Success comes by feeling the pain and understanding your *why*
An amazing piece of technology is great but focusing on ensuring it solves a painful problem and empowering your startup with a powerful *why* is your best bet for success.
I worked with a company that had a fantastic piece of technology. It was truly groundbreaking, a feat of engineering, a coding wonder. I cannot fault what they had created.
Bullseye, right?
Sounds great, right?
But here is where it got quickly unstuck. The pain they were solving with that technology was only being felt by a handful of people who weren’t in a position to affect the level of change needed to embrace a new way.
The first big painful lesson to learn, know how bad the pain is.
The pain was there, but it wasn’t so bad yet to force anyone to do anything even when presented with an amazing solution. The target audience was willing to throw money at the existing approach while waiting it out until someone like Google fixed it.
The second harsh lesson I learned as part of this founder story was about the distinct lack of *why*. The founder struggled to challenge himself to step back and find a strong enough value proposition that could drive active support for the change. To in effect force the hand of those that matter to push this. When you’re busy building your business it can be really challenging to articulate a value proposition that the customer can actually care about.
Two major learnings you need to keep in mind
if there isn’t a problem, or the problem doesn’t affect enough people who feel the pain or give a damn to create a market
or you don’t understand yourself or can’t articulate to your audience what the value is that you promise to deliver that is unique and better than any other solution, including doing nothing
Unfortunately, you’re going to struggle. So how can you change this?
Focus on the problem.
42% of businesses fail due to “No Market Need.”
Ouch, yep, that’s a lot of misdiagnosed problems. You’ll hear a lot of advice about always starting with the problem. Please pay attention to it. Don’t fall into the common trap of focusing on your passion, i.e. the solution. The only passion you should have should be about the problem. Every waking moment you need to be thinking about “how can I tackle this problem.”
But it’s not just that there needs to be a problem. You have to have a problem that is powerful enough to induce action. One so darn annoying that once your customer knows that there is a solution to it, they have to take action to fix it. Challenge yourself to discover:
Is the market there? Are there enough people who have this problem that will care about this problem being solved, and is it painful enough that they will take action, prioritise this above everything else that is going on and pay for the privilege?
Is it the right time? Are you too early for the market to move them or are you too late and the problem is quietly falling into the pages of history?
As I witnessed, you don’t have a problem worthy of your startup being funded if you are pointing the pain out and people don’t care, or it’s not quite painful enough to motivate anyone.
How do you avoid this? It comes down to one of the things many founders seem reluctant to do. Do your homework, talk to your potential clients (hint: use the Mom Test to avoid false positives) and more importantly, listen to the results. Please don’t talk to them about your products, speak to them about the problem.
They will tell you if they are interested or if the timing is too late or too early. If your potential customer base can’t see the impending doom, or worse, don’t care that it’s coming; chances are, you’re going to struggle to create a business until it arrives. You can only survive so long waiting for the world to catch up with you.
Remember the *why* is where the money is.
As Simon Sinek famously said: “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”
The *why* is your value proposition. It’s the authentic, passionate and unique promise you will deliver to your customers about the value you bring.
It’s the thing that only you can deliver. Your radical differentiation, as one of my favourite marketing gurus, likes to point out.
Your *why* clarifies what makes you the best choice to solve your customer’s problem that you’ve been obsessing about over everyone else. It answers why you should be the one chosen to solve the problem over everything, including doing nothing. It is the message that is so powerful and authentic that they can’t ignore you over the sea of other options.
Your *why* isn’t just a marketing story or something your brand agency suggests when creating your brand logo, strapline or positioning. It is a fundamental truth to your business.
It is strategic and integral to your startup and how you will grow and make money. This unique promise you’re making to your customers, and future customers, speaks to everything in your business, from your marketing and sales to your customer support and product roadmap. It becomes your north star.
If done right, your unique value proposition will be at the heart of all of your company’s communications and engagement, from sales to building relationships with investors to brief your marketing team or even future hires impacting your employee brand.
Suppose you can’t articulate your value proposition in a way that will make your customers and investors eye’s sparkle or the media or potential partners understand you within moments. How are you ever going to make that emotional connection that is critical in building key relationships?
It starts with being obsessed with giving genuine value.
Nobody will pay you for having a great looking website or a picture-perfect Instagram or LinkedIn feed or even a great piece of technology if they can’t understand what value you’re going to give them.
Finding your value proposition means stepping back and exploring the world view of your customers. It means putting your own self-interest aside and putting the customer first. It’s having some humility and honestly about what is really going on and not getting stuck on how great the product or solution is.
Using proven methodologies like Strategizer will help you through this challenging process of unpicking all the insight to find exactly what value you bring and why someone will want to drop everything else to work with you. It starts with:
Discovering all the jobs that your customer has to get done that your solution is going to be impacting.
Unearthing all the pains and bonus experiences that come out of that job being actioned. Both those that you do and those that you feel. Don’t forget emotions.
Understanding your solution or product’s role in addressing these.
Defining the hard edges of your competitors and indirect competitors, and where you can sit in differentiation from them.
Exploring the world’s influences, what’s happening that is impacting your buyer's behaviour that might impact or drive behaviour around purchase?
Remember, everything must be viewed from the customer’s point of view. They are selfish and won’t care about your cutting edge technology unless it does something amazing for them. Your job isn’t just building a solution, it's about stepping back and staying connected with the problem so that you keep focused on being able to articulate your *why*.
Customers will have pains, even one’s they aren’t quite aware of yet. Once they are aware it needs to be big, bad, annoying enough that when they see how you will uniquely fix it to give them something so important and valuable they will drop everything else to prioritise you in their life. They recognise and pay you for the value you create and the change you can make in their lives. They acknowledge the pain and pay for your *why*.