Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups

If there is one rule that pretty much everyone in tech agrees with, it is this: find a problem, then build a solution. Do not build a solution and then go looking for a problem to apply it to.

It is solid advice. Except when it is not.

Matt Bell did exactly the thing founders are told never to do. He built Matterport, a technology that captures physical spaces and turns them into interactive 3D replicas, without a clear problem to solve. He just thought computer vision and bridging physical and digital worlds was cool tech.

Founded in 2012, Matterport now has tens of millions in revenue, 650,000+ subscribers, and hosts 8.7 million spaces across 177 countries. Clients include Netflix, Redfin, Waldorf Astoria, and AWS.

So what gives? Was the advice wrong all along?

Not exactly. But the nuance matters a lot for investors.

Why "Solution First" Usually Fails

The reason the conventional wisdom exists is because it is right most of the time. When a founder builds technology they find interesting and then goes hunting for customers, a few things tend to happen.

They fall in love with the tech, not the customer. The product becomes a showcase for engineering talent rather than a tool that solves a painful problem. Customers are an afterthought. This usually results in a demo that impresses other engineers but does not convert to revenue.

They cannot find sustainable demand. A solution without a clear problem can generate curiosity but not recurring usage. People try it once, think "that is neat," and never come back. There is no retention because there is no real pain being addressed.

Elizabeth Yin talks about this dynamic often. She looks at ideas and unit economics above all else as a first step, because if those work out, many teams can run with it. If the economics do not work, even an incredible team will struggle. A solution looking for a problem almost always has terrible unit economics because the founder has not identified who will pay and why.

When It Actually Works

So why did Matterport succeed? Because Matt Bell did something that most "solution first" founders do not. He spent 18 months systematically testing use cases.

He explored scanning bodies for virtual clothing shopping. He looked at industrial equipment installation, construction, insurance, and real estate. He was not married to a single application. He was married to finding the application where customers pulled the product out of his hands.

And at the end of those 18 months, he found that real estate had the most traction. So he went all in.

This is the critical difference. The founders who succeed with a solution-first approach treat their technology as a hypothesis, not a conclusion. They are willing to pivot the application entirely based on where customer demand actually lives. They do the hard work of customer discovery even though they started from the technology side.

The founders who fail with this approach fall in love with their first idea and refuse to test alternatives. They keep trying to convince the market to care rather than finding the market that already does.

What Investors Should Watch For

If a founder pitches you with cool technology but a fuzzy problem statement, it is not an automatic no. But you need to dig deeper.

Ask: how many use cases have they explored? If the answer is one, that is a concern. If the answer is six or eight, and they can explain why each one did or did not work, that is a founder who is doing the work.

Ask: where is the customer pull? Not "people think it is cool." Actual paying customers or clear signals of willingness to pay. Elizabeth Yin has pointed out that the truth is if you have a business with strong product-market fit, you do not need to be a customer acquisition genius. The product practically sells itself. If a solution-first founder has found that kind of pull for their technology, the origin story matters less.

Ask: are they flexible on the application? A founder who is attached to a specific use case despite lack of traction is a warning sign. A founder who treats the technology as a platform and is hunting for the best application is someone who might find it.

The Matterport story is instructive because it is the exception, not the rule. Most solution-first startups never find their real estate equivalent. But the ones that do have a significant advantage: they have built something genuinely differentiated rather than the fifteenth variation of the same product in a crowded market.

If you want to get better at telling the difference between a solution looking for a problem and a solution that just has not found its problem yet, Angel Squad members evaluate these dynamics alongside Hustle Fund's team across 1,000+ monthly applications. Check it out at Angel Squad.

The technology is never the question. The question is always whether someone will pay for it.