Are you making pizza?

I always thought a business was this: you do something you love and people pay you for it. Sounds pretty simple. So I figured the trick is simply to find the thing that you’re good at that you like doing.

I like pizza. Other people like pizza. I make good pizza. People pay for my pizza. Ka-ching. Right?

Not so much.

Because it’s not about the pizza.

Nobody needs pizza.

Sometimes pizza is just what’s on the table, when people are chatting with friends. Other times, pizza is what they do instead of cooking something the kids won’t eat. And sometimes pizza is the easiest thing to grab before they go to a thing.

So it’s not really about the pizza. There’s usually something else.

The trick is to figure out what that something else is. Which means, figuring out what the customer actually needs. And when you figure out what that is, it might be that pizza will solve it, so cool. Or maybe something else will solve it even better, or for more people. Which is actually even cooler.

So then you’re in the business of solving problem X. And you just focus on solving that problem like no one else is doing. You’re not the best pizza joint, you’re the best solver of problem X. Whether you’re doing it with pizza or even sushi doesn’t matter anymore. Now you’re not a pizza vendor, you’re a problem solver. And people are always happy to pay money to make problems go away. So now, you have a business.

I know I’m not the first to land on this revelation. But since it clicked in my head in a new way, I started seeing things differently. It’s helped me think more deeply about what I’m making (the pizza) versus the actual problem.