It's a charming ideal that I think is vanishingly rare in real life. I also can't see how the hair on fire thing fits with any of the top startups and ex startups I know. In fact I dare say the rapidly rising user count is a separate story from the hair on fire story. The hair on fire tends to be a specialty business problem and still, against all reason, tends to require a pretty rigorous sales cycle. The problems I work on, making the medical record discrete data is of this kind. The other kind is more like Google, Facebook, Uber, AirBnB and those were surprises because no one's hari was on fire. We didn;t know we wanted that stuff until we saw it and then we wanted more and more.
In summary, I guess I disagree with the whole thing
I think there are actually two aspects to the market question. First, there's the level of pain experienced by the customer, and second, there's the size of the market. Lots and lots of startups are solving "hair on fire" issues for relatively small markets - enough to generate millions in revenue, but not billions.
For a sad case in point, there's not a whole lot of research for a cure (or even a treatment) for ALS - a disease that is completely debilitating and almost always fatal. There just aren't that many patients (even though it's common enough to touch famous people like Lou Gehrig, Stephen Hawking, and Jason Becker). Meanwhile, tons of money are poured into Viagra and its competitors - not an actual lifesaving problem, but a huge market.
I know about Airbnb personally and it started with a hair on fire problem - a design conference where all the hotel rooms in the city where sold out. Brian and Joe hosted attendees in their apartment on air beds. That sounds like a hair on fire problem and a brick solution :)
I see your point but that implies that on rare occasions hotels are sold out at a specific time and place. I don't think that is the problem AirBnB solves
I'm wondering if this may dovetail with another piece of common YC advice, "start by going narrow & deep".
I didn't start using AirBnB until 2013, and I used them because they were remarkably polished and made the experience super-easy. They weren't at all a "hair on fire" problem for me.
But I could imagine that at some point in time, there was a group of people who were so desperate for a place to stay that they'd crash on a couple of airbeds at a stranger's place. And that gave those strangers the idea that maybe this was something worth looking into and investing time into perfecting.
The importance of that initial core group of users may be feedback. I've had to give up startup ideas because I launch them and then there is literally nobody who cares. And then with no users, there are no guideposts as to which direction to improve the product in. It's all guesswork, and random ideas don't have a particularly high chance of success.
This may also dovetail with the known advantage that you get from solving your own problem. If it's your own problem, then you know at least one person wants it, and you can use yourself for feedback on improving the product. Then hopefully once it's good enough for you, you can find some other folks that'll find it good enough to try out, and use their feedback to evolve the product.
Great write up. You hear many times the advice of getting MVP out and then "just" listen to your customers and the data. A lot of times, as you said, there is virtually nobody that cares and few feedback. You are just treading through a desert without nothing to guide you...
I don't remember their story in detail but I think they started as a couch surfing alternative. Given the rule of supply and demand I'm guess there was not "no hotel rooms available" there was "no hotel rooms available cheaply". offering a cheaper alternative is great, but I can't consider it a hair on fire problem
Cool analogy. However don't some startups actually open up things that we didn't even know were painful?
E.g I was happy staying in hotels. I wasn't on fire looking to stay at someone's house. I'm guessing the hosts weren't on fire either having random strangers over.
Facebook, Google, Amazon. I was very happy with the alternatives. They just did somethings better. Although Facebook is kind of dead to me. Haven't opened in months.
I do like the analogy of getting overwhelmed by customers and having scaling problems.
If you didn't know you were in pain, you weren't in pain. If you didn't know your hair was on fire, your hair wasn't on fire. I suppose if you squint hard enough you can make any of these support the authors contention.
In summary, I guess I disagree with the whole thing