Solutions in search of a problem

We tell ourselves a comfortable story

The popular explanation is that startups die because the money runs out.

For a while, that was easy to believe. Funding on the continent fell two years running, dropping about 35% in 2023 and another 25% in 2024. Roughly 33 African startups shut down in the 30 months to mid-2025.

Then 2025 changed the picture. African startups raised around $3.2 billion last year, a recovery of roughly 40% over 2024. The money came back, and startups kept dying anyway.

By the time the bank account empties, the real problem has usually been in place for months. There was never enough genuine pull for what they built.

CB Insights has studied founder post-mortems for years, and the same cause keeps sitting at the top of the list. Somewhere around 42% of startups fail because there was no real market need. Startup Genome adds the other half of the picture, finding that about 74% of failed startups scaled prematurely, pouring fuel on a fire before confirming that anyone wanted the heat.

The capital that returned in 2025 is also getting pickier. In the first quarter of 2026, the number of deals above $100,000 fell from 140 a year earlier to 92, even as total money rose. Investors are concentrating their bets on fewer, more validated companies. A solution nobody asked for now gets filtered out faster than ever.

The figure the African ecosystem keeps repeating still holds. The vast majority of startups here fail before they ever reach product-market fit. Most of them were clever solutions, built by talented founders, in search of a problem that was never quite there.

2025 said it out loud

You can see it in the companies that closed last year.

Finta, a cap-table and equity-management platform, ran for seven years before shutting down. The post-mortem was honest. There simply was not enough demand from the African startup market for a dedicated tool of that kind. A clean product, well built, answering a question very few people here were actually asking.

Edukoya tells a different version of the same story. The edtech startup pulled in more than 80,000 students and answered over 15 million questions. Real traction, by any dashboard. The traction never turned into a business that could survive connectivity gaps, limited devices, and low disposable income. People used it. The ache it touched simply could not be paid for at scale, yet.

One built something few people needed. The other built something many people used but could not sustainably pay for. Both are versions of the same lesson.

Why we fall for our own solution

The solution is seductive. It is the fun part.

It is the thing you can demo. The thing your friends call "cool." The thing that photographs well in a deck. Building it makes you feel like a founder, and falling in love with it is easy because it flatters you.

The problem is harder to love. It is messy. It lives out in the world, in someone else's frustration, in a workaround they have been quietly running for years. It does not applaud you.

So we skip it. We build for the investor in the room and forget the person in the village. We build the answer we want to be true, then go looking for someone whose pain conveniently matches it.

That is a solution in search of a problem, and it is the quietest, most expensive mistake a founder can make. On day one it looks like progress, which is exactly why it is so hard to catch.

The copy-paste version of the same trap

There is a local flavour to this too.

"The Uber of X." "The Stripe for Africa." We import answers that were shaped around someone else's ache, built for markets with reliable cards, formal addresses, and deep banking rails, then paste them onto a continent that works differently.

The blitzscaling playbook assumes infrastructure we do not always have. It assumes purchasing power that, in much of the market, simply is not there. And it keeps trying to replace the informal networks people already trust, when the real opportunity is to strengthen them.

The founders who get it right tend to do the opposite. They build around how people already live. They lean on the trust that is already there. And almost always, they are solving a problem they have personally lived.

What understanding the ache actually looks like

We do not have to look far. We have one of the clearest case studies in the world right here in Kenya.

Before M-Pesa, sending money home meant handing cash to a matatu driver and praying it arrived. People travelled for days to deliver it themselves. Around 80% of Kenyans had no access to formal banking, and almost all of them had a phone in their pocket.

That was the ache. Visceral. Specific. Everywhere.

Safaricom led with behaviour. They watched how people actually used what they had, even repurposing airtime to move value, and let the market show them the real job to be done. The product became "send money home" because that was what people were already aching to do.

Today it is the financial nervous system of a nation, because it answered a pain that was real before the product existed.

Fall in love with the problem

Steve Blank , who has taught more founders than almost anyone alive, says it plainly:

There are no facts inside the building. Get the hell outside.

The whole discipline of customer discovery comes down to that. Before you build, you go and sit with the ache. You ask people about their life and listen for where it hurts, keeping your own idea out of the conversation. That is the heart of Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test. You stay curious about the solution and devoted to the problem.

So before you write another line of code, sit honestly with four questions:

1. Who, specifically, hurts without this? Picture one real person, with a name and a daily routine.

2. How are they solving it today? With WhatsApp, cash, a cousin, a spreadsheet, sheer patience?

3. Would they pay for your version, or just tell you it is nice? "Nice" is the most dangerous word a founder can hear.

4. If you disappeared tomorrow, who would genuinely miss you?

If those answers are thin, no amount of funding or talent will save the build. If they are strong, you have found something worth giving years of your life to.

The honest part

I'll admit it. I have built solutions in search of a problem. Most of us who build have. It is a very human thing to do. Making things is more fun than sitting in someone else's discomfort, so we reach for the making.

But everything I have learned, through Startinev, through the failures I have watched up close, through the home we are building at Hackhouse, keeps returning me to the same starting point.

The work begins with the ache. The idea, the product, the company all grow from there.

Understand that first, and you stop guessing. You start building something the market was already reaching for.

That is the whole game. Start there.