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Every successful business I’ve launched has had one important thing in common: They’ve solved a pain point.
Back in college, when I was building a website for an on-campus association, I needed a membership system that allowed people to create profiles and browse others. That’s how, long before social media became a thing, I created Profile Manager, essentially a proto-Facebook. It became a hit because so many other websites had the same needs.
Fast forward a few years, to when I was a developer at a New York media company, wasting hours at my desk building forms. I hated the task of building those forms — it was time-consuming and boring. My company, Jotform, exists today for two reasons: 1) Forms are incredibly useful, for a variety of things, and 2) I never wanted to waste time building one from scratch ever again.
No matter how flashy a product, or how well-marketed, it’s never going to take off if it doesn’t solve a problem.
Related: Don’t Go Looking for Problems: Curing Your Own Pain Points Is a Good Way to Develop a New Product
The importance of pain points
Some founders believe that if they create something cool enough, customers will magically materialize. It never works. As a result, those founders release a product with exactly zero users. Remember Juicero, the $400 juicer whose sole function could easily be done by hand? It became the laughingstock of the internet, before quickly dying out. If you’ve ever watched the show Shark Tank, you know how often unique, quirky and wholly unnecessary products get funding (rarely).
To be clear, solving a pain point doesn’t necessarily mean developing a completely novel idea — it may just mean taking an existing product and making it better. I always think of Warby Parker, the glasses purveyor that changed the way we shop for new frames. It’s not that you couldn’t buy glasses before — it’s just that Warby Parker’s innovative home try-on program made it way easier and way more affordable.
Find the pain point
A small, wealthy subset of the population will pony up for flashy, untested products and services, a founder’s best bet is to target regular people.
The fact that the vast majority of Americans — 98%, in fact — use smartphones has opened up enormous potential for revolutionizing how services are delivered. Many companies succeeding in this space aren’t exactly sexy — take Remitly, which allows customers to send money internationally from their devices without having to travel to Western Union; or Cityblock, a tech-driven healthcare provider that offers care for underserved communities.
Finding the right pain point is an art — for me, my goal was to solve my own. But you can also look to people you know, within your community or the world at large. If you’re searching outside yourself or your immediate circle, it pays to go where people are venting. Forums like Reddit, Slack groups and Discord servers are rife with people sharing their frustrations. Your goal should be not to pitch, but to listen and see what people are saying.
If you have an inkling of an idea already, set a Google Alert for some keywords and phrases associated with it, or use BuzzSumo to see what discussions are happening around your topic.
Related: How to Identify the Pain Point in Your Customers To Skyrocket Sales
Get the facts
The above suggestions represent where you should start doing your research — but that’s just the beginning. “While gut feel or personal experience with a problem can be a strong signal there is a problem to solve, without proper product discovery work you won’t truly know if you have a winning solution,” says Julia Austin, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School.
A crucial question I ask all of my mentees is this: “If the product was ready right now, how would you get 100 people to use it in a short time?” This gets to the root of the important distinction between interest and problem validation. While interest can be measured in a number of ways — positive feedback, social media engagement, etc. — this is not the same as problem validation, which is the process of confirming that not only is there a problem worth solving, but how a product can most successfully solve it.
One good way to kick the tires on your idea is by testing your product manually, otherwise known as Wizard of Oz testing. This allows you to gather feedback while saving the effort of building a full prototype. Be sure to pay attention to the responses you’re getting — the reactions to your manual solution will be critical when you build the real thing.
Solving pain points isn’t just a path to business success — it’s the foundation. Whether you’re addressing your frustrations or tapping into the needs of others, the key is to listen, validate and innovate. When you focus on real problems, your product has the best chance of making an impact.
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