Why the Best Business Ideas Solve Your Own Problems

The best business ideas solve your own problems. When the problem is yours, you’re the first customer, you feel the pain every day, and you know straight away whether the fix works. If you wouldn’t use the thing you’re building, you probably shouldn’t be the one building it.

That’s the biggest thing I took from my conversation with Fam Mirza on the Addicted2Success podcast. Fam is a serial entrepreneur. When I introduced him, I said he became a millionaire by 21, has been featured in Forbes five times, and built a brand called 1:Face that has changed over a million lives. A few minutes in, he held a little pack up to the camera and told me to look at the back.

On the back, all it says is, “Open, wipe. You’re welcome.”

That’s the whole set of instructions, and it says a lot about how Fam builds things.

Why solve your own problems before anyone else’s?

The product is called Chuck Offs. Fam told me he owns something like 60 or 70 pairs of Chucks. Somebody steps on them, they get scuffed, and now he can’t wear them. So his team created a proprietary formula in the lab that takes rubber scuffs off rubber, then put it in packaging you can spot from across the store. If he’s at the register and you’re in aisle six, he wants you to see it.

He didn’t need a survey. He looked down at his own shoes.

Then he said this: “If you’ve created a product or a brand and you would never use it, you suck.”

I said amen to that, and I meant it. If you won’t use it, why would anyone else? What do you even know about it? Fam told me he asks people who show him something they’ve made one question: do you use it? When they say no, he can’t make sense of it. You’re not even the user, and you created it.

His rule, the one he says he’s lived by since he was a kid: “Solve your own problems. That’s how you come up with the next big idea.” Then: “Everybody has problems.”

This isn’t just a sneaker thing. The team behind Basecamp built their software the same way and wrote about it in Getting Real: when you’re the target audience, you know what’s important and what’s not.

That last part of Fam’s line matters. Nobody gets to say they don’t have ideas. Every day you run into something slow, overpriced or broken. That’s the raw material.

Be the guy: why smart investors back people, not products

Fam took this further with a story about Chris Stoikos, the founder of Dollar Beard Club. People kept telling Fam he had to meet Chris because they had the same energy. When they finally met, Fam told him straight up that he was the guy. Chris asked why. Fam’s answer: because he had a barbaric, Viking-sized beard. If he’s not the guy to sell beard products, who is?

Fam said that if he’d met Chris before the launch, he would have invested in him without thinking twice. Not in the product. In him. In Fam’s words, “smart investors don’t invest in products. They invest in people.”

Even if Chris knew nothing about marketing, Fam said it wouldn’t have mattered. Marketing can be taught. Being the customer can’t be faked.

I love this because it flips the question. Most people ask whether the idea is good. Fam asks whether you’re the right person for it. Be the person you need to be to grow the business. And if you’re not that person, he’d tell you not to create the product.

If it doesn’t bother you, you won’t take action

Here’s where I jumped in, because this is the part most people skip. Everyone’s got ideas. Ideas aren’t the problem. Action is.

What I said to Fam was this: “If it’s something that really pisses you off, like if it’s a real pain point, you’re going to want to take the action. And I think that’s the difference.”

When the problem is somebody else’s, it stays theory. When it’s yours, it nags you every morning. That’s what gets you off the couch and building.

Fam had told me he only sleeps four or five hours, and when I brought it up he said, “my ideas won’t let me sleep.” I’m not telling you to cut your sleep. I’m telling you what it looks like when someone cares about the problem. I told him that’s the energy of your purpose. When my body can’t take any more and I have to go to bed, it annoys me because I want to keep going. Then I wake up wanting to jump straight back in.

You don’t get that feeling building something you don’t care about.

Money is the byproduct, not the reason

I told Fam that if you’re just coming from a place of “I want to make this because it makes money,” it’s not good enough. It needs to be: “I’m solving a problem. It’s going to help a lot of people. Yes, I can make money and we’re going to have fun doing it.”

He agreed, and went further. He doesn’t think any hugely successful entrepreneur does it for the money. To him, money is always the byproduct. If you build a business and you’re all about the money, he said, you’ll only get so far. Maybe six figures. Maybe whatever.

“If you didn’t pay me to do what I do, I would still do it, because these are my problems,” he said.

He still called money “just freedom.” But for Fam the real step up is when you can make money and change the world at the same time. That’s where 1:Face came from.

The biggest problem Fam solved was the one he grew up with

I asked Fam what really drove 1:Face. It’s all good making the millions. It’s all good going through the failures and coming out stronger. But what about the impact? What about serving? I think that’s the part a lot of people miss.

His answer went back to his childhood. He was born in Qatar, and his parents, who were still building their careers and didn’t have money, left him with an aunt in India until they were stable. He told me he didn’t really get to know them until he was seven. He grew up in conditions where he didn’t know what a shower was. Bathing meant a bucket and a cup poured over your head. When he got to Qatar and saw water spraying out of a metal thing in the wall, he thought it was strange. His mum had to tell him it was a shower.

Then his family moved to America, which he described as a total economic shock. He’d wanted to build a charity brand since he was a kid, and some early attempts flopped. One clothing line gave away 99% of its proceeds and lost money month over month. Too generous to scale.

1:Face started as a watch he redesigned because he liked the idea of a mirror face but thought the original design was off. He wore it everywhere. Twice, people bought it right off his wrist. There was demand before there was even a brand.

What made it a brand was the mirror. When you look at the watch, you see your own face. He sketched 82 logos in a book before landing on the simplest one: a one for the nose, two lines and a mouth. They crowdfunded it, and he said they did about $358,000 in the first 30 days.

But the reason he gave for its success wasn’t the design. It was transparency. A lot of charity brands sell a vague feel-good story. His attitude as a customer was blunt: “Tell me where my money is going.” So 1:Face told people exactly what each watch funded, down to which cause and where. He said the strongest moment of all was being able to take someone to the village, pump the handle on the well, and watch the water come out.

That’s solving your own problem at a different scale. The kid with the bucket and the cup grew up and built wells.

Pain pushes you, vision pulls you

Fam told me he’d hate to have grown up rich. In his view, if everything had been handed to him, he wouldn’t have made anything of himself. Most people who are comfortable don’t think outside the box, because they don’t need to.

I agree with him. Being hungry is a good asset to have. When it’s fed to you, you’re too comfortable.

Here’s the way I put it to him: find your pain in your life and let that push you. Then attach the pleasure to it, which is your vision, and that pulls you. You’ve got the pain for the push and the vision for the pull.

Your own problems are the pain. The thing you build to fix them is the vision. Most people have plenty of pain and no plan, or a nice vision board and nothing that stings enough to make them move.

There’s no such thing as fast money

We hear the glory, but we don’t hear the story. A lot of people have only seen the highlight reel. So I asked Fam for his biggest lesson. What would he never do again?

He didn’t hesitate. He said he lost $750,000 in the stock market when it crashed. He still has a screenshot of the day his Fidelity portfolio was down $198,000. His takeaway, in his own words: “there’s no such thing as fast money.”

Fam was firm that, for him, real estate builds wealth and stocks don’t, because insiders get the news first. That’s his view after getting burned, not a rule for everyone. There are real tradeoffs between real estate vs stocks worth understanding before you pick a side.

What I added ties straight into solving your own problems. Tell me if I’m wrong, but I feel like you’d have to be ready to immerse yourself in whatever industries you’re investing in, and it’s a full-time job. Like, if you don’t really like technology, why invest in technology stocks? It’s the same rule as building a product. If you’re not the user and you don’t live in that world, you’re guessing. Speak to a licensed advisor for financial advice.

Fam said the same impatience kills companies. Everyone wants the fast track. Raise $20 million, hire 300 people, make a billion dollars tomorrow. “Companies that scale slower have so much more longevity than companies that scale fast,” he said.

His example was the Fisker Karma. The way Fam tells it, the push was to beat Elon to market, the car was mostly a design play, and Consumer Reports had it flatbedded four times during testing. The company ended in bankruptcy. Tesla went the other way and made sure the product was incredible first. You can’t build slow and right on a problem you don’t actually understand.

How to start solving your own problems this week

I don’t want you to read this, nod, and move on. That’s the gap I see all the time, between knowing something and doing it. So here’s what I’d do.

1. Write down five things that annoyed you this week. Not big world problems. Real ones. The thing that scuffed, broke, wasted your time or cost too much.
2. Ask Fam’s question about each one. Would I use the fix every week? If the answer is no, cross it off.
3. Ask whether you’re the guy. Are you the obvious customer for this, the way Chris Stoikos was for beard products? If not, it’s probably not your idea to build.
4. Check it isn’t just you. Your problem is a starting point, not proof. Before you spend real money, put in the time validating your next business idea with people who aren’t you.
5. Find one expert. Fam told me every person on his team is required to link with one person who’s an expert in their industry. Run customer service? Ask the customer service manager at Zappos for five minutes.

I learned a long time ago that you can go far by yourself, but you can go even further together. I’ve had the whole Superman complex, trying to control everything and not hiring anybody. Fam runs a team of about 28, and he’s known 11 of them since they were teenagers.

Become knowledgeable, then execute

Near the end, Fam said, “You’re the sum of the content you input into your mind.” What you feed yourself every day decides what you think about. He told me his dad once bought a computer when they were late on the mortgage and told him to type out the quotes of great men every day after school. Fam put them on the fridge, and he said those quotes still affect him today.

But reading the quotes was never the end of it. Living by them was. I asked Fam my usual last question: if he had 30 seconds to give his last speech to the world, what would he say? He talked about looking in the mirror before you brush your teeth and telling yourself you can change the world. One idea can change the world, he said, “as long as you have the right execution behind it.”

Then he finished: “become knowledgeable on it and then execute. That’s it.”

That’s the whole thing. You already have problems. Pick one that bugs you enough to act on, and make sure you’d use the fix. Are you able to take action now instead of getting lost in the next notification that pops up on your phone?

FAQ

What does it mean to solve your own problems in business?

It means building a product or service that fixes something you personally deal with. You become the first customer, so you know the pain, you know what a good fix looks like, and you’ll keep using it. Fam Mirza’s Chuck Offs came from his own scuffed sneakers.

Should you build a product you wouldn’t use yourself?

Fam Mirza’s answer is no. He says that if you created a product you would never use, you don’t understand it well enough to sell it. If you’re not the user, he’d ask whether you have a real user testing it with you at all times.

Why do smart investors invest in people, not products?

Because a founder who is the customer can learn everything else. Fam said he’d have backed Dollar Beard Club’s Chris Stoikos before launch because Chris was obviously the customer, even if he knew nothing about marketing.

Is making money a good reason to start a business?

On its own, not really. Fam believes money is the byproduct and that money-only founders only get so far. I think you need a real pain point to keep you taking action when it gets hard. Solve the problem first and the money can follow.

Is there such a thing as fast money?

Fam says no. He lost $750,000 in a market crash and now warns against chasing quick wins, whether that’s penny stocks or scaling a company too fast. That’s his experience, not a guarantee either way. Speak to a licensed advisor for financial advice.