What is Problem-Solution Fit*?

The Customer Development Journey — Part 1

Carla Inez Espost

Published in

Little Kidogo

4 min readMar 21, 2019

Find a balance between startup self-love and startup selflessness.

What’s stood out the most for me on my startup journey so far has definitely been the countless quotes and interviews, talks, webinars and presentations that elaborate on one very important point — serving others as a way of becoming successful.

As much as this can sound like, uhm, just start an NGO and become Mother Theresa (LOL, I don’t even know if she really had one, but I’m sure you know what I mean — like she’s like one of those ultimate examples of selflessness you know) — anyhow, let me get on with it; selflessness is probably very much part of this equation, but I’m trying to get to a very specific point within selflessness here.

So like, this is very difficult to explain —

See, I used to be one of those people who give too much of myself, so much so that others walked over me.

It all started to come together when I started practising self-love — and yes, unfortunately at a point I went a bit too far towards the ‘self’ side of the scale, but luckily I soon realized that I needed to scale down and build up some real humility this time.

“Now where does the business side of this come into the mix?” you might be asking.

Well — simple, same as being a balanced human, being ‘humble yet confident’ is great for building wealth in life!

Being ‘humble yet confident’ is what I call the balance between startup self-love and startup selflessness.

⚖️

So last night we attended a talk —

A fellow entrepreneur explained what the tipping point was for her company to start becoming scale-able.

Guess what it was…?

Yep you got it —

It was when she realized the product should be about the customer and not her idea of what she wanted the product to be

🤯

Seems logical no?

As a trained contemporary artist and academic I was so used to looking inside for solutions. Now that I was being told the solution lies outside of me —

It became super difficult to confront &
It makes the guarantee that the product is going to work like, NULL, right?

Wrong.

⏭️

This brings me to what I’ve learned can help me find somewhat of a guarantee that my product will be bought —

The Problem-Solution Fit phase

Simply put, the Problem Solution Fit phase is about making sure the people who you are thinking will buy your stuff will actually need your stuff.

I mean duh, the founders aren’t the ones buying it right?

Otherwise, we’d all just make stuff for ourselves and pretend money grows on trees (lol maybe one day it will —but for now, all we can do is give a moment of silence to all the inventors out there trying to make this work).

🐱 So let’s stop talking about money and actually learn how to make some!

Steps to finding your Problem-Solution fit:

Let’s start with who you think the customer is for your product, who needs it? Now go find your customer in real life. Corner your customer. Interrogate your customer. Force your product off of your customer and take their wallet. And voila you’ve got a clear road towards financial well-being.

Seems about right?

😹 LOL of course not!

Here’s how you do it with empathy and understanding (like the inclusive peace-seeking human that you are) —

First and foremost accept that you’re in discovery mode and that your first potential customers (aka early adopters) need to feel comfortable and NOT interrogated.
Second, Listen Listen Listen and Listen again. You NEED to know and hear how THEY think —

Your thoughts are not the most important here! In fact, they will only hinder your progress, plus make the customer feel useless.

So yeah, in order to accomplish YOUR goal you need to let THEM feel comfortable.

Now, let all this mull around a bit in your mind first.

Then read this next blog to learn what list of questions you can make to help you and your potential customer figure out what their most important need is and how your product could possibly be solving it.