We all encounter obstacles in our daily lives. Most people will groan and move on. But if you pay attention, you can see opportunities when you spot inconveniences.
In the following article, I list numerous instances where creative minds saw a problem and came up with remarkable ways to fix it. Their revolutionary thinking improved not only their lives but the quality of other people’s lives as well.
Where there’s a problem, there’s a solution. In a free market, there are always people who will see room for innovation to help their businesses or their communities get ahead.
Why not you?
Case Study #1: Dropbox
Most businesses today, including mine, rely on technology. This is unnerving as devices can break, lose storage space, become infected with viruses, get misplaced, or even worse, get hacked.
What are the alternatives, though? Maintaining your own server is expensive. Doing daily backups is a hassle. Using external hard drives or USBs is time consuming. I know this from experience.
It turns out that I was not the only one who was frustrated by the limitations of email and USB drives when it came to sharing and storing files; a lot of people were.
One of those people was Drew Houston, the eventual founder of Dropbox. Exasperated by how the current technology was interfering with his work, he invented the prototype for Dropbox, a cloud-based solution that lets you easily store, access, and share files across multiple devices.
Currently, Dropbox has over 600 million users, and it is the platform I utilize to transition seamlessly between two offices and across multiple platforms and devices.
Case Study #2: Uber
Taxis are expensive, especially in big cities. Even worse, they are notorious for being impossible to find when they are most needed.
I vividly remember leaving a speaking engagement at a business event in NYC. I had a limited amount of time to get to my my train at Penn Station 一 and I really wanted to grab a bite to eat. I assumed getting a taxi to a nearby restaurant would be simple.
I was wrong.
I had a terrible time finding a cab. Finally, I managed to flag one down. When I walked up to the taxi, he rolled down the window and said, “Where?” I gave him the address of a nearby restaurant. He looked at me, said “No” with finality and drove away.
Well, that was that. I skipped dinner and walked the fifteen minutes from the Javits Center to Penn Station. Maybe I had pretzels or something.
What a headache. What an annoyance. What a mess.
Well, in 2009, the co-founder of Uber, Garrett Camp, felt the same way. In his own words,
“I was just stranded on the curb in San Francisco so often that I just got sick of it.”
Boom. He saw a problem. He also saw an opportunity. And the solution he came up with became worth more than $143B.
Case Study #3: Rent The Runway
When Rent The Runway co-founder Jenn Hyman saw her sister flirt with credit card debt just to buy an expensive ensemble for a wedding, she knew there was a problem.
Most women cannot afford to continuously outfit themselves in designer clothes season after season, trend after trend. But they really, really want to.
Jenn’s answer to their problem was Rent The Runway, a curated rental service for women who cannot cope with the cost of buying transient fashion. A subscription service ranging from $30 to $159 a month, Rent The Runway provides eager customers rented access to a rotating selection of costly designer clothes.
Currently, the subscription has 145,000 active users. Evidently, lots of women have the same problem Jenn’s sister did… and they are willing to pay for a smart solution.
Case Study #4: Zoom
I have been incorporating video conferencing into my business for years. Over the years, I experimented with a multitude of services, and they weren’t very good. The cheapest options are hard to use. Google Meet has shockingly low functionality. Microsoft Teams is robust, but it has compatibility issues.
Eventually, I discovered Zoom Pro. It was straightforward and it was simple to use. For my clients, especially those who aren’t tech-savvy, “easy” is the main thing 一 and that made Zoom the undisputed winner.
Zoom was Eric Yuan’s birth child. As the leading engineer of Cisco WebEx, he experienced daily irritants with the existing video conferencing services. And he made it his mission to create a simpler, more reliable platform.
Eric Yuan shares the story of Zoom
Yuan founded Zoom in April 2011, but it was only during the Covid pandemic that its user base exploded. Zoom now has a user base of approximately 300 million daily users.
Now, what about you?
When you find yourself aggravated with some daily annoyance, take a moment to wonder: if you’re feeling exasperated, chances are others are as well. Might there be a way to ease THEIR frustration?
Ask yourself the following questions:
- What is the problem you’re experiencing?
- What are the current solutions (do they exist)?
- Are they any good? What are their shortcomings?
- What solution would help others veer around these shortcomings?
- What are the steps needed to bring this idea to fruition?
- What resources 一 time, money, manpower 一 would be necessary to make this happen?
Don’t be afraid to think big. You can be impractical at this stage. The answers you provide will form the beginnings of new business opportunities.
Drop me a line. I’d love to hear what you come up with.
