小本本

Find the critical problem at the intersection of something mandatory and something wasteful. 关键问题总是位于强制与浪费的交叉点

A Critical Problem Is Not Optional Some things can be ignored or delegated, but a critical problem can’t be. If it’s critical, people will have to deal with the problem every time it occurs. They can’t just opt out of it. Solving the problem is essential to making any kind of progress in the work. Find the critical problem where people would love to opt out, but can’t. ...

Find the critical problem where solving a problem takes a long time every time the problem occurs. A Critical Problem Takes up Too Much Time If a problem can be solved quickly, people either solve it the moment it appears or they set aside some time to do the work in a batch later, without feeling like it’s a waste of time. If that is the case, the problem is not really critical. Only when you need to spend considerable time and effort each time you solve the problem will it be impossible to “just” deal with it. “Doing it later” also turns into a chore, as it may take hours or days to deal with a long queue of deferred problems. A critical problem will feel like an unwelcome chore: important, yet tiresome. ...

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.

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.

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. ...

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.

From a goal, you can usually infer a problem that is in the way of your customers’ path to success. Solve that problem, and you can help everyone in the niche reach their goals.

People in your niche will likely have the same problems. If they love fantasy football, they all need to keep track of their teams. If they enjoy fly-fishing, they all need to find information on where to fish and how the weather will impact their chances of a catch. If you spend enough time investigating the problems of your niche, you will sooner or later surface their critical problems. These are the things that are common roadblocks for everyone in the niche. Solving that problem with a dedicated product will allow you to have a high chance of success with your bootstrapped business. ...

Shared interests will allow you to speak to the needs of your niche audience directly. Creating content that has a lot of impact and will be read by a lot of people will be easier, as there is less competition for your audience’s attention.

Partnerships in niches become a much more lucrative endeavor. Additional exposure and reach results in quick win-win situations, where both partners can significantly boost both their customer base and their reputation as an expert in the niche. Partnering up with other players in the niche allows you to reach customers at different stages of “niche proficiency,” increasing the breadth of your sales funnel. ...

She became an advocate for the needs of these teachers, and they followed her actively on social media, engaging in conversations, spreading the word, and, best of all, even defending the company and the product against people who dismissed or publicly disliked it. That’s the power of a tribe.

If your product is shareable, spend time on creating a referral system early in the life of your business. If it’s not shareable, defer this kind of system until you have exhausted better, more effective marketing techniques.