You've got 99 problems...

but an urgent one ain't one

It’s a magical moment during a customer development sprint when you come across a legitimate pain point. The person you’re speaking with may even be blunt about it: “Ugh, it really sucks to do {insert annoying task}.” Your shovel just hit something and your eyes light up.

Assuming you’re able to prevent yourself from immediately solution-ing, you (unbiasedly) investigate further. You learn more about the experience and then pry some more: “How do you try and make this better today? What band-aids exist?”.

This is a critical juncture because you’re about to learn about the type of pain point in front of you. Turns out, not all pain points are equal. The Jay-Z of customer development, Steve Blank, breaks customer problems into a few different categories:

1. a latent problem exists, but they are unaware of it (or ignorant of it)

2. a passive problem exists, but they aren’t motivated to change it (it’s whatever)

3. an urgent problem exists, and they are actively trying to figure out how to solve it

If we’re being honest during our user interviews, we should respect that everyone has a lot of latent problems, plenty of passive problems, and very, very, VERY few urgent problems. A good health check is to make sure your collection of pain points reflects this distribution.

Happy weekend,

Raman at Rhetoric

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📚 What’s made me a better storyteller this week

As usual, there are so many goodies in Mike Maples Jr chat with Daniel Ek of Spotify. I was immediately drawn to the insight that WHERE you start really matters. Spotify started in Stockholm, where it could achieve scale without ruffling any regulation feathers. Lyft started in San Francisco where public transportation is horrible.

I’ve linked to Rob Fitzpatrick’s content quite a bit here, but also want to call out that he has a Udemy course where he walks you through his best practices in just a few hours. Highly recommend.

As the hype cycle of AI begins to chill out a bit, we’re going to start talking a lot more about value capture. Jerry Chen and the Greylock team start the conversation here.