A good problem isn't enough

Every business has a list of real problems it isn't doing anything about. Not because no one has noticed them. Everyone has noticed them.

The thing that turns a known problem into action is rarely the problem getting worse. It's a moment, usually a small and specific one, when somebody decides they are actually going to deal with it. Before that moment, the best solution in the world is a tab someone closes. After it, a mediocre solution gets bought that afternoon.

I ran a small business years ago that depended entirely on being found by the right customers. The product was good. It sold itself in the room. And it sat there quietly for months, because the people who needed it weren't waking up one morning and deciding to go looking. They had a vague ache, not a decision. The work that changed things wasn't a better product. It was finding the moment the ache turned into "right, I'm sorting this today", and being in front of them when it did.

Watch how the best software companies sell and you see the same thing. The person comparing CRMs is already too late to be worth much. The one who counts is lying on the couch at nine at night thinking "I have got to get better at sales", long before they know a CRM is the answer at all. The company that owns the problem at the moment it becomes a decision finds the product question mostly sorts itself out later.

It scales further than you would think. I watched a business run a whole stable of separate brands that were, underneath, one operation, because the value was never in the operation. It was in occupying a dozen versions of the customer's deciding moment, each one feeling like the obvious answer to a particular ache. The thing being sold barely changed. The problem it was matched to changed completely.

So when someone has a clever solution and no traction, the solution is rarely the issue. No one is at the moment of deciding, and a solution that turns up before that moment is just noise, however good it is.

Find the moment a problem becomes a decision. That, and not the solution, is the thing worth building around.