What a relief when you get to scratch exactly where it itches. Has this happened to you? The best thing is the feeling of satisfaction that comes immediately after scratching, an “ahhhhh” of relief. This is precisely the desired effect when you are about to create a business, to overcome a real user problem.
However, for a good portion of entrepreneurs, especially those who are still in the development stage of their business idea, this attitude is usually not evident. They base their entrepreneurial spirit on the solution they want to bring to the market rather than the problem it will solve.
Practice rather than theory
To successfully build a business, you have to act, take action. Turning an idea into a business depends on how it responds to the user’s jobs to be done. That means if this idea solves a real customer problem.
Despite the theory and practical exercises, among entrepreneurs in the start-up stage, it is common to find certain postures more focused on the solution to be offered than on the problem to be solved.
A real-life case
Let us present the case of the “Hazelnut” team, whose product was chocolate, very focused on the solution it wanted to provide (its chocolate), but not on the problem it wanted to unravel.
Their hypothesis: the story behind the product
“Why would the public buy your product”? When the “Hazelnut” team asked themselves this question, they replied that people would buy it because of its artisan and traditional manufacturing. For them, the value proposition was the way chocolate was produced and the tradition behind it.
This is where making an entrepreneur “in solution mode” into an entrepreneur “in problem mode” becomes a challenge. When the value proposition is not solid, nothing better than to go through experimentation to find meaning in the offer that is being built.
Experimental approach: exploring the market to validate the hypothesis
In this context, during the hypothesis validation stage, this team decided to conduct a survey as a market exploration activity. During the development of the survey, the team members realized that their value proposition was not strong enough, since it did not solve a real user problem. Their hypothesis was more related to the quality and origins of the cocoa, but they have gathered evidence from customers that points to other important criteria. They thus discovered other reasons for consumers to buy: the chocolate composition (organic), price, distribution channels, among others.
When you are working on ideas to develop a product, you must consider it as the means that your customer will use to solve or complete a task or job (in this case, the urge to consume chocolate). That is, consumers are not buying a product, but rather something that helps them make their lives easier.
Learning: take a step back and listen to the customer
The “Hazelnut” team members realized that they needed to take a step back to better understand their potential customers. Instead of trying to “impose” their vision of the value of the product, they put their focus to find out how to respond to the value that the user is looking for in their product. It is this turnaround that is sometimes difficult for entrepreneurs to adopt. You have to start from the customer’s needs to fuel the development of the solution, and not the other way around. Once the “Hazelnut” team met its potential users, real answers were able to guide them so as not to launch a product that would not have had traction. Here is a way to avoid potential risk in starting a business: test to keep away bad assumptions during the validation phase of the problem or problem market fit.
Although they were start-up entrepreneurs, they had the flexibility to challenge their own hypotheses thanks to the experimental method, right from their first cycle of experimentation. In this way, they began to collect evidence, and they had the courage to go back to assess value generation scenarios for their target. And above all, they put themselves in a position of empathy towards the customer and the market.
This is why it is essential as an entrepreneur to put energy into a good understanding of the problems of our target audience, those “jobs to be done” or small tasks that the client seeks to accomplish. There are several tools to identify these jobs to be done: among them, the problem validation interview which is quite used during the exploration stage. If you are successful in helping your user with their issues, it will result in a positive impact. The first step in this direction is to embrace a culture of experimentation. Why? Because this posture is based on understanding the user’s real irritants in order to experience and generate value, which brings you closer to developing a long-term relationship with your client.
As a bonus, we share a video on this unmissable topic: Culture of experimentation and innovation (only in French, but with the option for subtitles).