Four Questions to Determine if a Pain Point Is Worth Solving
How to navigate the maze of competing pain points
After graduating from university, a friend and I tried starting our own startup. I did lots of desk research. I understood the market, the economics, and the market inefficiencies that “needed” to be solved. In my mind, I just needed to talk to potential customers to validate the pain points and then offer my solution.
After talking with potential customers I learned that I correctly understood the market inefficiencies. I updated my financial projections based on additional data and confirmed that the assumed pain points were, in fact, pain points.
I threw up a website, built a very unscalable MVP, and started to market my idea. I went into businesses and explained the solution to them. Everyone was very kind and genuinely interested, but no one paid up.
After a while, I figured it out: Though I was solving a pain point and market inefficiency, it wasn’t big enough for customers to care to change their workflows to solve it.
What I learned was that finding pain points wasn’t enough, and finding the right pain points is essential.
There are four key things to know when finding the right pain point:
The pain point type
Emotional: Does it cause significant frustration, stress, or inconvenience?
Financial: Does it result in significant financial costs?
Time: Does it waste a lot of time?
Social: Does it make customers look bad in front of their peers?
The frequency of the pain point
Does it happen frequently enough that it’s worth solving for?
The severity of the pain point
Is it big enough that customers have tried to solve it in the past?
Alternatives to solve the pain point
Why do the current solutions not work?
There are several ways you can go about finding answers to these four key aspects of a customer pain point. For a mature product with lots of people to inquire, you could conduct a survey and run statistical analysis to find a stat sig answer.
But in most cases, a much more economical and quicker way is to talk to 5-10 (potential) customers to get a directional understanding to pivot or double down.
Once you have your target customers ready to talk to, there are only four key questions you need to ask them (+ some follow-up “why?” questions to get more details). Here they are:
[Pain point type] What is the hardest thing about {doing the thing you are solving for?}
Nail down what the actual pain point is. If the pain point is different from what you thought, it could be a good opportunity to pivot your solution.
Understand why it is a pain point so you can use it in your marketing and sales.
[Frequency of pain point] Tell me about the last time you encountered this problem?
The more frequently a potential customer encounters the pain point, the better. The less frequent the pain point, the less they will need to rely on your solution. The answer to this question will be a good gauge to help with a go/no-go decision.
[Severity of pain point] What, if anything, have you done to try to solve the problem?
Have they hacked together solutions or used competitor products? If so, that’s usually a good sign. Have they not tried to solve the pain point? Probably a sign that the pain point isn’t very severe and it may be time to look for a different pain point to solve.
[Alternatives] What other solutions have you tried? Why haven’t you stuck with them?
Again, if they haven’t tried other solutions, this could be a sign that the pain point isn’t severe enough.
If there are many reasons why they haven’t stuck with another solution, this is a good sign. It means that competitors haven’t nailed the solution and you now have answers on how to nail it.
If they can’t think of any reasons why they haven’t stuck with a competitor, it could mean one of two things. 1) they don’t have the money to pay for it, which isn’t a good sign, or 2) The competitor's solution is good enough, which may mean there isn’t much room in the market.
Lastly, after talking to a number of (potential) customers, you need to ask yourself if you are hearing similar pain points across your conversations. If the answer is yes, you are onto something. If the answer is no, it may mean that the market to solve the pain point isn’t big enough to grow a profitable business. Be careful though to not produce a false negative—this can happen if the people you are talking to are from completely different segments of (potential) customers.
There you have it. Asking these four simple questions can save you months or even years of work searching for a solution to a problem that isn’t worth solving. What I have come to realize is that I identified a market inefficiency, but it wasn’t considered a big user problem among those who experience the inefficiency. Hopefully, the same thing doesn’t happen to you. Happy building, everyone.