There's advice you have heard many times if you've ever sought out business advice. Focus on the problem. If you want the more sophisticated version, focus on the customer. Both are given with the confidence of something self-evidently true, and both deserve more credit than I am about to give them, because they are not wrong. They are aimed at remedying a real disease. The trouble is that they stop one step short of a complete remedy, and the step they miss happens to be the only one that tells you whether you are building a business or just a very well-intentioned hobby.
My friend Victor put it better than I can. There may be a gap in the market. But is there a market in the gap? It is not simply a clever reversal of a cliché. It is pointing out that a gap and a market are two different things under the hood. A gap is a fact about the world. A market is a fact about people, specifically about what people are willing to give up in exchange for a solution. You can find gaps all day. Most of them are gaps for a reason. Nobody has filled them because nobody particularly cares enough to pay the one who's filling it.
So here's the advise I've found myself given consistently to the founders I advise. Don't start with the problem. Start with the money.
I say this fully aware of how it sounds. It sounds like I am telling you to be a mercenary, to trade in the nobility of solving problems for the vulgarity of chasing cash. Far from it. Money, in a business, is not the reward for having done something good. It is the verdict on whether you did. When someone pays you, they are not merely acknowledging that their problem was real or your solution was clever. They are telling you, with the only currency that costs them anything to spend, that this mattered enough to pay for. That is a much higher bar than caring about their problem or your solution. Caring is free. Caring is what people do in conversations, in surveys, in the comments under your post. Paying is what happens when caring meets a wallet and the wallet has to make a decision.
Which is why I think ability and willingness of a customer have to be treated as two entirely separate hurdles, not one blurred requirement called "wanting it." Someone can want your solution badly and have no money to give you. Plenty of the most sincere, most sympathetic people you will ever meet are in exactly this position, and building a business around their sincerity is one of the noblest ways to go broke. Equally, someone can have all the money in the world and simply not care enough about your problem to part with a fraction of it. Neither of these people is a customer, however much they might resemble one in a pitch deck. A customer, properly understood, is someone standing at the intersection of both conditions, able and willing, at the same time.
This is why I think finding the problem is not step one. It is step three, maybe four. Step one is asking where the money already is, who currently has it and is already spending it on things adjacent to what you might build.
Step two is figuring out how much of it you actually need. Only once you know that do you go looking for the problem, because now you are looking for it in the right place, among people who have already demonstrated, with real behaviour rather than stated interest, that this is a category they pay into.
I find it useful to be almost embarrassingly literal about this. I know what I want an hour of my time to be worth, roughly three thousand five hundred cedis for ninety minutes when I am consulting. That number is a filter. It tells me immediately who I am and am not looking for. It rules out conversations before they waste anyone's time. And more usefully than either of those things, it occasionally tells me something I would rather not hear, which is that I am not yet worth what I am asking. That is not the market being unreasonable. That is the market being honest in a way that a friend rarely is. If nobody will pay the number after careful looking, the number isn't wrong, I haven't finished becoming the person who earns it or haven't found the thing worth that number.
That reframing turns a commercial disappointment into a question about character and skill, which is a question I can actually do something about.
Before any of that, though, there is a duller and more necessary exercise, which is simply working out what it costs to be you. Not the number that sounds impressive at a dinner party. The real one. Rent, food, transport, the people who depend on you, the savings you are supposed to be making and probably aren't. Most people trying to build something have never added this up, which means they are running a business toward a target that does not exist. You cannot work backward from a number you have never named.
I want to be honest about the limits of all this, because I think an idea stated without its boundary is dangerous. If what you are making is not meant to be a sustainable business at all, if it is an experiment, a piece of learning, something you are building because you are curious what happens or because it needs to exist regardless of who buys it, then none of this applies, and it shouldn't. That is a different, older, and in some ways more honest kind of making. But if you have told yourself, and told the people depending on you, that this is meant to pay for a life, then you have accepted a set of rules whether you like them or not, and one of those rules is that somebody, eventually, has to hand over money they could have spent on something else.
In short,
1. Work out what it costs to be you.
2. Decide what the business needs to produce to cover it.
3. Go looking for the people who already have that kind of money moving through their lives.
4. The and only then go looking for a problem. Ask what they need badly enough to spend it.
5. Find out whether you can actually deliver that, and if you can't, take the gap seriously as a question about your own capability rather than a complaint about the market.
That I find is an approach that has more fidelity to reality when it comes to building a business.