National Incubation Center Hyderabad hosted a Problem Identification and Opportunity Definition session led by Syed Muhammad Haroon Rashid, Founder of asancars and one of NIC Hyderabad’s own graduated startups, built around a premise that undercuts a common instinct among early-stage founders, the urge to move straight into building a solution before confirming the problem itself has been defined correctly. Having Haroon lead the session rather than an external trainer gave the format a credibility that generic problem-framing workshops often lack, since his guidance came directly from having gone through NIC Hyderabad’s own incubation process himself before founding asancars.
The session walked founders through how to identify the right problem to begin with, then move into writing a problem statement precise enough to actually communicate what the venture is solving and why it matters, a step that many founders skip or handle vaguely, assuming the problem is self-evident once they understand their own market well enough. Haroon then guided participants through defining the opportunity behind that problem and assessing it using a formal opportunity screening and scoring tool, giving founders a structured method for evaluating whether a problem is worth building a company around rather than relying purely on instinct or personal conviction.
What distinguished the session from a standard ideation workshop was the emphasis on rigor over generation, founders were not simply encouraged to brainstorm more problems but were challenged to sharpen their existing thinking and stress-test the opportunity behind ideas they had already been carrying. That distinction matters because founders often arrive at incubation with a problem they are personally convinced matters, without having subjected that conviction to the kind of structured scoring that separates a genuinely large opportunity from a narrow one that happens to resonate with the founder’s own experience.
For NIC Hyderabad, having a founder who has already been through the full incubation cycle come back to lead this kind of foundational session reflects a growing pattern among Pakistani incubators of using their own alumni as trainers, giving current cohorts access to lessons learned directly from someone who faced the same starting constraints rather than a consultant working from theory alone. With backing from the Ministry of IT and Telecommunication, Ignite National Technology Fund, PTCL, LMKT, and Tech Destination Pakistan, the session adds to NIC Hyderabad’s ongoing effort to make sure founders leave with problem statements precise enough to actually build a company around.
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