The Tuesday Roundup
For today’s Tuesday Roundup, I’m sharing some additional resources for problem validation.
As you begin the problem validation journey, you need to start tuning your ear to catch the problems people are expressing. This article from StartupYard is a guide to identifying problems, or “pain points,” in conversations with customers.
You’ll find, most likely, that the customer knows very well what his or her problems and pain points are- although they may not think of them as problems. A problem that doesn’t seem to have a solution isn’t a problem at all- it’s just an aggravation. So showing a customer that a problem exists means getting them to acknowledge pain, and then to understand the solution.
Another resource I recommend for problem discovery is this short guide to customer discovery interviews from David Cummings at Atlanta Ventures. The pointers in this article are good reminders of how to conduct conversations to discover problems without forcing your solution on the customer. This is a resource you can revisit often as you embark on the validation journey.
Entrepreneurs would do well to use customer discovery to deeply understand the customer’s problem, and work to ignore their existing ideas.
Lastly, this founder story from Avni Patel Thompson is a reminder of the core truth I shared in the problem validation newsletter — building a company should be about solving a problem that needs to be solved. You can have a great idea, but if it’s not solving an urgent, important need for a segment of customers, you will not grow.
I hope these resources help you on your problem validation journey. This week I’ll be sharing part two of the idea validation series, so stay tuned. Let me know what you thought of this newsletter here, on Twitter, or on Instagram.