What's the PROBLEM your product solves?
In the month that I've been here, I've been noticing a pattern in a lot of launches - strong demos, polished UI, clear outputs of "what it does."
But when I ask myself "What problem does this solve?" I sometimes have to dig for the answer. (I come by that thinking honestly - I've spent 33 years building and fixing businesses, so this is the lens I can't turn off.)
The products where the problem is obvious are the ones people actually buy - you see it, you go "oh, that's exactly my issue," and you're sold on it.
It also makes pitching easier. If you're clear on the problem, explaining your product to anyone - buyers, other makers, whoever - gets a lot simpler.
And it's a small tweak with a big payoff - naming the problem clearly in your launch messaging can be the difference between people scrolling past and people stopping to actually look.
Curious what others think: when you're checking out a launch here, do you look for the problem first, or does the demo/output usually sell you on its own?
Replies
I try to answer the "problem to solve question" as early as possible. Sometimes too early.
The hardest part for me is reducing the problem to a single sentence. It’s tempting to describe what the product does instead of the one problem it solves.
I’ve also noticed that this sentence changes as you learn. Especially before product-market fit, every user conversation can refine—or completely change—how you describe the problem.
One exercise that helps me is switching to the user’s perspective. Instead of asking “What did I build?” I ask “What changed for the user after using it?” The answer is often much simpler.
Coming from enterprise IT, I think this is something many projects struggle with. We often start from a list of required features rather than a clearly articulated problem. You can build exactly what’s specified and still miss the thing the user actually needed.
I look for the problem first, mostly because a clean demo can hide the fact that nothing really hurt before the product existed. For DukieX (disclosure, I'm the maker), the problem is that running a creator business means paying for and gluing together five or six tools that don't talk to each other. Shop in one place, community in another, memberships and bookings each with their own cut and login, and a spreadsheet at month end to reconcile it all. The demo shows one Space that runs all of it, but the real problem is that the tool sprawl quietly taxes your time and your margins, and you don't feel it until you're in deep. Writing that out plainly actually changed how I pitch it, so thanks for the nudge.
The problem Naxely solves is one I kept seeing in freelance work: you spend 3 hours in Excel making a client report look presentable, and the actual analysis took 20 minutes. The ratio is backwards.
Freelancers and agencies send the same type of report every week — same structure, same sections, just different data. But every time it's manual: copy numbers, fix formatting, write a summary, make charts, export to PDF. None of that adds value. It just takes time.
So the product is: upload your CSV, get a branded PDF report with charts, anomaly flags, and an AI-written summary. The 3-hour part becomes 30 seconds.
To your broader point — I think demos sell curiosity, but problems sell decisions. Someone watching a demo thinks "interesting." Someone who recognizes their own problem thinks "I need this." Those are very different moments.
My co-founder and I created Neuphlo to solve issues we've had over the years with project management tools (I'm a test manager). no matter which tool i have tried, i ended up having various workarounds to make the tools fit our department work processes. When building our landing page, we have adressed some of these issues, but I still think we have a long way to go before we can really "catch" new users using the site alone. I do not have the answer as my marketing skills suck, so I am listening in on all you good people to see what really makes a product catch the eye :-)
Regards
Jan Riis Sørensen
Co-found of Neuphlo.com