A founder answers

Why pick a hard problem to work on?

Will says he "got lucky at how challenging of a problem it was to solve," because "it's always good when you find a hard problem" — "that means that people will pay a lot of money to get it right."

The full answer

WB
Will Bodewes · Phonely (YC S24)
EP 28 · Co-founder and CEO, Phonely
Show notes ↗

Will says he "got lucky at how challenging of a problem it was to solve," because "it's always good when you find a hard problem" — "that means that people will pay a lot of money to get it right."

More from this episode

Will landed on the Phonely problem because "it just felt like a really important one to solve and it felt like a hard problem to get right." He frames the difficulty as the moat: a hard problem means "people will pay a lot of money to get it right." It also set expectations — he picked it believing voice AI "is gonna be a problem with AI" that "is going to be solved. It isn't solved now so let's work on it."