Your Problem Isn't Unique
Never start from scratch; find who already solved your problem and patternize the solution.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 93%
Teams love to believe their growth problem is unique and re-engineer solutions from the ground up, incurring huge opportunity cost. Verna is '99% sure' your problem has already been solved somewhere. The move is to find and talk to people who solved it, borrow their approach, and force your solution into a reusable pattern rather than a one-off, so you reach ~60% of the answer fast and add authentic implementation on top.
Origin
Elena Verna, illustrated by her Miro community build with advisor Kara Luton (ex-Atlassian).
Core principles
- 01In growth especially, problems like lifting activation or fixing an activation-to-monetization drop are more systematized than teams expect
- 02Solving any one problem uniquely is extremely inefficient given how fast the market moves
- 03People love to talk about what they did, so tap that human psychology
- 04Ego and fancy titles drive teams to start from scratch; humility is the shortcut
How to run it
- 1
Refuse to start from scratch
On any initiative or metric you must move, assume the problem has been solved and explicitly do not begin from zero.
Watch out 'Do not start from scratch ever' is the single biggest time-saver; re-engineering burns cycles on an already-solved problem.
- 2
Find and interview people who solved it
Use your network, LinkedIn, and X to find people who have solved this exact problem and ask them directly what they did and what happened.
Pro tip Ask around your network for who might have a similar solution; most people will happily share.
- 3
Also study how competitors solved it
Use competitor teardowns as an additional input into how the problem gets solved (paired with Inspiration-Not-Imitation).
- 4
Patternize the solution
Fit the solution into an existing pattern or framework so it solves not just this problem but the next ones too, getting you to ~60% fast, then add your own authentic implementation.
Pro tip Lead with humility: admitting you don't know 'earns you a lot more credit than you think.'
Watch out Going zero-to-60 manually as a one-off leaves you behind in a fast-moving market.
In the wild
Tasked with building Miro's community with no prior experience and a one-year runway, Verna (then interim CMO) approached it like finding PMF and was banging her head against the wall. She talked to Kara Luton from Atlassian, who reframed it: user vs. agency vs. partner community, and advised starting with agency/partner communities for results.
→ A far better structured outcome that Verna 'wouldn't have gotten to probably until six, eight months later' without the conversation.
Common mistakes
Letting ego force a from-scratch build
A fancy title makes people afraid to admit they don't know how to solve a problem, so they re-invent instead of asking for help, hitting every failure point along the way.
Is it for you?
Best for
Operators facing an unfamiliar initiative (community, activation, monetization) under time pressure
Not ideal for
Genuinely novel category-defining problems where no prior art exists
From the transcript
“your problem is not unique. I'm 99% sure of that.”
“do not start from scratch ever. Do not start from scratch.”
“you should go find people that have solved this problem because there are people there and people love to talk about what they do”
“you need to be able to patternize your solutions”
From the episode
10 growth tactics that never work
Elena Verna (Amplitude, Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey)