Cool or fun for who? The user or the startup? For the user, cool fun entertaining things solve a clear problem, boredom, and ease a pain, the fact that they aren't as cool as other people in their life, and the product can fix their dissatisfaction. Keeping up with the Jones's and boredom are very valid problems and drivers, and an early adopters desire to have the greatest and latest tech to show off is a real pain you can assuage.

Yes, it's one of the Silicon Valley, clichés: "what problem does it solve"?

A common answer is that an existing product is great but it can be made even better or cheaper. It's weird to frame it as solving a "problem".

I'm not sure how it's weird.

Lowering costs is solving a massive problem - for consumers and businesses alike. There are few greater problems to be solved for the majority of people, than lowering their cost of living - or cost of operations for a business - while providing the same or better quality of a thing.

That process has been a fundamental requirement for all of human civilization as we've known it the last ~5,000+ years. Without it, most of us are not here. It generates an incredible incremental gain spiral, a compounding of small surpluses that build and unleash bigger things over time.

For a business it frees up capital which can then be put into productivity, R&D, salaries and countless other things. For consumers it can boost savings or enable other purchases and investments that improve life. It enables new demand which will unleash new goods that were not feasible or viable previously.

It's all about generating a surplus that can then be directed toward some additional goal. Better and cheaper is one of the required tenets of mass standard of living progress.

That's an idealistic way to look at it, considering the backdrop of human behavior.

Or even that your product is roughly the same, not really better or cheaper, but looking to carve out a small share of the market.

A lot of ecommerce is basically this, your products are the same branded goods other retailers are selling, your website offers roughly similar experience and your pricing is roughly the same. Before the internet the differentiator was location, millions of store distributed across the world selling the same Nike shoes for example. Now a handful of ecommerce sites could serve the whole online market for Nike themselves.

If you dig past the surface, entertaining products often solve the “problem” that someone is bored or there is something uncomfortable in their lives they are seeking to avoid.

Saying that entertainment and leisure is the "solution to the problem of boredom" seems to really be working hard to prop up the idea that everything worth doing is actually solving some problem.

As Rivierakid above says, it's kinda weird to frame it that way.

Thats because thats how you normally get people to give you money. Fun or entertainment is in the hits based genre with no way of knowing if its going to be successful, there is nothing to aim at.

>That's not right. People spend vast amounts of money and time on fun and entertainment hobbies education pleasure and leisure

You'd think so but let me tell you - the hardest thing in the world is to convince someone to give you money for your product. You can easily get lots of compliments, lots of feedback, lots of positivity, but money? Oh boy. Just try and see how easy it is to find customers.

If you are making entertainment you aren't a startup in any meaningful term, you are an entertainer who is trying to create a hit that requires a very different way of thinking about things.

You are more like a musician.

wouldn't fortnite be a startup if it were independent company ?

Fortnite accidentally became a hit.

pg has written a lot about this, including that the best things often start out as toys.

One example is http://www.paulgraham.com/organic.html, but there are many others.

That's kind of different, though.

That things start out as toys can mean many things.

a) People create something for fun, it's fun and it turns out that after all, even if it wasn't intended, that thing actually satisfies a need better than current products on the market.

b) People purposely want to make something that's seen as mundane, boring, or annoying more fun. Lots of failed attempt at gamifying work here, but there must've been some successes.

c) People not so much create something that "starts out as a toy", but they create a toy, plain and simple. It's an entertainment product that is particularly well made and people like it because it's inherently fun.

The underlying idea is simple: if we take an optimistic view of things, things that people do not inherently enjoy will either be entirely automated (and "disappear") or be turned into things they inherently enjoy ("toys").

So, if you want endless sources of ideas, think about those:

a) How can you automate things people don't inherently enjoy (probably 90%+ of existing jobs)?

b) How can you make things people don't inherently enjoy enjoyable?

c) How can you make things people already want and enjoy (entertainment mostly), but better?