What Problem is Your Startup Trying to Solve?

Pownce, Convore, and Grove founder Leah Culver shared her story

about living using cloud services and doing away with the traditional sense of ownership. Of course, being in the US it's ridiculously easy to do this whereas for us in Southeast Asia, it's the stuff dreams are made of.

We can't have a cab company like Uber because it's against the law, at least in some countries (maybe all). AirBNB can't yet operate properly due to the high amount of trust required by both parties (and also the law). Grocery deliveries are still unreliable. Dropbox requires a reliable, widespread 3G connection. We can't buy books on Kindle or iBookstore, no Rdio, Spotify, not even iTunes Store.

Living in a third world country is a bitch, but you know what, that means there's plenty of opportunities to figure out how to come up with services and products that solve these problems. That's the challenge in living in this part of the world. People get preoccupied with first world entitlements that some of the more basic needs in this region gets forgotten. This is where local entrepreneurs should step up, identify those problems and come up with workable solutions.

Forget running a Groupon clone, to hell with location based social networks, let Silicon Valley people handle those and find out what you can build here, figure out solutions for local challenges and problems. Like booking taxis, hotels, concerts and movie tickets, finding out the nearest doctor, clinic, pharmacy, or hospital, or how to seamlessly and effortlessly pay bills or transfer funds from your mobile devices across multiple financial institutions, how to get local governments to fix potholes in public roads, how to find and review local businesses or points of interests online, and so on.

Get out of the city and see what the rest of the country is like. Find out what can technology do to solve out problems. I'd like to see somebody doing something about managing city traffic and commuting, if not solving it then make the trips more bearable somehow. Or perhaps getting people to enjoy more music legally as opposed to listening to 30 second snippets while waiting for a call.

There hasn't been an exciting startup in this part of the world in a while. Hardly anybody seems to be doing something really good, something big, or something worthwhile. There's a lot of consumption and not enough creation. The ones that seem to be doing the right things for the greater public tend to miss out on being successful. There's a lot of technically gifted engineers or programmers in this country but there's not a lot of ground breaking or workable ideas that have been getting a serious follow up.

Ideas don't always have to be exciting but they have to work. Ideas have to have a purpose and when coming up with a product, there has to be a problem that needs solving because if your product isn't solving a problem that other people are also experiencing, then what's the point?