90% of Startups Chase Symptoms, Not Problems

Most entrepreneurs think they're solving problems, but they're actually chasing symptoms. That's the brutal truth behind why 90% of startups fail – they never truly understood what they were fighting against.

Meet Dara, CEO and co-founder of Pinhome, Indonesia's leading property platform that's raised $76 million and operates across 300+ cities. But before building a company serving 8 million users, she learned the most valuable lesson of her career at McKinsey: how to define problems properly.

In this interview, Dara reveals the exact framework that transformed her from a problem-chaser into a problem-solver, and why understanding your stakeholders' North Star metrics is the difference between building features nobody wants and creating a platform people can't live without.

Dara: Hey, I'm Dara, a CEO co-founder of Pinhome from Indonesia. Pinhome is a home seeking, home financing and home services platform for first-time home buyers. You'll be able to search for your potential new home, make payments. You can also look for mortgage options. Once all transactions are completed, congratulations, you buy your first home, then it's time for you to start maintaining, managing your home, doing cleaning, maintaining your home electronic appliances. And you can do all that through Pinhome as well.

So far we have gathered about $76 million equity financing. We have operations in about 300+ cities, about 75% Indonesian city coverage. We serve about 7 to 8 million unique viewers. So these are property seekers. There are about 21,000 agents, more than 10,000 property service providers that are serving millions of customers on Pinhome.

Dara: I really wanted to solve problems. I think that's one thing that was very unique about me and consistent since I was little to today. After I graduated, I spent 2 years at a telco company. I wanted to learn more sectors, different industries, and I thought the best way for me to learn skill sets across sectors is by becoming a consultant. So there was an opportunity to work with McKinsey. I applied and I got accepted, and there I learned the core of problem solving.

We learn a lot of frameworks in consultancy, but really one framework that sticks in my mind still today I think that's probably the most powerful framework that is essentially about defining your problem, so making a smart problem statement to solve problems, specific, measurable, achievable, result oriented time bound that is a smart problem. A lot of people are trying to solve problems that either don't exist or it's just not the root cause of all the symptoms that you experience, and usually that happens because you don't define your problem enough, so defining smart problem is the first step in problem solving.

Second is structuring your solutions. Sometimes you see solutions, maybe multiple potential solutions. All of those are so big you don't even know where to start. As you break down those solution sets, then you realize that, oh, things are more manageable. Lastly, talking about just creating action plans, what needs to be done by who, by when, that's the key to really solving the problem. I learned about that and that's extremely powerful.

Dara: I'm extremely passionate about real estate. I started my home buying journey when I was 22 years old. I bought a piece of land. It was cheap. It was like $7000. You wouldn't realize like buying land could be that cheap or affordable in Indonesia. This country has huge land bank. There's a lot of property developments happening in the country, so there's actually a lot of opportunity for first-time home seekers to explore home and buy a home. I said to Ahmed, what Property. I love the sector. I know this sector in and out because I'm an avid customer of it.

The passion for property really came from Dara because she had experienced these pain points significantly. 10 years ago, I bought my first property. I remember the pain points of having to deal with fake listings, dealing with agents that are not responsive, meeting them just to find out that they don't actually know the owner. I could only look at listings from outside.

Dara: One of the biggest concerns that customers have in the home purchase journey is the transparency of the price. Dealing with owners who come up with just like unreasonable asking price, don't know how to negotiate. There's no base price. All these costs that are hidden and you have no idea. In addition to the cost of purchase, there's at least 7 to 10% other administrative and transactional costs just caught me off guard.

What we see is that home seekers usually get really surprised. Oh, the cost of the transaction is very high on top of the cost of the house. There are fees to the agents, there are fees to the banks and various different fees that they may not understand and they might not even know that they can negotiate those things. Another concern with agent commissions is what value am I actually getting from the agent? Why do I have to pay such an amount?

Dara: Once we decided that the property sector was where we wanted to focus on, then the journey began on validating all the different hypotheses we could come up with based on our experiences in the field. Sometimes you see solutions, maybe multiple potential solutions. All of those are so big you don't even know where to start. As you break down those solution sets, then you realize that oh, things are more manageable.

After you break down the solutions, unless you prioritize because resources are limited, your time, attention, whatever capital you have is limited. The opportunities are infinite. How do you approach that with such a limited resources prioritization is key. So you roll out things that are irrelevant or not important, and then you focus on the things that are important and then still prioritize them. We have to aggressively prioritize all the time.

Dara: One thing that has been really helpful in allowing us to grow this far is to ensure that we are very rigorous in how we assess opportunities, how we make bets to ensure that the company continues to grow rapidly. This involve talking to all the stakeholders in the property industry, talking to agents, agencies, property developers, home seekers, homeowners that gave us a really good map of all the different personas and archetypes in the sector.

It can get quite detailed. So one example is an agent. People may just think of an agent as just one type of person, but there are many archetypes. Among agents, you have global franchise agents, you have local franchise agents, independent agents, freelancers, and you also have in-house agents. In-house agents are agents that property developers hire in-house to only sell their property. And each of these archetypes have different pain points. So, you really have to segment accordingly and decide which segment you want to target when building a solution for them.

Dara: So the vision is to unlock home ownership for a better livelihood and financial inclusion. We do that by doing 3 things, digitizing home information, building the largest property database. We have close to a million listings. Second is digitizing home financing. Why do you have to go through your WhatsApp contacts or like maybe bank's branch or random websites to find all this information? Why is it not aggregated well? We want to be a one-stop financing platform for property seekers, property owners, and lastly, digitizing home services. And with that we want to solve this problem of property seekers, property owners, end to end.

We launched in January 2020. We were so excited about launching. Our website was live to consumers and we start seeing unique page views, unique visitors. Fortunately, Pinhome has grown significantly since we launched our first product. We have operations in about 300+ cities, so we have about 75% Indonesia city coverage. We've been fortunate to be able to serve these first time homebuyers through the past 3.5 years, and we still see many up to 100 million first-time homebuyers buying their first homes in the next 10 to 20 years.

Dara: So what's interesting about us is that our platform consists of multiple stakeholders, not just supply and demand side. There are intermediaries. Each of the stakeholders, there'll be one thing that they care the most, and you need to know what that is.

When we get our first customer, we offer a lot of different things to agents. We say, Hey, what do you need? You need tools. You need incentives. We assume all the things that they need. We realized their main North Star metric is leads. You can provide the most seamless platforms, but if you don't provide them with leads, people who are interested to do property viewing and buy property, they won't see you as a platform that's impactful. Of course we have all these tools, but that is meaningless if we don't give them liquid demand, just leads every hour, every day coming and inquiring about properties. So that's the customers on the intermediary side.

On the supply side, we have customers and our customers are property owners and property developers. You know what they care about? Actual property viewings. They don't care about people chatting them, saying that they're interested in their opinion. If these people are not coming to view my properties, they're not serious. So we focus on making sure there's viewings, walk-ins, visits. That's what we realized when we talk to our first time customers like we assume they want all these like, you know, key management, the best agents in the market, like don't mean anything. Bring me visits, then I'll start listening and use your platform, just understanding who are your stakeholders and which, which is the most important North Star metric for them that really helps you to focus on that and nail them and then eventually like retain all the stakeholders in your platform.