Tell me your problems

Everyone tells you to solve a problem you actually have. It's the most repeated piece of startup advice there is, and it's repeated because it's true. The trouble is that it quietly assumes the problems will present themselves, that you'll be going about your life and the gap in the market will tap you on the shoulder. Six weeks into Singapore, sitting between building something of my own and the very real need to find a job, I've been finding that the real ones don't tap you on the shoulder if you're at a desk with the door shut.

You can go looking for an idea by sitting down with a notebook and trying to think your way to a problem worth solving, or you can put yourself around other people who are building things and let their problems surface on their own. I used to treat these as the same activity in different rooms, until the rooms started producing problems I would never have found alone.

A desk can produce plenty of plausible-sounding problems, but it can't tell you which ones are real. You have no evidence for them, and you talk yourself into them because it would be convenient if they were true. Sitting alone, you can't tell a problem people have from one you've invented because it suits you.

The room does the work

What's actually moved me forward these last few weeks has been Hackapura, a builder community here in Singapore. I've been going regularly, and the thing that struck me first was how much you pick up just by seeing what other people are working on. Not in an abstract, inspirational sense, though it is genuinely inspiring, but in the specific sense that everyone building something is carrying around a list of problems they've hit, and when you get a room of them together those problems start spilling out.

Bouncing ideas off people who think the same way, giving feedback and getting it back, is a completely different mechanism to thinking alone. It's the difference between guessing what people want and watching what they're actually struggling with. The community here has been excellent for that, and it's reminded me that working out whether a problem is real is a social activity, not a solitary one.

This is worth separating from building in public, which I gave up on a while back. Posting progress online and sitting in a room with builders look similar on paper, but one is performing for an audience and the other is an actual conversation. Online I was optimising for engagement from peers who'd never be customers. In person you get the unfiltered version: the half-finished idea, the thing that didn't work, the problem someone can't stop complaining about. That's the raw material.

The bottleneck moved

The other thing I've been learning, almost in parallel, is just how much you can now get an AI agent to do. I've written before about wiring Claude into my analytics, but the last couple of weeks have gone further. Scheduling has changed how I think about it. I can set work up to run overnight, go to sleep and wake up to find the results waiting. There's something slightly absurd about getting things done while you're unconscious, and it takes a while to stop feeling like cheating.

These two threads connect more than they look. For most of my career the bottleneck on acting on an idea was building it. You'd find a problem, then spend three months and a lot of goodwill turning it into something real, which meant the cost of being wrong was high, so you were careful, so you moved slowly. That bottleneck is dissolving. With agents doing the grunt work and running while I sleep, the building is no longer the hard part.

If building is cheap, the scarce thing is knowing what to build, and that knowledge comes from exposure rather than introspection. The desk can answer whether I can make something, while the room tells me whether the problem is real.

None of this makes the job hunt go away, and there's a particular flavour of uncertainty in trying to find a problem worth building while also needing the stability of employment. Getting out and meeting people helps with both. Six weeks in, the most useful thing I can do is spend time around people building things and listen closely when they complain about what isn't working.