A founder’s diary entry on the strange, increasingly rigid expectation that you must have suffered your own problem before you’re allowed to solve it
I built a scheduling tool for small manufacturing businesses, a genuinely unglamorous, unsexy piece of software that solves a real, specific, well-documented problem for a real, specific, unglamorous industry. I have never personally run a manufacturing business. I have, however, spent three years talking to people who do, watching them struggle with exactly the problem I’m now solving, and building something they’ve told me, repeatedly and enthusiastically, actually helps. Apparently this is not good enough for at least one investor I met last week.
The Exact Phrase That Has Been Rattling Around My Head
“I love the product, but I’m just not sure you have founder-market fit,” she said, with genuine warmth, as though this were obviously self-evident feedback rather than a fairly significant philosophical claim about who is and isn’t permitted to solve a given problem. When I asked what she meant, she clarified that she generally prefers to back founders who have personally lived the pain point themselves, ideally as a former operator within the exact industry being disrupted.
I Understand the Logic, Genuinely
I am not entirely unsympathetic to this framework. A founder who has personally lived a problem often does have a depth of instinctive understanding that pure research, however thorough, can struggle to fully replicate. I have met founders like this, and their products often do show a certain intuitive polish that comes from years of lived frustration rather than months of structured customer interviews.
But I Have Genuine Questions About Where This Logic Ends
Taken to its logical extreme, this framework suggests that only people who have personally run manufacturing businesses should be permitted to build software for manufacturing businesses, only people who have personally struggled with a specific medical condition should be permitted to build tools addressing it, and so on, indefinitely, until every founder is simply solving their own narrow, personally experienced problem rather than any problem that genuinely needs solving on its own merits.
What I’ve Actually Done Instead of Lived Experience
I have spent, at this point, roughly three hundred hours in direct conversation with manufacturing business owners, sat in on their actual scheduling meetings, watched them work around the exact inefficiencies my product now addresses, and built something they use, pay for, and, crucially, keep using month after month rather than quietly abandoning. This feels, to me, like a meaningfully rigorous substitute for lived experience, even if it doesn’t tick the exact same narrative box a “former operator” origin story would.
The Investor Meetings Since Then
I have started, somewhat defensively, front-loading my next several pitches with the actual retention numbers and customer testimonials before anyone can raise the founder-market fit question, a strategy that has, so far, worked reasonably well in at least deflecting the conversation toward outcomes rather than origin story.
What I Genuinely Wonder About This Whole Framework
I wonder, sometimes, how many genuinely useful products never got built because their founder hadn’t personally suffered the specific problem first, and how many mediocre products got funded purely on the strength of a compelling personal origin story that didn’t actually correlate with the quality of the eventual solution. I don’t have a tidy answer to this. I have, mostly, just my own retention numbers, and a growing suspicion that they should matter more than whether I’ve personally run a factory floor.
Where the Business Stands, Regardless
The product keeps growing. Customers keep renewing. I have not, in the meantime, developed retroactive lived experience running a manufacturing business, and I suspect I never will, so I am simply choosing to let the actual results make the argument that the origin story apparently can’t. Further London startup founder diary entries continue at bohiney.com, with additional London business coverage available at prat.uk.
SOURCE: https://prat.UK/