They nod. They smile. They ask a few surface questions. And deep down, you can tell, nothing you’re saying feels urgent to them.
That moment usually has nothing to do with your intelligence, your effort, or even your execution.
It comes down to one thing: the problem doesn’t feel inevitable. Investors don’t fund ideas because they’re clever.
They fund them because the pain is obvious, expensive, and already being paid for in some way. Headcount. Time. Workarounds. Stress.
AI makes this easier to miss. Everything feels buildable. Every workflow looks automatable.
You can ship fast and still build something that doesn’t create pressure on the buyer.
The startups investors lean into tend to come from a different place.
They’re built around problems people complain about without being prompted.
The kind of frustration that shows up repeatedly, across teams and years.
That realisation changed how I looked for ideas. Instead of brainstorming, I started collecting real complaints from public forums and founder communities.
Over time, that became startupideasdbcom (google it now) not a shortcut to funding, but a way to avoid building something that feels optional.
Sharing this here because many capable founders don’t fail, they just pick problems no one is desperate to solve.
If you’re thinking about what to build next, I’m curious:
what problem do people already pay for, tolerate, or complain about around you?