Founders often become emotionally attached to their 'baby'—the solution. Ash Maurya's principle advises redirecting this passion toward the customer's problem. This keeps the team focused on creating value and allows them to iterate or discard solutions without ego, ensuring they build what customers actually need.

Large companies often identify an opportunity, create a solution based on an unproven assumption, and ship it without validating market demand. This leads to costly failures when the product doesn't solve a real user need, wasting millions of dollars and significant time.

Just as PMs are warned against solution-bias, the same discipline applies to problems. The goal is not just to find one problem, but to find multiple, then assess which is most valuable, strategically aligned, and worth pursuing for the right audience before committing resources.

Unlike software, hardware iteration is slow and costly. A better approach is to resist building immediately and instead spend the majority of time on deep problem discovery. This allows you to "one-shot" a much better first version, minimizing wasted cycles on flawed prototypes.

Technical founders often create a perfect solution to a real problem but still fail. That's because problem-solution fit is useless without product-market fit. An elegant solution that isn't plugged into the market—with the right GTM, pricing, and messaging—solves nothing in practice. It's unheard and unseen.

This reframes the fundamental goal of a startup away from a supply-side focus (building) to a demand-side focus (discovery). The market's unmet need is the force that pulls a company and its product into existence, not the other way around.

Instead of a generic 'ideation' phase, Rainbird's stage-gate process begins with a 'Basis of Interest.' This forces teams to articulate *why* a problem is interesting and worth solving for customers and the business before defining a solution.

Using a child's toy analogy, demand is a pre-existing hole (e.g., a star shape) and your product is the block. Founders fail when they build a block and then search for a hole it fits. The real job is to first deeply understand the shape of the hole, then craft a block that fits it perfectly.

The misconception that discovery slows down delivery is dangerous. Like stretching before a race prevents injury, proper, time-boxed discovery prevents building the wrong thing. This avoids costly code rewrites and iterative launches that miss the mark, ultimately speeding up the delivery of a successful product.