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There’s a joke that every SaaS product is essentially an Excel spreadsheet turned into business logic. When someone uses generic tools such as word processors or spreadsheets to solve a problem, it indicates that the problem is significant enough to warrant building specialized tools. Most problems aren’t highly complex and can often be resolved immediately. However, a critical issue will require developing a more sophisticated system. If your customers are using piles of Post-it notes or a disorganized mix of Word and Excel files to address a problem, you might have identified a key pain point. ...

Customer Preferences for Problem Solving Customers often find alternative ways to solve non-critical problems because they want to save money. It’s not worth their while to seek and pay for a solution that they value less than the alternatives. When Customers Are Willing to Pay If the solution saves them time. If the solution saves them money. If the solution helps them make more money.

Finding the Critical Problem So, how can you learn about which is the most critical problem your customers have? It’s quite straightforward: talk to them. Ask them what annoys them most. Find out where they want to be. Ask them what keeps them from being the best at what they are doing.

If you find something that will obviously make them significantly more money or save them a lot of time, then you have something to go on. Customers should really want to pay for it, almost have a burning desire to open their wallets. When they ask you if that is possible and you tell them it is, their mouth should drop to the floor.

Focus on what you can help them accomplish. Ask what customers want and which state they want to be in when the work is done. Don’t focus too much on the “how it’s done.” That is usually more based on tradition than on an optimized process.

Time-Related Pains Most productivity-related issues cause temporal pain: people feel like they’re wasting time. These pains are caused by suboptimal processes and friction between tasks. If tedious work takes a lot of time, it keeps you from doing important and useful things instead. That leads to time mismanagement and relevant actions not being taken. By solving the time-related problem, productive tasks can be accomplished faster and sooner. When people complain about inefficiencies, tedium, or pointless work, you’re looking at a time-related problem. ...

If you hear people complaining about a waste of money, prohibitive costs, compliance, or the wrong people working on the wrong things, you’ve found a resource-related problem.

Self-Related Pains This group of problems is often overlooked. Everyone wants to be notable somewhere. This can mean holding a position in a company or being regarded as a supportive co-worker or friend. When people struggle with achieving these things, they feel self-related pains. The four essential concepts to look out for here are Reputation, Accomplishment, Advancement, and Empowerment.

Do They Know? The Problem with Problem Awareness When you’re conducting interviews with customers, you will hear them talk a lot about the problems that bother them. These are the known knowns. But your prospects will never be able to tell you about the issues they don’t realize they have.

Efficiency What keeps you from being more efficient at work? Why can’t you do more of what you do? Which tasks feel like they are a drag? Effectiveness What limits you from doing your job the right way? Which tasks are the most pointless? What annoys you about working with competitive products? What is your experience like with each of them? Financials Where are you spending too much on tools? Where are you spending too much on consulting? What is your budget for software tools? What is your budget for outsourcing work? ...

Entrepreneurs are good at coming up with ideas. We envision solutions to the problems that trouble the audience we have chosen to help. We think deeply about a problem, mentally shape a product, and see how much it would benefit the quality of life. Then we get to work and build the prototype, eager to release it as soon as possible.

A good question here is, “At what stage of your workflow will you be using this solution?” Throughout your solution validation conversations, you want to project a clear interest in solving your customer’s problems without causing new ones. If you communicate this clearly in each call, you will create goal alignment between you and your prospect: you both want a great solution that makes things easier for the customer.

Asking the Right Questions: Focus on Problems not Solutions When you talk to your customers or prospects, you will find that there are questions that always produce meaningful results: where they are now? Where do they want to be? What stands in the way of getting there? Essentially, this is applying the jobs-to-be-done framework to your communication strategy, trying to find their realistic and aspirational states, and then building a solution that allows them to go from one state to the other. ...

Use free or low-cost tools. For example, you can build cross-platform apps with frameworks like React Native which don’t require paying for multiple native platforms. Use free graphics tools like GIMP instead of Photoshop. Validate your app idea first. Get feedback from target users before investing time and money into full development. Create mockups or prototypes to gauge interest. Consider freelancers instead of full-time staff. Hire affordable freelancers to help with things like graphics, marketing, etc. Leverage app marketplaces like App Store and Google Play. They make distribution easy without needing your own marketing budget. Use free promotion channels. Promote your app on social media, forums, blogs relevant to your niche. Reach out to influencers and the press. Monetize with ads. Mobile ads through networks like AdMob can provide revenue even for free apps. Build up over time and reinvest revenue. Start lean, prove the concept, then grow organically by reinvesting any profits. Consider crowdfunding. Run a Kickstarter campaign to fund development costs and assess demand. Look for startup grants and investments. Apply to app startup funding programs and pitch to angel investors once you have traction. The key is to start small, validate demand, leverage free/low-cost tools and use creativity instead of big capital initially when bootstrapping your app busine ...

Solve the presence or absence problem first, then solve the quality problem. +++

Sometimes we look for immutable things like age or gender niches. Other times the specifics we’re interested in are fluid things like preferences or experience levels. Some niches can be large enough to contain millions of people, and others might just consist of a handful of individuals.

The makers of Bud Light spend more than $1.5 billion every year. They do that because they need to be present in the mind of every single shopper when they think of getting a beer.

What unites all niches is that they are inclusive of some and exclusive of others. The members of the in-group will be reasonably similar, depending on the specificity of the niche. That’s why niches work so well for bootstrapped businesses: if you can provide a tool that solves a niche problem very well, you can be sure that everyone in the niche will be interested in it. ...

A craft beer company might put up flyers in a local pub that is serving lots of craft beers, or allocate a budget to exhibiting at beer festivals. A niche business will market to its niche and no one else.

If you filter a large group of people by several specific properties, you will end up with an audience that shares those properties. As a result, these people will also share many other things that can make building products and selling them very convenient.