Sometimes they just throw it away.
Sometimes you, the entrepreneur, need to do the same thing with your "solution".
Tristian Kromer talks about stubbed toes vs broken toes. Diana Kander talks about headaches vs migraines. The smart money seems to concur that the "right" way to solve a problem for a customer, is to make sure the problem exists in the first place. Most ideas are solutions, and most of the time these solutions go looking for a problem that simply does not exist. It happens more than you might think. The notion of doing customer development to identify if the customer in your mind really has this problem, is probably the most important and the first step any entrepreneur should take on their new journey.
If those interviews are done correctly it should be fairly easy to fold the hand and change your problem hypothesis or customer hypothesis if you learn that the problem simply doesn't exist.
The more challenging scenario, I have found, is when the entrepreneur identifies a huge problem, BUT the consumer doesn't know they have this problem. This is a classic number 1/5 on the early adopter scale and can cause an entrepreneur to believe that the only thing separating him from a $50 million exit is $100 million in marketing budget. Nevertheless, this is still an easier hand to lay down than a 3 or 4 out of 5 on the scale. A true early adopter, and the only person to count as a "Yes" in your initial CustDev interviews meets ALL FIVE CRITERIA...
This past weekend I was honored to work with an experimental team for a certain mail delivery company. One of the problems they were trying to solve was that of junk mail. Seems obvious. Seems like a universal problem. Seems like their core competency. Seems like an enormous waste. Seems like a drain of everything from paper to time to fuel. The team validated that people have the problem and know they have the problem. Seems like the perfect opportunity to build a real time, semantic web app that geobarcodes your mail reading habits and automatically learns what to send you and what to cancel while cyber filtering the physical mail in a new vaporizer mailbox that converts the junk mail to potting soil.
Yet, the simpler solution "I just throw it away" seems to do the trick just fine for the majority of people.
Sometimes people just throw their junk mail in the garbage. It's annoying. But it's annoying for a second. It's a stubbed toe or a headache (if it's even that bad).
Believe it or not, some complicated app to solve the problem would be more of a broken toe or a migraine than the problem itself. Remember this, if you have a solution and you are out there looking for a problem... sometimes it's ok to throw it away (better that than your investors' money and your team's time).
Tristian Kromer talks about stubbed toes vs broken toes. Diana Kander talks about headaches vs migraines. The smart money seems to concur that the "right" way to solve a problem for a customer, is to make sure the problem exists in the first place. Most ideas are solutions, and most of the time these solutions go looking for a problem that simply does not exist. It happens more than you might think. The notion of doing customer development to identify if the customer in your mind really has this problem, is probably the most important and the first step any entrepreneur should take on their new journey.
If those interviews are done correctly it should be fairly easy to fold the hand and change your problem hypothesis or customer hypothesis if you learn that the problem simply doesn't exist.
The more challenging scenario, I have found, is when the entrepreneur identifies a huge problem, BUT the consumer doesn't know they have this problem. This is a classic number 1/5 on the early adopter scale and can cause an entrepreneur to believe that the only thing separating him from a $50 million exit is $100 million in marketing budget. Nevertheless, this is still an easier hand to lay down than a 3 or 4 out of 5 on the scale. A true early adopter, and the only person to count as a "Yes" in your initial CustDev interviews meets ALL FIVE CRITERIA...
- They have the problem
- They KNOW they have the problem
- They have hacked together their own solution (and it's not good enough)
- They are actively LOOKING for a superior solution
- They have currency to invest in your solution and are ready and willing to "participate"
This past weekend I was honored to work with an experimental team for a certain mail delivery company. One of the problems they were trying to solve was that of junk mail. Seems obvious. Seems like a universal problem. Seems like their core competency. Seems like an enormous waste. Seems like a drain of everything from paper to time to fuel. The team validated that people have the problem and know they have the problem. Seems like the perfect opportunity to build a real time, semantic web app that geobarcodes your mail reading habits and automatically learns what to send you and what to cancel while cyber filtering the physical mail in a new vaporizer mailbox that converts the junk mail to potting soil.
Yet, the simpler solution "I just throw it away" seems to do the trick just fine for the majority of people.
Sometimes people just throw their junk mail in the garbage. It's annoying. But it's annoying for a second. It's a stubbed toe or a headache (if it's even that bad).
Believe it or not, some complicated app to solve the problem would be more of a broken toe or a migraine than the problem itself. Remember this, if you have a solution and you are out there looking for a problem... sometimes it's ok to throw it away (better that than your investors' money and your team's time).
Comments
Problems are not the only thing that motivate people. People are either motivated by fear (and the many negative emotions that result, like anger, frustration, annoyance…) or Love (and all of it’s related qualities of Joy, Gratitude, Compassion, and so on…). A good example is gift-giving: people may buy a gift because they are worried about what others will think if they don’t, or they may buy a gift for another because of the Gratitude or Love that they experience for the person.
I actually check in with myself frequently to determine where my decisions are coming from. If they are a result of negative emotion, I know that the solution is not any external product or service, but to resolve whatever misunderstanding I have within myself that the situation triggers with negative emotion. Once resolved, I make the decision from a place of peace, in the direction of serving myself or others.
So, I plan to include a piece of my vision at the end of my early adopter interviews, after assessing the problem and how they are trying to solve it. After all, I have never experienced a pain to go see a movie, but I frequently get excited to see a movie. Trouble is, how do I place excited people on the early adopter scale?
Using your example, once a person decides to buy a gift - the only way they are going to buy it from you is if you offer or appear to offer something UNIQUE and OF VALUE. Understanding your customers is the best way to do that.
Getting entertained of course is not a problem per se. Nor is giving a gift. But for the purposes of customer discovery, these are the problems: I want to be entertained, I want to give a gift.
Perhaps this is just semantic, too, but the key is not whether they "get excited". The key is to understand if your subject is actually taking action. How often do you go to the movies? How do you determine movie versus read a book? Etc.
@Adam, in my experience, it IS important to recognize that a prospect meets all five criteria. Those are likely to be the early adopters, but one must realize that they also might be one in a hundred, not one of hundreds.
The focus on early adopters is in my opinion more of a post mortem. Golly, it was the early adopters that adopted my solution earliest.
The important thing is to go out and find people who are willing to "spend currency" right now to solve the solution. If it takes me five minutes to shine a light on their hurt and then they act, I'm NOT going to put them at a lower priority. I'm going to make sure that five minutes of enlightenment happens in every meeting or happens in lots of places.
If it takes five weeks to enlighten my very best prospects, then I'm going to make some serious change to my estimate of the sales cycle, etc.
The goal is not to find Early Adopters. The goal is to find a paying customer and then figure out whether how to find a whole lot more of those and whether a business can be built around that business model.
For example, I helped establish the market for in-building wireless phones (cell phone size, cordless phone integration) in the 1990s. I loved it when I went into a hospital and they could show me the table top of bulky cordless phones and tell me why that didn't solve their problem. However, I sold more systems including my earliest customers to hospitals renovating and de-centralizing the nursing stations who "just knew" the old way wouldn't work and cordless phones wouldn't work either.
Of course we tried to find Early Adopters. We called them First Customers. We didn't shed interested parties that hadn't struggled to solve their problem if they were willing to buy our solution. In most of my startup experiences, we had to keep iterating to find ANYONE with any consistency that had the problem we thought lots of folks had AND were willing to pay to solve it.
The objective was to know a priori (based on industry, size of company, etc.) which group of prospects we're likely to be highly interested and recognize our value 4 out of 5 times. That's when we knew we had a market. If we could find them, contact them, educate them, and close them in a 15 minute call, we didn't care if they even knew they had the problem before we called.
It's good to find Early Adopters and, yes, they are the most likely to adopt early, but the emphasis is on the "adopt early", not the "Early Adopters".