After introducing this theme from a founder perspective shared in the comments, we want to explore it here from a more operational angle, through the lens we apply at Fondazione Start Attractor.
Every startup begins with an intuition. A founder notices something missing. A team senses that a process is inefficient. An opportunity starts to emerge.
But the first real step is not building the solution. It is framing the problem properly.
This means moving from: “this should exist” to “this is the specific problem, for these people, in this context.”
A problem is better framed when at least four things are clear:
Without this work, teams risk refining solutions before understanding the actual need. In other words, they risk building the hammer and only afterwards looking for nails.
In startup building, clarity on the problem is what makes validation possible, communication sharper, and execution more effective.
One more caution: do not ask your friends whether what you see as a problem is really a problem. They may want to please you. A real reality check should be performed with people who do not already know you.
And do not confuse external research with validation.
You probably remember from primary school that you cannot add apples and oranges: they are different objects or, in programming terms, different types. The same applies to market validation. You cannot use analyses produced by others, in different contexts, at different times, with different methods, and for different purposes, to validate your own hypothesis that a problem is real and worth solving.
As Alberto Savoia reminds us in the Right it, evidence matters only when it is the right evidence for the problem you are actually testing. In one sentence: other people’s research is not automatically validation.