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Every successful business I launched had one common feature: they solved pain.
After returning to College, when I used to be building a website for the association in the campus, I needed a membership system that allowed people to create profiles and browse others. In this manner, long before social media became something, I created a profile manager, essentially a proto-facebook. It became a hit because so many other pages had the same needs.
Quickly ahead a few years, when I used to be a developer in a New York media company, wasting hours on my desk building forms. I hated the task of building these forms-it was time consuming and boring. My company, Jotform, exists today for two reasons: 1) The forms are extremely useful, for various things and 2) I never desired to waste time building one from scratch.
No matter how flashy the product is or how well introduced, it’ll never start if it does not solve the problem.
The importance of pain points
Some founders imagine that if they create something cool enough, customers materialize magically. It never works. As a result, the founders release a product with exactly zero users. Remember Jucerro, a juicer price USD 400 one -man function Can you be easily done manually? He became laughter of the web, then quickly died. If you’ve got ever watched Shark Tank, you know how often unique, bizarre and completely unnecessary products receive financing (rarely).
To make it clear, the solution of the pain point does not necessarily mean developing a completely revolutionary idea – this may simply mean taking an existing product and improving it. I at all times think about Warba Parker, a supplier of glasses who modified the way we buy recent frames. The point is not that you just couldn’t buy glasses before-just the revolutionary Warby Parker program at handmade it much easier and more accessible.
Find the Pain point
The small, wealthy subset of the population might be pony at the flashy, unverified products and services, the best solution to the founder is to attack bizarre people.
The proven fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans – 98%In fact – the use of smartphones has opened the huge potential of revolutionizing the approach to providing services. Many firms are successful in this space is not entirely sexy – take Perhapswhich allows clients to send money on international arena from their devices without having to travel to Western Union; Or CityThe technology based on healthcare supplier, which offers care for underestimated communities.
Finding the right point of pain is an art – for me my goal was to solve my very own. But you can too look at the people you know in your community or around the world. If you are looking outside of yourself or a direct circle, it pays to go where people surrender. Forums similar to Reddit, Slack Groups and Servers of Disguise are filled with people sharing their frustrations. Your goal mustn’t be throwing yourself, but listening and seeing what people say.
If you already have an idea for an idea, set a Google alert for some keywords and phrases related to it or use Buzzsumo to see what discussions happen on your topic.
Get the facts
The above suggestions represent where it is best to start conducting research – but this is just the starting. “While the intestinal feeling or personal experience with the problem can be a strong signal, there is a problem to solve, without proper detection of the product, you really do not know if you have a winning solution” says Julia Austin, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.
The key query that I ask all my pupils is: “If the product was ready now, how would you prompt 100 people to use it in a short time?” This gets into the source of an vital distinction between the validation of interest and the problem. While interest could be measured in many ways – positive feedback, involvement in social media, etc. – this is not the same as validation of problems, which is a technique of confirming that there is not only a problem that is price solving, but if the product could be best solved.
One of the good ways to throw tires in your idea is to manually test the product, also generally known as testing the OZ wizard. This lets you collect feedback, saving the effort to build a full prototype. Remember to listen to the reactions you get – reactions to your manual solution might be crucial after building a real thing.
Solving pain points is not only a approach to business success – it’s a foundation. Regardless of whether you deal with frustrations or use the needs of others, the key is listening, confirmation and innovation. When you focus on real problems, your product has the best likelihood to influence.
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