236: The Entrepreneur’s Dilemma with Somi Arian from InPeak

My discussion with Somi Arian is a deep dive into the entrepreneur's dilemma of solving problems vs. fulfilling desires, customer discovery, product building and pivots, all baked into a live startup mentoring session. This episode was originally recorded as an episode of the Somi Arian Podcast.

Show Notes
Guest Profile

Somi Arian is the founder and CEO of InPeak, an innovative platform enabling creators and businesses to build and monetize communities. Somi is also an award-winning filmmaker, tech philosopher, and author whose work sits at the intersection of AI, blockchain, and the future of work. Her 2018 documentary, “The Millennial Disruption” won several international awards and featured industry leaders from The Economist, Marie Claire, Bentley, JLR, and Steinway.

Somi and I dove into the choice that an entrepreneur has between solving a problem versus fulfilling a desire. We commonly find this dilemma in web3, but it originated in web2. If you’re a startup founder, I will tell you until you’re blue in the face that your startup needs to be solving a painful problem for a big market of people who are feeling that pain regularly, whether it’s a professional pain point or personal pain point.

But not every startup you see doing well is solving an obvious problem for the direct user. Sometimes, the startup is just fulfilling a desire - take social networks. Their goal is to bring people with shared interests closer together, as that desire to be part of something bigger than themselves creates an attention span, and that attention span is monetizable. With that, the desire to be fulfilled is that of the individual user, and the problem to solve belongs to the social network’s true customers: brands having a hard time monetizing their audiences through other advertising channels.

The message in this for startup founders is that when you set out to build, make sure you’re solving a big problem, and if you’re also fulfilling a desire, just know who you’re serving with what proposition, and that both of these markets are worth pursuing.

If you’re building in web3, the next class of the Techstars Web3 accelerator takes place in spring 2024, and applications are open now.

As web3 is global and borderless, so is Techstars Web3. Although most of the accelerator content is delivered virtually, the class does meet up in person for a week at a time at the beginning, middle and end of the program in different cities around the world. Jump on over to techstars.com/accelerators/web3 to apply.

LINKS:

Watch the video version on Somi Arian's YouTube channel

Follow Somi Arian on LinkedIn and X/(Twitter)

Check out the Somi Arian Podcast and learn about InPeak

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