People Only Change After Pain
There’s a saying on the wall at Tacklebox that goes:
People can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Even if people have a problem, know they have a problem, have the money to solve that problem, have the desire to solve that problem and trust you to help them solve it - they probably still won’t buy your thing. People are irrational.
This can make entrepreneurship feel discouraging and random, but it’s not. You’ve just got to do a bit more work to find the people who will act rationally (or, at least, the way we’d like them to act).
A friend of mine says that 95% of parenting kids under 6 is saying “wow” and cutting strawberries.
The entrepreneurship version is that 95% of working on an idea-stage startup is qualifying - figuring out the characteristics that make someone more likely to actually solve their own problem.
Here’s an example.
If I run a tree removal business, my customer isn’t just someone with a dead tree hanging over their house. Most of those people won’t act rationally, and you won’t have the bandwidth to sell each one. You need qualifiers.
So, you might speak with people who have already used a service to remove trees and ask what led to it. You might hear things like “I knew someone who had a tree fall,” or “I heard a big storm was coming.” But the most reliable indicator will be pain. The vast majority of people who get trees removed do it because at some point a tree fell on their car or their house and they felt that pain.
The customer qualifications - the checklist of attributes that makes up your first customer - are the bet you’re making on your startup. You’re betting that if you spend your finite time and resources on this person, you can convince them to pay you to solve their problem. If your #1 qualification isn’t “they’ve felt / are currently feeling the pain of this problem,” you’re in trouble.
People often change after pain. They rarely change for any other reason. And we’ll need them to change to buy the new thing we’re selling.