Fall in Love With the Problem A Necessary Formula for Success, But Be Sure to Dig Deep
Fall in Love With the Problem A Necessary Formula for Success, But Be Sure to Dig Deep
This past week, I had a great lunch with Chandan Mahajan and Dhiraj Jain here in NYC, and we discussed a wide range of eCommerce topics based on their experience working with large retailers in their long IT and Retail careers.
(btw: Shout out to the DotKonnekt team for their coming out party at Shoptalk 2023 in March.)
Now they are working on a startup and have this advice to employees at their company, as well as to other startup founders around the world.
It's advice I happen to agree with
"Fall in Love With the Problem"
This sounds like a simple and trite statement, but it is not. It's one thing to know about a problem. It's quite another to understand it more deeply than anyone else in the world. And as a startup founder, that must be your standard.
But let's go deeper. What does this mean in your daily activities?
* Before you begin, do you understand what customer you are solving this problem for? Demographic, psychographic, category, company size, and other factors should be specified, or you will chase different symptoms. The same problem looks different for different audiences.
There is no such thing as Plato's" ideal form" of a problem. Who has the problem truly matters.
* Within your ideal customer profile, how would you know the client is healthy? Remember, your job is to solve problems for healthy and growing businesses, not try to fix broken ones.
As a startup founder, attrition you control is fixable. Attrition you cannot control means you have a qualification problem. Internalize this.
* Have you described the problem accurately? How do you know?
* Do you know the actual root cause of this problem? How far have you explored it?
* Are there certain types of businesses that have this problem more acutely than others?
* Can you quantify the depth of the problem in a company without a conversation?
* Which line item on the brand or retailer's P&L does your solution affect? To what degree?
If you can answer these questions confidently, you can really start to feel confident about your conversations with prospect. Because now you are speaking their language.
