Module 3: Problem Validation

Welcome to Week 3. Last week you chose a problem to carry all semester. This week you put it on trial. The question is simple and unforgiving: is this problem real for anyone other than you? Founders fall in love with their own ideas, and love makes for bad evidence. Problem validation is the practice of checking, honestly and early, whether the pain you see is felt by real people beyond your own head. You do this before building anything, because the cheapest time to discover that a problem is not real is now.

Here is the Seminar's central question from this week's angle: do we find, unearth, or create value? Aimed at validation, it sharpens into this: the value of a solution depends entirely on whether the problem is real, so how do you gather honest evidence that the problem exists for others, instead of evidence that merely flatters your idea? A found problem that no one else has is not a discovery. It is a mirror.

By Sunday you will have three things: a validated problem statement (your problem rewritten as a problem for other people, with early evidence that it is real), three to five customer personas (short profiles of the kinds of people who may actually have this problem), and your CEO agent version 1, the first real AI agent of your venture, built from the work you have already done. The CEO agent uses the same building form the Baker track is teaching you.

If you are joining this week or missed Module 2, you have lost texture, not prerequisite knowledge. You need one thing to start: a rough problem you care about. If you do not have one yet, pick a frustration you have complained about more than once and use it as your working problem for this week. The "Ask Wren" panel on any page can point you to the Module 2 problem-finding work if you want it later. Wren Calloway is your course concierge.