A customer who has the problem 🤷‍♂️ vs. A customer who recognizes the problem 🙌
If a person recognizes that you have a solution to his painful problem, he will take it.
THIS APPLIES TO COMMUNITY BUILDING AS WELLđź—Ł
Founders/builders struggle recognizing qualified customers. They often struggle to understand the difference between a customer has the problem and a customer recognizes the problem.
People will have problems you can solve, but they won't buy it because they don't recognize the problem. It's important to recognize the difference between a person having a problem and a person recognize the problem. If she doesn't recognize it, she won't buy it.
Earlier when we started pubb.at, we were trying to get college clubs on our platform for free. They have engagement problems and suffer badly from it, but the community builders don't recognize the problem. They know they are suffering but don't know what exactly is wrong with it. Though pubb.at solves their problem, they didn't get on it.
That was a precious lesson for me to recognize the differences. No one ever taught me that before, I had to hit some real dead ends to learn it. You don't have to go through the same struggle that we had been through. Notice this difference in your next interview, it will save you a lot of time and morale.
Hi Kangle,
Thanks for the advice! What advice do you have to help people recognize their problem? My first reaction (though need to think more about it) would be if they have the problem then they feel the pain. If they feel the pain the would work to get pain relief even though the product may not be exactly what they may need.
For example,
Say I have heart pain
Your company sells heartburn relief
Since my pain is real and intense enough, I try your pill even though I may or may not have heart burn. Maybe it's something else.
I think the customer would travel to find the solution. If they don't travel, then it may not be an intense problem for them. Thoughts?
I saw ur berlocks, it looks quite interesting. Interestingly I just met another guy who is doing the same thing, accountability app in Canada I think.
But yours looks a lot better tho lol. What stage r u in rn?
Thanks, we're at $115/MRR. We help founders stay accountable to hack an MVP, find customers, and charge revenue. If ya need accountability, check us out. Free to start :)
How do you guys keep ppl accountable? let's say i have want to get 10 customer this week.
Sure, we'll be realistic to understand how many customers you got last week. If only 2, then it'll be hard to get 10 this week.
But we would brainstorm where we can find your customers and offer them value to convert.
One founder, I worked with this last Sunday we found three ways he could get customers (he has 0 now). We came up with:
Maybe for Pubb.at, we can say 3 ways to find customers:
Provide value, then convert
Does that help?
hey dude i think u got a cool thing there! It would work for a lot of people and people would want it. My advise would be don't say it's an accountability app, but rather something helps you to brainstorm how to better reach goal.
Because when I see accountability i think of ppl oversee my operation and provide no help.
But your suggestions are probably very help to a lot of other business!
I like ur suggestions, I have done all of them except amazon book review lol.
Followed u on twitter, get some good contents in there man! haha,
Here's some good content (rated by other people). How to build your MVP in days:
https://berlocks.com/blog/v/how-to-build-your-mvp-in-days-5ef098da6d52f
If ya want to chat, just book me
https://calendly.com/berlocks/find-your-big-elephant
They have the problem and feel the pain, but they might not recognize it.
The only way is to ask them and let them answer what do they think is wrong with them. I gave a whole course on it in my own builder community.
It's not about if he really has a heart burn, as long as he believes he has a heart burn, he will buy your product. But if he doesnt really have the problem, he will abandon the product very soon since it doesnt really fix the problem for him.
Set a barrier of entry is important. If they have a problem bad enough, they will go extra mile to find the solution. This barrier also filter out a out of people who are just browsing.
Agree with barrier but still not understanding how if someone has a problem, they wouldn't recognize it. Can you give a clear example?
I have a computer, it's not working, because the CPU broke. But I keep thinking it's the monitor. So if you try to sell me CPU i wont buy it. Hope that make more sense lol
That makes sense :)
Im glad my friend!
Thanks for sharing @kanglelin
For sure man!
You actually need both:
I remember being in college when email lists, friendster, livejournal and phpBB were a thing. Mobile internet wasn't a thing so you'd connect with people when they were back in the dorm. But most people left their doors open and that's where the community happened - in your hallway. If you joined a club, it happened after meetings. I mean, this was the same environment Zuckerberg was in - you had "clubs" and some were good that everyone wanted to be a part of. Then Facebook happened - and while it was a good directory, and a voyeuristic activity, it didn't create deep connections, and still doesn't.
As a community builder, the number one thing I've realized is "seeing" people. College kids were lonely then, as now, and they look for bubbles of safety. Clubs - official or not- that offer that bubble can draw membership. Once there, however, they need to create smaller groups for people to connect. And they need facilitators, to ensure people don't walk away.
Everyone asks themselves at some point in their life - do I even matter? Do I make a difference? Communities that can remind their members - that say "Yes, you matter. We didn't see you at the last meeting, what happened? Hey, I heard you like playing Age of Empires, we have a LAN session tonight" - when you have that quasi-paternal experience, that is something I think software can do well.
the world had changed, this is no longer 2004. I agree that the connection is still shallow on FB. It's so cool to hear about "hallway community" from you man! coz I didn't get a chance to experience that. Cannot imagine how you guys leave your doors open. My freshmen year in the dorm was a nightmare. That was the first and the last experience for me. Thx to @gilbert made me a room divider so I could sleep better lol.
Yes I agree people would be drew if we can offer them a sense of intimacy in the community. Intimacy was the main reason why raddit decompose into subreddits and communities moved from forums to chat apps. A smaller group always does a better job creating intimacy which leads to better quality engagement and supporting content.
One thing you want your community members to feel is "your post and comments matters here, and you feel rewarded when you post or comment." which is what I always try to create.
I am so glad to see you sharing your learning from your experience as a community builder man! By build in the open like this, we were able to confirm our learnings from each other's progress. Good work bro!
Hey Kangle, nice article. From the example you gave re college clubs, would this issue not always occur with various groups? Is it not hit or miss if a customer understands they have an issue or not? I.e. would you need to go through the whole process of trying to sell to them and then only realise they don't know if they actually need the product that is being sold at the end.
Knowing what you know now, would you engage with the college club? Or engage them from a different angle?
I do think it happens to all groups. But in general, groups that need to survive on profit knows their problems more clearly. because they gotta improve their performance to survive. EX)startups
College clubs are ok to be not engaging or vibrant. To them things are chicken and egg, they want cheap or free stuff that everyone else is using. they don’t have money and don’t survive on the money.
There is definitely an angle to approach them, but for what I am making right now it’s not worth it. Entertainment is more important than profit for most of the college clubs nowadays I think.
A more basic look at this will be: to companies on the market a community problem can fetal, so the solution is a absolute need. But for college clubs, nothing is fetal, so every “solution” is a “nice to have”, which made it hard to sell.
I think groups have priorities in their problems. Even if you solve a problem they recognize, if it's not on the top of their mind, they won't act on it.
Yes my friend, I think I commented it must be a painful problem.
You definitely got it right!
Agreed. A very common problem that many entrepreneurs don't recognize.
founders often try to go thru the whole process try to sell because they feel like they "got a chance". Go thru the whole process and get rejected can cost ur morale. You want to identify 2 things here:
If it’s yes to both questions, you most likely got a customer there.
If you got no in any of them, they probably will end up not buying it, or just try it and not use it.
Most of the time, a beginner will go thru the whole process and hit the wall many times to learn this. which I think in some cases it’s quite necessary learning.
But I would say don’t go thru the whole process to find out, the first 5 -10 mins is enough to find out