Solving the right problems

As bootstrapping entrepreneurs we have ideas every day, lots of them. I write them all down in my journal, usually that’s as far as they go, but often I can get distracted by them for a few hours, or even days.

If you are in the tech industry, then like me you probably see problems all around you, that given the chance you can solve with your creativity and vision. It’s highly likely that what lead you in to founding your first business, you saw a problem, and thought hey I can fix that. Or wouldn’t that be so much better if it worked like this.

I am often told that I am solving problems that just don’t exist. I reply, “yet”. And that for me is the reason I do what I do, not to make money (although we have to pay the bills too) but to innovate, that is what it’s all about. To innovate we have to imagine tomorrows problems and build solutions that solve them today, even if it’s not a major problem now. My business Linktagger is a mobile interaction platform. We provide hardware such as NFC iBeacon and printed QR, and then a software layer to bring it all together in to a unique user interaction experience in shops, gyms and even industrial environments. I don’t kid myself that we will still be doing QR and NFC in 5 years time, I know that the tech will move on, likely to 2D and 3D object recognition as well as point and gesture interaction. But if we didn’t have QR Codes, NFC and iBeacon apps today trying to innovate and bring the physical world online, and the virtual world offline, then we lose the bridge between now and then, the trying and doing that creates our new world tomorrow.

The fact that you can’t tap a tin of Tesco spaghetti to reorder more isn’t really a huge problem yet, but as our dependence on digital devices and interaction grow, we come to expect that we can interact with objects around us in the physical space as we do in the virtual. This for me is a problem worth solving now.