in a limited attention economy and that people don't read; but fortunately the target users for needgap aren't them.