Launching an Experiment to Spot Problems Worth Solving

It is a little over ten years now, since I started working with the Startup Ecosystem here. Much has changed – and I’d say for the better. Funding has improved. Startups are mainstream. And Entrepreneurs are celebrated. Yet, when I look at some of the companies and startups that we showcased at Proto.in ( Between 2004 – 08), it seems some of them were quite out of the world, compared to the me-too startups we see.

Chennai, a tier-2 city by most metrics, has 52 food delivery startups (that we know of). In a conversation with a group of students in IIT and when I prodded them asking why they aren’t going after some of the bigger problems, their answer was simple; “Sir, we read that some of these companies have raised 10s of millions. We look at their venture and it seems so simple and we believe we can do it better”. While the audacity is to be applauded, It also makes me wonder if the best and brightest need to be going after ventures that are essentially time-bound courier service ventures.

As part of The Startup Centre, we’ve been running In50hrs (a prototyping event) for four years now. We’ve been active in 8 cities across the country – organizing close to 14 events a year. I personally love it – seeing entrepreneurs from each of these hubs, and their ideas. But it seems that most of them are drinking out of the same watering hole for their inspirations.

I strongly believe that the ecosystem will sustain as long as we are solving real problems. Inflation and frothy valuations only kick in when there is excess of capital but not enough opportunities to chase. Capital being available is a good thing; I wish if we could direct it to a better purpose.

A few months ago I started talking to a few people to collate problem statements (alok was kind enough to send a few of his own). We are trying to see if we can seed these problem statements – not ideas, but problems – so that the ecosystem can benefit out of.

We put all of them in a Google spreadsheet and shared. I have an inbox full of requests to show that people were indeed interested (or perhaps just curious). But there wasnt a way for folks to interact, and build on it. I opened up the access priviledges and it only took a few minutes before it got vandalised.

Building from the learnings, a week ago we launched Ideaspace. We are building a community around problem solvers – the same community that came together for In50hrs, but this time centred around problem statements – both seeded by us, and those that the community throws up. We’ve a little over 400 users on the platform right now. If you’d like to participate, do let me know. You can signup via http://ideaspace.in50hrs.com. If you are simply curious and just want to have a glimpse of the problem statements then you can do so via http://ideaspace.in50hrs.com/problems

I’d love to have your feedback – and thoughts on the same.