Don't build the solution before you understand the problem - a podcast by Kent C. Dodds

from 2021-02-11T00:28:41

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What is up my friends all right, so today I wanted to talk about investing
the time at the right and appropriate time so I actually talked with myfriend Jacob about this and yo-yo Jacob if you're listening and just in
general we're talking about you have this really big plan for a big and
exciting thing and you want to like create a business out of it or you wantto build a whole new application or something like that and so you have
these really giant plans what I want to tell you is try to.Avoid doing as much work as possible and like sorry let me say that again
try to avoid solving problems that you don't yet have but thank you will so
you have really have to have a compelling reason to solve a problem thatyou think you're going to have rather than solving problems that you know
that you have right now so let me give you example of this my sister abouta year ago when covet started she is a violinist she's very good and she
all of her violinist friends were just not doing great becauseCovid andeverything just messed up their lives and so she had this idea that she
could make an app that would enable violin professionals to teach onlineand she done a lot of research and everything said there wasn't anything
quite like what she was thinking and so she wanted to hire a developer tobuild something for her she basically wanted an app that was like zoom and
Tito for the ticketing and like had all of these things built in as.You know an app and it would be a really cool thing potentially and so she
was ready to like go go hire an engineer paid hundreds of thousands ofdollars to make this dream of hers a reality probably more is what it would
end up costing and I and she asked me because I'm a developer and so I
could tell her about some of that aspect of stuff and I told her hey, it's
great that you think this is gonna be so awesome and it probably like avery much could be awesome but really really try to avoid.
Doing all of this stuff until you're like solving all these problems until
you're certain that you know what the problems are because often you'll get
into things and you'll just you think that you know what promise you need
solve okay, we need this feature in that feature in that feature and thenby the time you're done you find out that you're no longer into it at all
and so you don't even need the solutions in the first place or you
misunderstood the problem and so the solution doesn't fit the problem yeah
that I maybe need a little bit more time to talk about this but yeah justavoid like I don't own any domains for apps that I haven't built I built
the app first then I buy the domain.Yeah take that and run with it good luck see you later.

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