Recently I started reading All In Startup: Launching a New Idea When Everything is on the Line by Diana Kander. It’s a great read thus far as it’s helping me to really think about the pitfalls of launching a start-up without first diagnosing what our customers actually want. It helps that author offers a framework through the lens of a story, as stories resonate more. My favorite part thus far though has been the introduction of this question, is the problem you’re trying to solve for a headache or a migraine? The difference between a headache and a migraine is the level of urgency you feel towards solving that problem. Only your customers can tell you the difference, and there will be a difference.
Having spent the past few months trying to sell a new product I can already tell a difference. People who listen to my pitch and say, yeah that seems like a great idea but… and then rattle off a list of reasons why they’re not interested, I haven’t found the problem that gives them a migraine. But, when I pay attention and listen, either in our empathy interviews, or simply in my follow up conversations with our customers, the thing they keep coming back to, what they’ll pay money to solve, their pain points… those are their migraine problems.
It’s now the only question I care about asking when talking to a prospective partner. What keeps you up at night? What is giving your biggest headache? What have you already tried, but doesn’t seem to be working? How much did you spend in your attempt to address this issue? These questions are my ways to gather data. And, they help me test my working assumptions about my own solution. My working assumption is that most companies that we work with already care about the fact that managers tend to be under-trained, over-worked, and simply unprepared to manage people. It’s a capacity issue right? And, as someone who has managed people in the past myself, I know how these pain points can cause big headaches.
What I’m learning as I talk to more and more organizations across sectors is that they care about different things, but most of them really care about employee outcomes. Like, if managers don’t get better immediately, conditions will get worse for the people they manage, and there’s already a ton of pressure to do more with less. So I’m going to keep listening, (because you can’t sell anything by doing all the talking) and keep testing these assumptions, in hopes that our customers help us land on the right problems to solve for them.
