It's not enough for your users to have a problem. They need to be actively looking to solve it.

I've been reading a lot of interviews on Failory lately (they're conducting interviews with founders with failed products, unlike IndieHackers which only focuses on successful product interviews) and there's one thing that stood out to me.

Many of those founders were SUCCESSFUL in finding a "problem" or a "pain point" within their audience. Yet, they still with their product. Why?

It's because their target audience didn't want to SOLVE the problem (although they had it, and said it's a pretty important one). Huh? How? Let me give you an example.

BeehiveID was a startup who had a great idea: Identify fraudelent online profiles. They decided to focus on the dating market (which turned out to have a huge problem with fake dating profiles). Yet, they failed:

By the time we shut down, we had personally spoken to the majority of the dating industry, large and small and we eventually realized that even though most of them claimed to be very concerned about fraudulent accounts, in reality, they knew a huge percentage of their accounts were fake and had no desire to do anything about it.

Another example is Delite. They were a SaaS hoping to make it easier for retailers to place wholesale orders (a process that takes hours to do manually). Yet, they failed:

Delite was a “nice-to-have” for our customers. You know that thing in your life that you keep putting off, you know you need to do it, but it can wait? That was Delite for our customers. They knew they needed something like this in the future, but it’s something they are putting off to another day to implement because they were very busy.

Team Voice was a tool to help HR professionals, and they faced the same problem:

At the end, I realized that even though our target audience – HR professionals – understood the importance of employee engagement, they were too overloaded with daily routine tasks (e.g. interviewing, screening, writing job descriptions, etc.). They didn’t have time to sit down and think about the strategic stuff that we were trying to solve - engagement and retention. Even though all of them said it was one of the things that kept them up at night, they just had too much tactical stuff on their plate to carve out some time to do something about engagement.

The lesson:

All of these people wanted to EVENTUALLY solve the (important) problem they had, but they WERE NOT IN A RUSH. They were busy with other more urgent things. Other people have written about this "urgent vs. important" paradox...and from all of this, it's pretty obvious that you should also be focusing that the problem you're solving is also urgent, not just important.

But how do you make sure if the problem you're solving is in the urgent category? I suggest a simple question:

Ask your (potential) users if they're ACTIVELY trying to solve (the problem you're solving).

If they made 0 effort trying to solve that (important) problem, it's a red flag.

Look for past behavior. So, if you were targeting HR professionals with an employee engagement platform, ask questions like:

• What's the last time you did something about employee engagement?
• Is there something you're doing right now to engage your employees?

If you get answers like "this is something really important, but I haven't done anything about it in the past year", it's a red flag.

By asking questions like these, you may avoid wasting hundreds of hours making something that people find important, but they'll do it next year...

Let me know what you guys think about this.