Finding the Most Painful Problem in a Market - The Bootstrapped Founder

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Original Article: Finding the Most Painful Problem in a Market - The Bootstrapped Founder

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When you’re looking at a niche market, you will find many people having a large number of problems. However, people will only pay money for a tiny subset of those: the excruciating problems. You can solve many problems but still fail to build a business if you’re solving the wrong ones.

Your chances of success increase substantially if you find the critical problems in your market and solve one of them better than anyone else.

So, how can you find the most painful problems?

You will need to take a close look at the work that is being done in your niche. You’ll need to talk to people, get them to tell you about the things that keep them from being where they want to be. In those conversations, you will want to listen more than you talk.

Painful problems have specific properties that you can look for. We will look into the types of pains, the intensity and awareness of problems, and what questions to ask your prospects when you’re trying to find the most painful problem in a market.

The Kinds of Pains to Look For

Every person experiences some level of the human condition at any given point of time of their lives: we have aspirations, goals, conflict, struggle, and hardship. We all have a place where we want to be and things that are in the way of getting there. That’s where we feel pain. Your job while researching a niche is to find these pains and where they come from.

Pain can come in a million different shapes, but its underlying reasons can be grouped into three categories: Time, Resources, and the Self.

Most productivity-related issues cause temporal pain: people feel like they’re wasting time. These pains are caused by suboptimal processes and friction between tasks. If tedious work takes a lot of time, it keeps you from doing important and useful things instead. That leads to time mismanagement and relevant actions not being taken. By solving the time-related problem, productive tasks can be accomplished faster and sooner.

When people complain about inefficiencies, tedium, or pointless work, you’re looking at a time-related problem.

People hate wasting money. Anything too expensive for the value it creates is a big problem for the person and the organization. Often, existing solutions are too costly, which will cause them to feel like a painful expense. Regulation imposed on an industry can make certain activities prohibitively expensive, both financially and from the amount of work that will need to be done. Resources are not just money: capital is only as useful as the people it’s compensating. Human effort can easily be wasted, creating a resource drain. Solve these resource-related problems, and free resources can be allocated more efficiently.

If you hear people complaining about a waste of money, prohibitive costs, compliance, or the wrong people working on the wrong things, you’ve found a resource-related problem.

This group of problems is often overlooked. Everyone wants to be notable somewhere. This can mean holding a position in a company or being regarded as a supportive co-worker or friend. When people struggle with achieving these things, they feel self-related pains.

The four essential concepts to look out for here are Reputation, Accomplishment, Advancement, and Empowerment.

Reputation is a measurement of trustworthiness...

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