The Customer Need Canvas
Don’t waste your time on latent needs (unless you have really deep pockets)
How to differentiate between a ‘nice to have’ and a core need?
The best point to start innovating is by finding a problem to solve. After all, if you’re not solving a problem for anyone, that means you’re not creating value.
When coming up with problems (you think) people face, there are a number of aspects to keep in mind. The first two are familiar to anyone, but the third is often overlooked:
- Market Size — How many people face this problem?
- Customer Segments — What do people that face the problem have in common? How can you group them together and characterize them? And where are they best reached?
- Real Need vs Latent Need — Is the problem a real need for the potential customers? Or is is a nice to have?
How to differentiate between a real need and a latent need?
Think of the Maslow pyramid. At the wide base of the pyramid, you find things everyone needs, such as food, water, rest. These are things you can’t do without. At the narrow top, you find things that only become important to people once their basic needs have been fulfilled.
If you think of problems to solve for your business, think about where that problem is in the pyramid. Is it on the bottom, or at the top? This is a way to visualize latent needs vs real needs.
The problem with latent needs is that people don’t really know or care about fulfilling them — yet. They are ‘optional problems’.
Note: That does not mean that a latent need can’t be huge: in a 1999 interview, people in Amsterdam laughed at having a mobile phone in their pocket every hour of the day. They simply could not imagine what it would be like.
Video: Interviews by Frans Bromet about the use of mobile phones in 1999 on the streets of Amsterdam. (English subtitles)
Convincing people of a latent need is an uphill battle. It can be done, but it is a lot harder than fixing something people are aware of as a problem. You will need a lot of time, energy, and money to move the needle.
For most startups, looking for a problem that is ‘not optional’ is a much surer bet. The easiest way to tell if people have a real problem is to look for problems that people actually already have a workaround for. If that workaround is unsatisfactory for them — for instance, because it is expensive, takes time, or only solves part of their problem — you have a candidate for a real need.
You already know they will value a solution because they spend effort on creating one right now.
Working with startups and corporate innovation teams, I often see teams get super excited about things that they think are real needs, but are really ‘optional problems’ for their customers. This becomes apparent usually quite soon, after talking to the first customers, but it can be a tough thing for a team to let the knowledge sink in that people are not waiting for your solution.
Love the problem, not your solution
– Ash Maurya
You need to go through this to get to the point where you can start to really be interested in the problem that people are actually facing. If you want to have a successful startup, you need to find something that is not an ‘optional problem’ for people, but something they can’t do without.
Even if your point of view is that something that is a latent need right now can be turned into something huge you need to understand why people will need it and what makes it not optional for them in the future.
Using the canvas
The Customer Need canvas can help you to work through problems you want to solve for a customer with your team, and filter out the problems that are core needs. You can do that in three ways:
- In the ideation stage, you can go through needs you identified and filter the most promising ones.
- You can take latent needs you have identified that are at the top of the pyramid, and try to work your way down, identifying deeper underlying needs. In the case of the mobile phone, the need was not to have a phone in your pocket, but to be able to communicate and be in constant connection, for instance.
- You can compare different customer segments and see if there are needs that are optional to one group that are not optional for another group.
In every case, try to find needs that are lower in the pyramid, as more people will be prepared to pay more to have these needs fulfilled.
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Keep innovating!
