(2022-10-03) Kahl Problem Discovery For Calm Saas Businesses

Arvid Kahl: Problem Discovery for Calm SaaS Businesses.

Your solution needs to solve a critical (compelling) problem that your prospective customers are willing to pay for

A well-defined problem is a specific problem. It’s scoped around a single task or a small set of goals to be accomplished

a critical problem is also painful: it costs us time, money, and effort every time it appears.

The best SaaS-compatible problems are recurring

A critical problem is urgent when it happens and important enough to be a top priority at that point

Problems like this are a small subset of all the problems you’ll find people having.

Calmness and Criticality: I want to suggest one consideration here. While you want to solve a critical problem for your customer, you should be careful with mission-critical problems. If you tackle a do-or-die problem for your customers, their stress levels in ensuring things keep working become your stress levels.

What challenges do your future customers have? The best way to learn about that is to go where they discuss their challenges: Their communities. (SalesSafari)

For artists, that’s Artstation. Software developers hang out on Twitter. Recruiters spend their work days on LinkedIn. Many communities exist in forums outside the social media space

just ask. People will gladly help you find out more about their communities if you just ask them

Once you’re in the community, you have a very straightforward task: shut up and listen. It’s like Schrödinger’s Cat: if you interfere, you might change the experiment’s outcome.

There are four distinct kinds of problem indicators that you can find in communities: complaints, cries for help, requests for recommendations, and requests for alternatives

Complaints

The common theme among complaints is that they usually come after someone unsuccessfully attempts to solve a pressing problem.

Asking for Help

A person asking for help, however, is looking for a more interactive experience.

The people who jump at the opportunity to help another community member are the people you want to follow and engage with actively.

Looking for Recommendations

Try figuring out how the solutions that are being recommended are monetized. This will heavily inform the expectations around price in that community

Looking for Alternatives

variation of looking for recommendations

Since we’re very interested in signs of a validated problem, this is a powerful signal.

Finally, let’s look into another kind of message you might find in communities that is indicative of a problem: when people are sharing the (often crude) systems they made to solve a problem. Whenever you see someone trying to build an Excel sheet or a Google Doc to enable them to solve an issue

Painful Learnings

Here are three types of pain to look out for: time pain, resource pain, and pain of the self.

Time-related Pains

Resource-related Pains

Self-Related Pains

Reputation, Accomplishment, Advancement, and Empowerment.

How to Track and Analyze Problems

at a minimum, keep a list where you note down a problem every time it occurs, what kind of message you found it in, and who talked about it

URL

Here are a few additional locations to regularly source problems from

Product review sites.

Competitors’ feature upvote tools

When to Stop Tracking and Start Solving