I’ve been struggling to articulate the problem I’m solving with my “book library” project. It’s critical to clearly state the problem in such a way that people will understand why it’s worth solving. When you can do that, people are more engaged and want to hear about your solution. But I wasn’t doing it, so I had to fight to keep people’s attention. And this was when I was talking to friends, not strangers, and I wasn’t asking them to use or pay for the solution.

I decided to use the holiday to review all my notes and start crystallizing the problem in a clear sentence. Creating a problem statement is something that sounds simple, but it’s been hard for me in the past. Getting to a concise statement is usually a process of refinement and wordsmithing. In the past, I’ve done it alone (with no success) or with a group of entrepreneurs as part of a retreat.

I didn’t want to do it alone and had no planned retreats, so I decided to use Google Gemini and ChatGPT as thinking tools. Both offer mobile apps that allow you to speak your thoughts instead of typing them. For this kind of ideation exercise, I wanted to capture my thoughts as they were flowing, so speaking was key.

I chose to use two models because no model is perfect. They all have strengths and weaknesses. But I’ve found that feeding my thoughts to both, reviewing their outputs, incorporating the outputs into my thinking, feeding my updated thoughts to both, and repeating that loop has worked well. I also ask each model to rate and give feedback on the output from the competing model. Together, this created a rapid iteration cycle, something I can’t normally do alone.

After many cycles, I’ve finally landed on two versions of what I think is a clear problem statement. I feel pretty good about both, but I’ll get feedback before I make final decisions.

Clearly articulating the problem sounds like an obvious thing that all entrepreneurs do, but many don’t have clear problem statements, which causes lots of issues down the road.