There is a single word which drives good business ideas.
That word is PAIN.
Humans are hard-wired to move away from pain. In fact, when given a choice, humans will choose to move away from pain over moving towards pleasure.
As a product manager and a side-hustler, I've seen time and again developers present ideas which are not based in pain, but are based in either a technical solution or a wild, kind of scattershot guess at pain. These ideas almost never get off of the ground, or if they do, it's because of a superhuman effort put forth by the founders which keeps the idea on artificial life support until such time as the founders run out of money or keel over from pure exhaustion. No amount of superhuman effort can save an idea which has no value.
In this article, I'd like to discuss an approach to use pain as an idea generator by describing a specific approach that I have successfully used to generate interesting, successful ideas. Then we'll list out a few examples where pain was successfully used to build a very successful product in the market.
The formula I often use for finding pain can be summed up as follows:
Interest + segmentation + pain = potential for great idea
First, let's brainstorm on a few 'interest' ideas. These are common and can literally be found everywhere. For example, we might identify 'career', 'money', and 'parenting' as potential areas of interest. In this article, let's use 'money' as an interest.
Next, let's segment some potential customers who might have an interest in the money category. Let's say we segment our customers by 'budgeters', 'savers', and 'spenders'. Of course, there are many more segments we could identify, but for the purposes of this article, we'll leave it to three.
Note that one key idea I like to use in segmenting customers is to consider customers who are a new entrant to the segment. It's much easier to mitigate pain for 'new' sufferers than long-time sufferers.
Now the most important part - identifying the pain found in each of these segments. We could brainstorm random ideas and maybe come up with something. Or we could give our thinking a little structure and make progress a lot more quickly.
Let's think about some causes of pain and how pain can be described to another person. If I'm describing pain to you, I might start off with one of these openers. Regardless of the interest or the segmentation, these 'pain statements' ring true as real pain.
- I don't know how to ...
- I'm embarrassed by ...
- I don't have time for ...
- I'm afraid of ...
- I'm frustrated by ...
- I can't afford to ...
- I suffer from ...
Now let's apply interest + segmentation to our generic pain statements and see what we come up with!
Let's take the customer segment of 'budgeter' as an example.
As a new entrant into the budgeter segment, something has led this customer to believe that she is going to have to become a budgeter. We don't necessarily care what led her to this conclusion (that's an article for another day), but for our purposes today, it's good news that she's arrived here, because we don't have to convince this customer that she has pain. We just have to find solutions to her pain.
To keep this article brief, let's focus on just three of her pain points. Taking the pain points listed above and applying segmentation to it, the budgeter might say to her friends...
- I don't know how to ... control my spending. Ok, it's clear she needs some help here to move away from her pain of being out of control with spending. Maybe she doesn't pay enough attention to price when shopping. Maybe she doesn't know where all of her money goes, and therefore she can't control it. How about a budgeting app which categorizes her expenses, shows her spending patterns in an easy to digest format, allows her to create a budget, and makes saving recommendations based on spending patterns? We've just described Mint.com, which is the #1 budgeting app available right now. YNAB (you need a budget) is also quite popular with the budgeting crowd.
- I'm embarrassed by ... the number of bounced checks I've had this year. Believe me when I say embarrassment is a strong driver to change someone's behavior. If our customer is really unable to control her spending such that she has a bunch of bounced checks every year, and she's very determined to somehow relieve this pain, how about a crazy accountability app which reports to a significant other or other person when she has bounced a check. Ouch!! Accountability apps are all the rage right now. Check out Stickk and Pact apps, which have options to hold our customer accountable for not meeting goals by donating a set amount of money to a cause our customer is opposed to supporting.
- I don't have time for ... researching elaborate money-saving strategies. Our customer wants to stick to a budget, but doesn't have time to research elaborate money-saving strategies. She's been considering ditching cable to save a few bucks, but hasn't put the time into finding streaming services that offer the shows she wants to watch. How about a decision support tool which gives our customer a personalized plan for ditching her crazy-expensive cable service and replacing it with a collection of mini-services which stream all or most of her favorite shows, but for much less money? Maybe our customer needs Hulu + Amazon Prime to get all of her shows. Check out the Trim app as an example of a money-saving/inertia fighting service that helps our customer overcome inertia by auto-terminating unused subscription services.
- I am afraid of ... missing out on the latest fashion trend or gadget because I don't have the money to buy. This pain seems like it could be resolved with a simple solution. How about a subscription service which proactively emails our customer with a weekly package of coupons, discounts, hidden rebates, lesser known sources for fashion and/or gadgets, and stores going out of business in her area? The email could be personalized to our customer's current spending patterns or could be based on products she wishes to purchase in the future. Kind of like wish list meets sale catalog meets taking advantage of a unique savings opportunity. Check out the Honey app as an example of a bot which scours the internet for discount coupons for products our customer wants to purchase. Check out the Ibotta app as an example of an app which allows our customer to apply coupons after the purchase and get a refund.
Will all of the unique ideas listed here be viable? Probably not. But in each one of these pain points, there is a solid idea with a hypothesis which can be tested, most likely in a very inexpensive way. Results of the hypothesis will help you decide whether you go forward with the idea or pivot to something else.
I enjoy discovering a customer's unique pain points and working with a development team to test our hypotheses and eventually develop solutions which address a customer's pain. What pain points are you working on addressing?
Look for my next article where I discuss how to monetize ideas generated through a pain analysis.