Problem Slide Example: YOUTUBE

We’re going to go right ahead and assume you’ve heard of YouTube and understand what they do. Not the most exciting looking or well-designed deck we’ve ever seen. OK, it’s one of the worst. But looks obviously aren’t everything since YouTube was acquired by Google in 2006 for $1.6 billion. These were the problems the founders were solving just a few years earlier…

As a problem slide, this is OK. These days, we’d probably expect a little bit more. Really, this slide is just a collection of four problem statements. It doesn’t say anything in the slide about who has the problem or what the impact or scale of the problem is. In fact, it doesn’t cover any of this information in any of the later slides either… referring only once to its customers as simply: ‘consumers.’

But it was a different time back then and all new technology was exciting and groundbreaking and imminently more investable. These days in technology, particularly software, it’s usually less a question of whether something can be done – it probably can. It’s more of a question of whether something should be done. Whether it’s worth doing, i.e. whether it’s solving a problem.