Finding Product Market Fit: There Are Four Types of User Pain, and Only Two Are Worth Solving

How do you know your startup is solving a real pain? How do you know your customers will adopt your product and pay for it?

The most common advice to new startup founders is to interview target customers and validate their pains before building a product. But this is easier said than done! Usually customer interviews go like this:

1. Would you use my product?
2. How much would you pay for it?

This does not really work! In fact, this type of questioning misleads founders into spending precious time and effort into addressing pains that aren’t real. As Steve Jobs infamously said, “a lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” So what questions should you ask when you interview customers?

Awareness ≠ Validity

When performing customer interviews, it’s easy to confuse user’s awareness of a pain as a sign of its validity/severity:

• Just because people think they have a pain, it doesn’t mean it’s real and they’d pay you to solve it.
• People often have real pains they’re not aware of, so how would you know for sure if yours isn’t one they are unaware of?

The Four Types of User Pain

To better evaluate pains, consider the following four quadrants created based on the level of pain (x axis) and the user’s awareness of the pain (y axis):

1. Battlefield

When there’s a real pain and everyone knows it, we enter a Battlefield. This is where numerous players, from new startups to old incumbents, are competing to address the pain and capture the market. Sales automation is a good example of a Battlefield.

Over time, it becomes increasingly more costly to find newer more innovative solutions. So if you’re late to a Battlefield, one way to win is by deep technology innovation, either through your own R&D (e.g., Google’s PageRank winning against Yahoo) or by leveraging an emerging technology (e.g., applying deep learning to medical diagnostics).

So if you’re in a Battlefield, make sure you really understand the competitive landscape and your differentiation.

2. Uncharted

Uncharted is when you discover a pain! It’s when there’s a real pain but no one has noticed. There are earlier explorers, but none have captured a land; don’t let those dead ideas discourage you.

There were a few early smartphone attempts, but prior to the iPhone, no one knew we needed one. No one noticed the pain in using thermostats, until Nest. Arguably, some of the biggest pains in life are so obvious they go completely unnoticed: until recently, modern medicine didn’t even attempt to cure humanity’s biggest killer, aging, because it is simply considered a fact of life!

Many consumer app innovations are often in the Uncharted waters since consumer pains are nuanced and hard to articulate. Even in the face of massive adoption, many remain skeptical to the validity of the pain (e.g., Instagram, Snapchat, …).

Over time, Uncharted becomes a Battlefield as more companies recognize the pain and set out to address it. After Apple’s iPhone proved the need for smartphones, it resulted in a Battlefield where every major consumer hardware manufacturer competed to capture a share of the market.

3. Mirage

When customer interviews lead to fictitious pains, we are in a Mirage. People claim to have many pains, but not every one is painful enough to lead to sustainable startups. Mirage is when founders tackle a known but unworthy pain.

At the peak of clean tech boom, many startups were founded to help people save energy at home. Every customer survey confirmed people’s desire to save, and every market research pointed to a rapidly growing multi-billion-dollar Home Energy Management industry. Today few homes have energy displays. While people’s claim to care about energy saving may not have been completely unfounded, the pain wasn’t important enough to result in a thriving industry.

Mirage is a common startup trap, and it’s caused by over-reliance on poorly-inquired customer feedback with no due diligence. It’s also common to get there by using market research reports, which are an unreliable source of customer validation.

Be warned of this common trap!

4. Echo Chamber

When founders don’t talk to customers and focus on solutions that address no real pain, they get stuck in an Echo Chamber. Sometimes this happens because of founder’s own convictions and unchecked assumptions, and sometimes this is caused by hypes in the tech community (e.g., Uber for X, bot for Y, etc.).

Find Your Startup on This Map

To measure where your user pain falls, you must ask two critical questions in your customer interview:

Question #1 : What are your pains with respect to _______?

This locates you on the User Awareness axis. Fill in the blank with a broad space:

• What are your pains with respect to your household budget?
• What are your pains with respect to commuting to work?
• What are your pains with respect to finding travel accommodations?

If the pain you’re addressing is among the top pains your customers respond with, you’re on the top half of the map.

Sometimes you will have to reframe the question and ask it from different angles. The more effort it takes to get users to mention the pain, the less aware they are of it. That’s either because it’s not a real pain, or they don’t see it as a pain (e.g., they are oblivious to it, or they assume it’s a fact of life).

Notice that we didn’t ask “would you use this product,” or “how much are you willing to pay?” These are classic customer interview mistakes, as they lead to the kind of poor quality user feedback that leads to a Mirage. The fact is people can’t predict their own behavior, so the only way to get useful feedback is to ask them about their pains.

Question #2: What do you do today to address _______?

This locates you on the Pain Severity axis. Fill in the blank with your pain:

• What do you do today to save energy at home?
• What do you do today to address parking problems at work?
• What do you do today to find last-minute accommodations?

While measuring User Awareness is relatively easy, Pain Severity is much harder to measure:

If people do nothing to address the pain today, it is NOT a real pain! Run away!

However, if they use alternative means to address the pain today, this indicates that the pain is real. To use your product, users must allocate a share of their mind, time, and (most often) wallet. How much they allocate these three resources today is the best indicator of how real the pain is.

Final Thoughts

• It’s possible to find an Uncharted water next to a Battlefield. The taxi industry is a Battlefield, but ride sharing startups identified (rather obvious) pains in using cabs, and set out to solve them. Realizing the abundance of free capacity, they created a superior user experience to taxi’s and set out onto an Uncharted water adjacent to the Battlefield.
• The biggest risk is to cross into an Echo Chamber when you think you’re in an Uncharted water. It’s also possible to end up in a Mirage when you think you’re in a Battlefield as there may be other startups there allured by the same Mirage.

This has been the result of multiple failures (and an occasional success) in my ever-elusive search for product market fit. If you have questions, comments, or examples, email me and I’m happy to update the article: ali@pear.vc