How do you find people who are thinking about the same problem?

Most ways of finding people start with the person. We search by job title, company, industry, location, expertise or existing connections. We look through profiles and networks, trying to work out who might be useful to speak to.

That works when you already know the kind of person you are looking for. But many ideas do not begin with a person in mind. They begin with a question, a problem you keep returning to, or something you have noticed but cannot quite explain.

At that stage, the useful question may not be:

Who should I talk to?

It may be:

Who else is thinking about something that connects with this?

We usually search for people, not thinking

Professional networks are organised around identity. They tell us what someone does, where they work, what they have studied and who they know.

Those signals are useful, but they tell us much less about what is occupying that person's mind today. A product manager might be thinking about loneliness. A researcher might be trying to understand a logistics problem. A founder might be exploring something completely unrelated to their company.

None of those thoughts necessarily belong on a professional profile. That means two people can be surprisingly close in what they are thinking about while remaining very far apart in the networks we normally use to discover one another.

Similar problems do not always look similar

Finding two people who describe exactly the same problem in exactly the same language is relatively easy. The more interesting connections are often less obvious.

One person might be thinking about how older people can ask for help without losing a sense of independence. Someone else might be exploring how software can recognise when a person needs assistance before they explicitly ask.

The projects are different. The industries may be different. The people may never appear in each other's professional networks. But underneath, both may be thinking about autonomy, trust and how people ask for help.

That is difficult to discover with a simple keyword search. Sometimes the useful overlap is not between two identical ideas. It is between two different thoughts that contain something important for each other.

What if the starting point were the problem itself?

There is another way to organise discovery. Instead of beginning with a directory of people and trying to predict who might be useful, begin with the thought itself.

Describe the problem, question or idea in its own terms, then look for other thinking that meaningfully intersects with it. The person has not disappeared from the process; their identity simply stops being the filter used to decide what is relevant.

The reason to have a conversation comes first. Who the other person is becomes useful once there is already something worth talking about.

That reversal matters. You are no longer searching through people hoping to discover a shared idea. You are allowing a shared idea to create the reason for two people to meet.

Privacy widens what can be discovered

There is one complication: not everything people are thinking about is public.

Public sharing works well when you want an audience, feedback or distribution. But an unfinished question often changes when it has to become a post. It needs a title, an explanation, confidence, context and perhaps even a conclusion.

That naturally filters out thoughts such as:

“I don't know whether this makes sense.”

“I keep noticing this problem.”

“There might be something here.”

“I haven't figured this out yet.”

Those thoughts can still be valuable signals. A private system can make room for ideas that are not ready to perform for an audience, while still allowing them to become discoverable when something genuinely relevant appears elsewhere.

A useful connection can be small

The internet has trained us to measure ideas by distribution: views, followers, impressions and reactions. But those measurements describe reach, not necessarily usefulness.

An idea seen by thousands of people may lead nowhere. Another may become important because it reaches one conversation that would otherwise never have happened.

Sometimes an idea does not need an audience. It needs one relevant conversation.

Someone may recognise the question, have already solved one part of it, or be approaching the same subject from a direction you had never considered.

The value comes not from how many people encountered the thought, but from the relevance of the encounter.

Finding the overlap

This is the idea behind Overlap.

You leave an idea, question or problem privately as a Drop. It is not published, and other people cannot browse what you have written.

Overlap looks for meaningful intersections between different people's thinking. When an overlap appears worth exploring, both people can decide whether they want to connect and begin a conversation.

The aim is not to help every idea reach more people. It is to make it more possible for the right thoughts to find the right conversation.