Discovering issues is just not onerous. Everybody has a variety of issues. Usually, the purpose of the train is to determine particular issues price fixing for a particular group of individuals.

Normally, this comes from observing issues or actively in search of issues by conversations or person interviews. There’s a good information on easy methods to conduct person interviews extensively utilized by founders referred to as The Mother Check.

Within the discovery part, keep away from dismissing issues on half-baked analysis standards. Utilizing simplified phrases like “painkillers, not nutritional vitamins” would possibly cross out probably good issues to resolve earlier than evaluating them absolutely.

Whenever you begin downside discovery in apply, you’ll discover that it rapidly turns into a large number. It turns into method too broad to change into particular in any respect. For instance, my spreadsheet of issues had every little thing from under-utilization of stock for used-car dealerships to discovering funeral house availability and costs for households after a latest dying.

Set boundaries by preserving all variables locked in to attenuate this paradox of alternative downside. Begin with a single variable as the place to begin: Customers.

Customers as the place to begin

Okay, so I don’t like utilizing the time period “person”. In spite of everything, you don’t even know who will probably be “utilizing” what and why. It additionally creates this bizarre, formalized, business distance between you and the customers.

Consider “customers” as folks you truly like.

Ask your easy questions like “Do I like these folks?” “Do I take pleasure in conversing with them?” “Do I empathize with them”?

You’d be shocked what number of founders are detached about customers — and even worse, dislike them. When you don’t like speaking about fantasy soccer all day, possibly don’t select fantasy soccer gamers as your customers.

One other strategy to check in the event you like customers is the “airport check”. When you had been caught on the airport on account of a delay, would you wish to spend a number of hours together with your customers?

I’ve noticed that folks aren’t nice at selecting customers, which is why there’s recommendation like “begin with fixing an issue for your self”. You realize your self nicely, and also you in all probability like your self too. The standards beneath helped me discover my common person group:

1. You take pleasure in being round them.
2. You perceive them.
3. You possibly can simply speak to them.

After getting a broad person group, you wish to slim down that person group after which particular issues. For instance, let’s say your goal customers are “enterprise capital traders”. You would possibly suppose it’s slim sufficient, however it’s solely a place to begin.

It seems that enterprise capital traders have a number of workflows, from firm prospecting to due diligence, inside reporting, LP reporting, and portfolio administration. And for each title — analyst to accomplice — the significance and technique of workflows will probably be vastly completely different. Add to that the stage, sector, and geography of the fund, and you’ve got an infinite variety of potential workflows and issues.

Advantages of beginning with the precise person group

Beginning with customers has at the very least three advantages in short-circuiting the ideation course of.

1. It’s simple. Mathematically and anecdotally, optimizing a single variable is less complicated than a number of variables without delay. Different variables will come into play in later phases of the PESE course of anyway.
2. It’s pleasurable. Within the early days, your job is to seek out out what to construct, construct it, after which promote it. To make use of the lingo, it’s product, engineering, and gross sales. 2/3 of these issues require speaking with customers. When you don’t take pleasure in working with customers, you’ll hate a lot of the startup work.
3. It embeds benefits. Benefits that maximize the possibilities of attending to a good suggestion:

Quick iteration cycles. Who do you suppose learns and iterates quicker? Somebody who can textual content and name dozens of customers a day to ask particular questions to check hypotheses on issues they know of already, or somebody who struggles to get 1–2 formalized video interviews to begin understanding the person’s day-to-day?

If it takes you days and weeks to get to person interviews, that is in all probability an indication that you just’re selecting the flawed group.

Top quality, minimal amount. If you’re already acquainted with customers and issues, you may get right down to an excellent set of issues to check throughout person interviews. You begin with good instinct. If not, it’s important to take a extra methodological method, much like a MECE method utilized by consultants. Probably the most helpful e-book for these person interviews was “The Mother Check”.

I’m not saying the latter gained’t work, however it can take you a lot extra interactions to get a way of the universe of workflows, issues, and motivations of customers. And velocity is the lifeline of startups.

Founder market match: It is a time period thrown round rather a lot. It’s a loaded time period that serves as a catch-all, together with the founders understanding of the market and customers and the area experience to construct the answer. Within the context of downside discovery, it goes past analytically understanding the issue however embeds the emotional states of customers, which are sometimes the drivers of selections.

What I favored about Jack Conte’s motive for constructing Patreon is that he understood the emotional part of the issue. It wasn’t “I noticed downside x, and solved it”. It was “no, I emotionally felt the ache as a creator of giving my onerous work to YouTube for possibly a number of cents for views.”

Liking your customers is the cheat code to discovering good issues

Every interview ought to be positioned to be taught one thing new, not used to substantiate what you already know.