The Three Types of Problems
Since I started doing this back in 2016, I’ve only seen three types of problems that customers will actually solve. I’ve got shorthand names for them — I should think of better ones. I’m all ears if you have ideas. Today, we'll talk through each.
But before we get into them, if you want an even simpler way to know if the problem you’re after is worth solving, envision that you've already solved it. You built something and your customers use it. Then, a year later, you stop providing that service. When the customer hears that you’re shutting down, what's their reaction? Is it "holy shit, we're totally screwed" ? Is it, "huh - oh well" ? Ideally (obviously), it's the first. If we take our business away, we want our customers to feel serious pain.
On to the three types of problems:
Get out of a Hole Problems
The Most Painful Step Problems
Status Level Jump Problems
1 - Get out of a Hole Problems
This problem archetype is about cost.
Your customer has done something and it’s costing them every day. This cost is, eventually, going to end their business or leave them without a spouse or some other massive consequence.
It feels like they’re in a hole, and it usually feels like that hole is getting deeper by the day.
Your job is to throw them a rope. This requires you to know the hole they’re in, be able to describe what it’s costing them, and have a way to find them.
The beauty of Hole problems is that whatever you build - no matter how ugly and clunky - if it works, they’ll overpay for it. If you’re stuck down a well and someone throws you a rope, no one is going to check to see if it’s organic and no one is going to haggle over price.
These work great as wedge problems. Maybe you solve a “hole” problem - “you’re six weeks past due on your business taxes and I’ll sort it out for you,” then once you’ve built trust and pulled them out you can say “and also, here’s my financial coaching tool that’ll make sure you’re making all your payments and have all your ducks in a row so that next year we aren’t in this hole again. It’s $99/month.”
When someone pulls you out of a hole, you’re very open to taking them to lunch after.
2 - The Most Painful Step Problems
This problem is all about commitment and process.
Your customer has committed to something and likely already invested a lot into it. The outcome is important. But, it’s annoying, or time consuming, or frustrating, or inconsistent.
Your job is to understand where your customer is now, where they want to go, and each step in that process. Then, you remove the hardest one.
Maybe your customer just bought a year of Salesforce (commitment). Their sales people are now using it but it doesn’t speak well to their CRM team. So, someone on the CRM team needs to go into Salesforce each week, pull a bunch of info, translate that into an outreach email, then add it to their tracker. Maybe pulling and formatting the info is the hardest part.
If you build a tool that connects Salesforce and their CRM tool so that this runs in the background, it removes the most painful step.
This product should feel like a teleporter. You transport your customer from one side of the hardest step to the other.
3 - Status Level Jump Problems
This one is trickier. It’s about people looking left and right.
We’ve talked about how people make decisions based on envy not greed, so this is about your customer wanting to make a status level jump. They want to see themselves as further ahead of their peers. Or, make sure they aren’t left behind. This is how humans gauge success - how they're doing relative to the peer group they see themselves in and the peer group they'd like to eventually be a part of.
This is all about understanding who your customer sees as peers/aspirational.
Last week I got a cold email from someone selling video editing software. They saw the Tacklebox content somewhere (still not sure how), and said “if you eventually want to be an alternative to business school, you’ll need to have much higher quality video.”
This pitched worked. It hit my insecurity. I’m not sure how they knew that our eventual goal is to be a b-school alternative, and I’m also unsure how they knew I was self-conscious about our video quality and had been looking for a way to improve it and re-record everything.
But, they did.
Status level jump problems are about secrets. Something you know that the customer didn’t think you did or could. This builds enormous trust, and hits our motivator - envy, not greed.
I responded to the email.
These are the problems worth solving. If you’re not solving one of these right now, that’s fine. But we’ve gotta thrash our way to one. We need to find customers with them to start — as we grow, the problem can be less intense. But our first customers really need to feel it.