It's all about the Customer Need

Since this newsletter is all about building products that solve problems, I thought it important to start with the source of all problems: the customer. The customer experiences pain caused by their problems, and you need to spend time deciphering exactly what that problem is.

Customers can give you the right direction

Don’t do anything until you’ve spoken to potential customers. Seriously, it is a giant waste of time. I understand the desire to just go ahead and build new products, it’s fun and it’s exciting. But don’t underestimate how easy it is to build something people don’t want:

30-40% of startups fail because there was no market need for the product. In other words, these startups built something no one wanted. From this we come to understand that businesses don’t exist without customers that pay them. So, you must be customer-focused at all times for the purpose of providing value to them and receiving payment in return. By solving your customers’ problems, you are reducing your probability of failure by 30%.

Conversing with customers benefits you:

• You gain a better understanding of their problem

• You get an idea of their desirable solution

• You build trust and mutual respect

Doing this leads to creating better products, marketing that is more effective and closing more sales.

At the end of the day, you want to build a product that makes customers happy as quickly as possible. And the easiest way to do that is to let them help you solve their problems.

Focus on problems and pain points

Spend time asking people what problems they experience. Ask specific, yet open-ended questions.

Your questions must be specific in the sense that a junior software developer and a chartered accountant are unlikely to share the same problems at work. So you need to identify a group of people who are likely to experience the same problem, maybe a group of blockchain engineers:

• They work with similar technology (they experience the same problems)

• They think in the same way (they share interests and belief systems)

• Their desires are similar (the same ideal states)

The key to building a product that is successful is getting your customers from their current state of pain to their desired (happy) state. Simply, you want to make their problems go away.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of questions that are worth asking:

• Various demographic questions: sex, location, education level, profession, age etc.

• What is the biggest problem you experience when doing X?

• What are you worried about with regards to X?

• In your typical [ work process / daily routine ], what do you need most?

• What are your goals? (as a business or individual)

• If you could change one thing about your current solution, what would it be?

• What are your expectations from your ideal solution?

• Do you have any objections to our current solution?

Focus on benefits and ideal states

Once you have interviewed a number of potential customers (Nabeel Khan believes 100 is a good number), you need to consider what your potential buyer’s ideal state is. This could be anything from feeling secure in their financial position to spending less time developing software to increased company revenue. For your particular customer, you must consider how their unsolved problem is hindering them now and how they would benefit if they had a good solution.

Now that you understand your potential customer’s problems and desires, take some time to brainstorm a simple solution that only solves their biggest pain point. They might experience 5 or 6 problems, you must only solve the one they need most.

You can now take the opportunity to develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). During development, you must continue validating the brainstormed solution with potential customers. Go back to the potential customers and ask them what they think of your value offering. Explain how solution fits into the problem and why the solution will benefit them - remember to focus on their problem and the pain it causes, and how the solution will transport them from this state to their desirable state. Then ask for feedback:

• Does it solve their problem?

• Do they foresee any issues with the solution?

• What improvements would they make?

• How much would they pay for it?

This should give you a good indication of whether your product has merit. If potential customers are excited about it, you’re on the right track. If not, you need to keep digging to find out why your product doesn’t fit their needs. Then update your value offering to solve their problem more effectively, and to position your product in such a way that it appeals to your customer.

Remember, the goal is to create a path to success by fulfilling your clients needs. So you need their feedback as often as possible to determine if you are on the right path.