Solved for users but not choosers

Description

  • You’ve found this amazing problem to solve for users who’d get huge value out of it, if only their bosses would let them use it

Disproof

  • You’ve identified the key purchasing decision maker, and have a way to make them decide to purchase

Consequences

  • You build the thing and then scratch your head about why it’s not converting
  • Best case you scramble a sales strategy that targets the right people. Pain ensues as you have to rapidly learn a completely different psychology
  • Worse case you’ve missed the fact that your industry works on extremely gate-kept tender processes or only buys from buddies at the country club
  • In complex B2B situations, it might not only be selling to the right people but the fact there’s an entire class of (super) user with a whole feature set they’ll need (admin tools, dashboards, reporting) that your product will be completely unsellable without, which you then have to add time to build
  • You run out of money and die

Causes

  • Occurs often when product gets structurally isolated from customers and value, sometimes out of a desire to ‘focus’ them on building, sometimes out of desire to ‘focus’ business development on the commercials
  • Can also happen when technically smart founding teams are breaking into a domain or vertical they don’t know about
  • Can also happen when the same industry is vastly different in another geography

Approaches

  • If your users are held hostage by the person controlling the purse strings, you have to consider their problems and motivations
  • And as such identify two sets of problems, design for the user's, position for the chooser's
  • This is almost universally a B2B problem, but it also crops up in strange places like educational products or anything bought by parents for children