Excuse Me, Is There a Problem?

the other version of this challenge is when the customer knows they have the problem, but genuinely does not care. This could be because this problem is the ninth-most-important priority on their list, and they can only give attention to their top three… and this item will never bubble up to the top three. 

A lot of great ideas, attacking real problems that customers acknowledge and seek solutions for, are in areas where budgets don’t exist, or not often, or are so small that it requires an enormous number of customers to make money (often also in a crowded competitive space), and therefore the company fails.

The first hurdle is trust: Do they trust not only that the product works, but that your company will be around for many years to come, that you will maintain a high pace of development, that you won’t have security issues, that your customer service will truly help them when inevitable problems arise, and that you can scale as the customer’s n

If a person does not already believe they have a problem, they will not be surfing the Internet looking for a solution, and even if they happen upon your website somehow, you cannot get them to spend money to solve a problem they don’t think they have.

Some founders are not only the first-and-best sales-person, but also natural evangelists. More, they’re on a mission to educate the world about their passion. They don’t see a lack of interest as a barrier, but as an opportunity to change minds. That is a difficult, expensive, and slow path7, but it is a path, and one that could result in zealous,

In general, consumers don’t like paying for stuff, hence the multi-trillion-dollar success of having people “pay” with attention (advertisement) and data (privacy).

Sometimes “willing and able” is a matter of market-timing. A famous example is Instacart: Successful after 80% of Americans carried a smart phone, unlike WebVan which was exactly the same idea, solving the same problem in much the same way, but the market wasn’t ready for it.