Why Identifying Customer Pain Points Should Be At The Core Of Your Business

When it comes to creating and developing products that customers will one day buy and love — products that will drive your business to success — the best way to start is by identifying those customers’ pain points.

Pain points are the problems that drive customers nuts — the inefficiencies that inconvenience them, or the outdated processes that take up too much of their time and effort.

Understanding the frustration underlying such problems, in fact, should be a primary focus of your business. If you succeed in ameliorating your customers’ frustration, your company will thrive. It might even change the world.

Here’s why.

Customers are always in the market for tools that solve painful problems.

I’ve spent much of my career in brand/product development and marketing strategy, and what I’ve seen, time and again, is this: the products that truly succeed are the ones that solve a problem nothing else available does or does well.

And that’s why your first step when starting a new business should be identifying what your core customers’ pain points are. What are their unmet needs and wants? What are the impediments they complain about? What hacks or workarounds do they deploy on their own?

This knowledge allows you to build something that customers are inspired to buy, since the benefit of doing so is immediate and obvious.

Many entrepreneurs, however, don’t start their business so curious or inspired. Instead, they come up with the product first — something that excites them rather than solves a problem — and then they try and find a problem that fits it.

In other words, they develop a solution in search of a problem.

This is more invention than innovation, and it represents a much riskier way to start a business, as these kind of inwardly-inspired products often don’t scale. They’re “nice to have,” as opposed to necessary.

It’s better instead to form your business around problems that you know the world at large is craving solutions for. The more acute customers’ pain, in fact, the more compelling and enduring your solution can be.

It’s not the customer’s job to solve their problem — it’s yours.

It’s not enough to simply know what your customers’ pain points are, however. You also need to know how to solve them.

It’s here where many entrepreneurs run into trouble, because in addition to asking customers about their pain points, they extend that logic too far and ask them for solutions, too. This amounts to asking customers to design your product for you. And the truth is, customers just aren’t well-equipped to do that.

As Henry Ford mythically said while building the Model T, “If I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

People often don’t know what exactly it is that they need. They’re much better, as it happens, at articulating their suffering.

That said, eliciting the “why” underlying customers’ problems will equip you with the knowledge you need to eventually solve them.

While customers are generally not well-positioned to help you design your product, they remain quite capable of describing their pain.

The best entrepreneurs remain cognizant of this. Henry Ford, for instance, might not have followed his customers’ advice regarding faster horses, but he was able to discern what they were really suffering from: in his case, the extended amount of time it took to travel from point A to point B.

After gaining that understanding, he had what he needed to devise his solution.

This process of gaining understanding of people’s motivations, behaviors, and attitudes can be challenging. It requires empirical, observational, and anecdotal methods — with a little bit of intuition mixed in.

And that’s why, when using inquiry, you need to first make sure that you’re asking your customers the right questions and in the right way. Engage them in an open-ended fashion. Immerse yourself in conversation with the goal only of discovery. Don’t make assumptions. And consistently ask, “Why?” Ask it over and over again until you understand the deeper challenges the customer is facing.

If you do this correctly, you can prompt people to articulate what their pain points are in a way that’s conducive to action — providing particulars that themselves allow insight.

Startups inspired by the pain of a founder can succeed — but the pain has to be genuine and shared, and the solution must be scalable.

It’s worth mentioning that your initial inspiration for starting a company does not necessarily need to come from your customers. Instead, it can come from your own pain points.

The company that I’m in the process of helping to build, RedPen — a breakthrough social news and storytelling platform powered by blockchain and artificial intelligence — is an example. RedPen was inspired by the pain felt by one of our founders, music producer Ryan Lewis. While Ryan was achieving intense levels of fame, he watched his personal narrative get abducted and warped by news outlets, social media, and content sites seeking clicks and eyeballs. Online, opinions about his music or even outright lies about his personal life looked just like facts, and readers had no way to truly discern truth, consensus, and takeaways.

Our goal with RedPen is to provide readers an easier way of understanding the complete story underlying a given topic.

As a voracious reader of online content myself, I saw the value right away of having a resource that could compile all the various takes on a subject in a way that helped me generate my own informed conclusions about it. And given feedback from consumers to our prototypes, and the intensifying issue of fake news, I’m confident I’m not alone.

That’s why I believe that RedPen can and will succeed: the problem we’re trying to solve is relevant outside the lives of our founders. If you’re in a similar position as we are, know that your idea can succeed, too — you just have to understand the breadth of the problem you’re attempting to solve.

The more universal the problem you’re solving is, the better your company’s chance for success.

At the end of the day, whatever your initial inspiration, solving problems that are important to your customers must sit at the heart of your business.

Moreover, empathy for your customer should be a cornerstone priority. As you scale, varied opportunities will avail themselves to you. Some will be more enticing than others, and some will threaten to distract you from your core goal and purpose — the problems you set out to solve initially.

You can’t let this happen. When you innovate or build new features, your primary inspiration should remain the same: solving the problems for the people you set out initially to serve.

The companies who remember that key fact are the ones who survive. Sometimes, they even change the world.

Peter is Chief Commercial Officer at RedPen, a breakthrough social news and storytelling platform powered by blockchain and AI. To learn more, visit meetredpen.com or follow on Twitter at @meetredpen.