How to establish a product/solution fit?

 Establishing a Problem/Solution Fit

As venture capitalist and billionaire Vinod Khosla once put it, “if there is no problem, there is no solution, and no reason for a company to exist … Nobody will pay you to solve a non-problem”.

                                                                   Sources: Wikipedia

   

Successfully establishing a problem/solution fit requires discovering and thoroughly understanding a customer pain so significant that sufficient numbers of people not only recognize its existence but are willing to pay good money for its solution.

On a pain scale of 1–5, a monetizable pain is a 4 or 5, i.e., it needs to be addressed now.

Discovering a problem/solution fit is an indispensable part of building a successful startup.

Why?

Because every single entrepreneurial activity is ultimately predicated upon the capacity to create something that people are willing to purchase but such a purchase will never materialize unless your creation effectively solves one or more of your customer’s pressing pains.

How can a startup validate what it believes to be its monetizable customer pain?

Here are the most important points to keep in mind.In order to test your pain hypothesis you need to:

• Find a sample of customers;

• Survey them in person or online;

• Evaluate the results; and

• Do more testing.

Acquiring as much valid insight as possible requires attaining brutal honesty from your focus group.

Rather than eagerly pitching specific ideas to your participants and trying to sell them your particular pain hypothesis, you should ask open-ended questions intended to allow respondents to speak freely and openly.

It’s also important to avoid priming your audience by ensuring that you don’t explicitly tell your participants that you’re working on a business idea.

Rather, you should pose questions like:

1. What is the most difficult aspect of x [i.e., some given problem]?

2. Tell me more about x. What happened the last time x occurred

3. Why was that experience so problematic or unenjoyable?

4. What solutions, if any, are you currently using to address this problem? What do you find unsatisfactory about them? How do they need to be changed?

Be sure to use all the offline and online resources available to you to locate potential customers and gather this kind of intimate focus group feedback.

Try your existing email lists, online forums/message boards, social networking and micro-networking sites, Reddit, Linkedin, Quora, and Meetup.com.

Go to Starbucks and offer passersby free coffee in return for an opinion.

You can also consider utilizing personalized, thoughtful, and intelligently targeted outbound marketing in the form of cold emailing.

Finally, you can apply the “$100 test”:

“List all the features you are considering implementing into the final version of your product and ask your customers, ‘If you had only $100 to invest in one or more features of this product, how would you invest your money? Which features would you invest in?’ Naturally, customers will select the ones about which they care the most thus providing you with data with which to distinguish necessary from superfluous features of your product.”

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