No Unique Problems: Somebody Already Solved It

Almost every founder believes, at some point, that his problem is unique. His market is different. His customers are different. Nobody has dealt with this exact combination before.

It almost never holds up. Problems get recirculated across industries all the time. The details change and the shape stays the same. Somewhere, someone has already solved the thing that's keeping you up at night.

That belief, that there are almost no unique problems, has shaped my whole career. It changes how you face every hard problem, because it moves you from inventing to finding.

How do you find who already solved your problem?

I use three moves, and I use all three.

Reason by analogy. Ask who else has a problem with the same shape as yours. If you're struggling to move inventory that loses value fast, ask who else moves perishable inventory under time pressure. Grocers, florists, airlines selling seats. The industry is different and the problem is the same, so the answer may transfer.

Work your network. Ask people who've operated in places you haven't. The man who ran logistics for a manufacturer may have solved your scheduling problem fifteen years ago and never thought of it as interesting.

Study the category leaders. Go straight to whoever is best in the world at the thing you're stuck on, and learn how they do it.

At MIT they have a joke for this: R&D stands for "rip off and duplicate." The serious version is borrow, license, or adapt what already works. Never steal. But never assume you have to invent something that already exists.

What do you do once you've found it?

You run a simple decision.

If the tool fits, buy it or license it, and adapt your process to the tool. It's tempting to bend good software around a process that wasn't very good to begin with, and that's usually the expensive mistake.

If the process fits and there's no tool, take the proven process and build the tool yourself.

If neither fits, take what you learned. That isn't a failure. It justifies the build, because now you know the expense is warranted. You looked first.

The rule across all of it: don't force-fit something unnatural. You can learn from someone else's solution without adopting every piece of it.

Why is this easier now than ever?

The hard part used to be the search. Finding who had solved your problem in a different industry took years of reading, conferences, and conversations. Modern AI collapses that cost, which is part of why I treat it as a thought partner. You can describe the shape of your problem in plain English and get a list of industries and companies that have faced it, in minutes. The method got cheaper exactly when the pace of business made it more necessary.

My career is built on this. Twice I've taken technology that already worked in one industry and brought it to an industry that was behind. The opportunity is often sitting in a laggard industry you already understand well.

What's the problem in your business that you've been treating as unique?

~b