- Business Insider has spoken with a handful of successful entrepreneurs and business owners.
- Many of them have one thing in common: Their business was born out of a problem they faced in their everyday lives.
- To launch a successful business of your own, start by thinking about solutions to daily problems.
The summer before my senior year of college, while participating in a four-week intensive entrepreneurship program, Netflix cofounder Marc Randolph came to speak to my class.
Nearly 13 years later, I still remember his advice: Build a product that solves a problem. He encouraged us to think about pain points in our own lives and how we could deliver a solution.
For my capstone project that summer, I tried to solve a problem I encountered nearly every day when I stepped onto a tennis court: After wearing out a handful of tennis balls, I'd toss them in the trash.
I never followed through on my idea of upcycling dead tennis balls — turning them into outsoles or playground surfacing — but the general advice stuck. And as I've written about successful entrepreneurs over the years, I've noticed that many of them do exactly what Randolph instructed my class to do years ago.
Take Garrett Gosselin, who became obsessed with pickleball when COVID hit and stripped him of his sommelier job. He started playing nearly every day of the week and competing in tournaments around Southern California — and he found himself cycling through a lot of paddles.
"At that time, they were all made out of fiberglass, and they all had really loud, vibrant graphics. They kind of looked like toys, and they were falling apart really fast," Gosselin told Business Insider. "There was a need for a better paddle."
When he decided to build his own — a sleek and durable, high-performance paddle with a carbon fiber face — he didn't intend to start a company. He simply wanted a better option for him and his doubles partner to use in competition. It wasn't until other people started noticing his prototype and asking where they could buy one that he ordered 500 units and set up a website.
Gosselin sold out within a week and couldn't keep his paddle in stock for the first two years of the business. The former somm now runs CRBN full-time, manages a team of 25 employees, and has expanded to offering bags, eyewear, and apparel.
Like Gosselin, Jack Schrupp encountered a problem he decided to tackle first and foremost for himself. Schrupp, a former collegiate athlete, couldn't find a protein powder that suited his sensitive stomach. He bought a spice grinder and a small blender, loaded up on ingredients such as oats and eggs at the co-op close to his college campus, and became a bit of a "mad scientist" in his dorm room, he told Business Insider.
While the taste of his original concoctions "left a lot to be desired," he said, "it didn't upset my stomach, and that's what mattered most to me."
After graduating and landing a teaching position at a boarding school, Schrupp continued experimenting with recipes. His tinkering evolved into Drink Wholesome, a protein powder company that resonated with so many others that he eventually quit his job to go all in on his startup. In 2024, the company did seven figures in online sales.
Lisa Harrington also turned a personal problem into a seven-figure business.
When the Massachusetts-based e-commerce entrepreneur and self-proclaimed "cat lady" went online to buy an interior cat door, "there was only one option," she said, and it wasn't what she was looking for. "It was the quintessential, 'I can do this better.'"
The first cat doors she manufactured and listed online were profitable but not a smash hit. It was when she noticed a recurring customer comment — people wanted a closable door, rather than a cat door with flaps — that things at Purrfect Portal started to take off.
The solution to her customer requests was born out of a happy hour with friends.
"Someone said, 'What about a miniature door? A little human door with a little doorknob and a little window and a little door knocker,'" recalled Harrington. "And everyone just lost their minds, even the non-cat people. And in my gut, I knew people would love it."
It took about two years to bring the happy hour vision to life, but when it launched in 2020, "people just lost their minds," she said. "It catapulted to the top of the bestseller list pretty quickly. We were selling 100 units a day."
Of course, once you identify a problem in your life, the next step is to solve it effectively — if you want to pursue the path of an entrepreneur, that is — and it takes a certain type of person to follow through.
Gosselin's childhood friend and business partner at CRBN, Kyle Goguen, gave insight into how Gosselin thinks.
"I remember Garrett would brew his own kombucha and make his own sourdough, and he has always been this sort of inventor," said Goguen.
When it came to bringing the pickleball paddle he wanted to life, "he didn't have these barriers," he added. "I think most people would be like, 'How do I create a product?' Instead, he was just like, 'I'm going to go figure out how to make it better because these problems exist.'"
