Broken experiences, broken experiences everywhere! Shiny new apps released to the App store or publicly announced that compels you to sign-up, but in exchange you get no immediate value back once you're officially converted to a user. A risk that is certainly easy to mitigate if founders asked early on: why and for whom are we building this for?

It's sad, but founders fool themselves by believing that customers need to get better educated about the problem, and only then they'll understand the true value of the offer. WRONG!

Your job as a founder is not to educate or persuade your customers. If the solution doesn't address an intense pain, you are dead in the water.

You need to avoid getting caught in this fallacy. If your early adopters don't understand the value quickly, you are bound to wasting years without achieving real organic traction.

It's better to plan it out, think about the initial assumptions that you can test with your first customers. Spend 10 minutes picking up the top 3 pains that your customers are facing when trying to solve the problem you believe exists. Once you are happy with what they are, go speak with them and don't be shy!

These people should be aware that they feel the pain, and must be doing something about it. If not, pivot your problem assumptions until you discover what they are.

That is all the evidence you need for moving on with MVP development. The catchy phrase applies: every problem has a solution, but not every solution has a problem. In other words, if you build a solution without understanding the problem first, you risk building a product that no one wants.

An example

WhatsApp, yet another IM messenger. Worked wonderfully for power SMS users who ran out of credit often or had many friends on different smartphones. Remember, by then it was Windows Phone, iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Symbian, fragmentation was BIG. SMS still ruled, but the penetration of smartphones was starting to pick up as mainstream.

So it was a perfect storm for founders, but a painful stage for customers:

• If you want to do IM messaging online, you need to install different apps to accommodate to your friends devices.
• Having to monitor SMS usage is time-consuming and difficult.
• Organizing meetings with friends over e-mail is disorganized.

So there you go, 3 big pain points that early adopters (SMS power users owning a smartphone and a mobile internet connection) were facing at the moment when no other IM app knew how to solve them correctly.

I know, looking at successful products in retrospect is dumb, but I still believe that founders keep missing an essential piece of their recipe for success.