How to do idea discovery
or finding great problems to solve
One of the more common complaints of would-be entrepreneurs is not having an idea to pursue. They have this pent up entrepreneurial energy but nothing to expend it on. There are a number of ways to address this problem. One common suggestion is to fix a problem in your own life. This is great if you can make it work because you would be solving a problem you have an intimate understanding of and have deep insight into. But what happens when you don’t really have an unmet need in your own life, or at least not one you have an interest in solving? How do you go about finding interesting problems in other people’s lives? This is where idea discovery comes in.
What is idea discovery?
Idea discovery is the process of systematically uncovering unmet needs in specific areas. It is a repeatable and predictable process that will allow you, in a couple of weeks, to better understand what, if any, unmet needs exist in any industry or role. To be clear, these unmet needs may not be problems that you can solve. The technology may not be there to address them, you may not have the skills, resources or capability to tackle these problems but that is a different issue than identifying the problems in the first place.
Why do it?
Why is it important to go out and discover problems? Isn’t the whole point of being a visionary that you can sit around and imagine a world that others can’t? Why not sit around and think up cool stuff, build it and then tell people all about it? The main reason is risk management. Building, marketing and selling a product requires a lot of investment in time, money and effort. You want to develop as much conviction as possible that this investment will be worthwhile before putting in the effort. Nothing builds conviction like having a potential customer tell you that they will give you money if you make the product for them. Sometimes you can even get the customer to give you money even before you build the product for them. In addition, meeting your customers before you have a product gives you a ton of advantages when it comes to selling to them later on. Now, you know how to reach them, how they talk about themselves and how they consider products to purchase.
The process
Define your target
The first step is to identify who you want to talk to. What industry do they work in? What size of company? What level of seniority? The more specific you can be, the easier it will be to find patterns after talking to a couple of them. If you’re not sure, start with a broad net and then get more targeted as you develop a better understanding of the space.
Build a contact list
Most people find the idea of developing a sizable list of people to talk to very daunting. They look in their personal connections and maybe come up with a handful. This is a good start. You should definitely talk to your connections first (with some caveats that I will mention later on) but you will quickly exhaust that list.
The next place to look is your personal networks. Are there any of your target profiles in the communities you are a part of? This could include your current workplace, slack groups, meetups, alumni associations, online groups, etc. Anywhere you already have some built up trust is a good place to find people.
Very often, these first two steps will only take you so far. Now you are going to have to do the thing most people dread - cold outreach. You will need to reach out to people you do not know and have very little connection with. This is daunting to most people. However, it is not as hard as it seems. With a little practice, pretty much anyone can become quite proficient at it. Later on, we will discuss a couple techniques that will get you most of the way there.
There are a number of different data brokers that can provide you a contact list for cold outreach. LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, etc are popular sources of contact information. They are not that expensive and allow you to filter their lists to meet your criteria.
Messaging
Now you have your list of contacts, what do you say to get them to talk to you? I like to use email for the first message. Real sales people ™ just go straight to phone calls but I’m not that brave. Email still gives pretty good results without feeling as … aggressive? When reaching out by email, brevity is important. You should fight the natural instinct to cram as much as possible into each line. It helps to keep in mind the idea that each messaging unit should be designed to cause the reader to take only one specific action and no more. For instance, the email subject line should be designed to cause the reader to open the message. Each paragraph should be designed to cause the reader to read the next paragraph. The last paragraph should be designed to cause the reader to take action and respond to you. You should edit and re-edit each messaging unit to ensure it is doing only that one thing and not trying to squeeze too much into it.
For example, I find posing a question in the subject line works very well. If I was sending an email out to supply chain managers, I would probably have something like “Logistics delays?” as the subject line (assuming the topic had some relevance to disruptions).
In the main message, the first thing I do is lay out why I am reaching out so they can quickly decide if this is relevant to them or not (“Hey Jane, I am doing research on how supply chain managers deal with disruptions in their logistics operations…”). Note that I do not start out by introducing myself or giving any other superfluous information. My goal is to grab their interest (or turn them off completely) right off the bat.
Next you need to provide some reassurances. Most people are a bit wary when it receiving email from strangers. They worry there is some kind of timeshare or MLM sales pitch coming. I find it helps to acknowledge that fact up front and let them know you are not selling them anything and only want to learn from them.
Next you let them know what they need to do. Ask them to provide you an opportunity to chat, connect, whatever. Be specific about what action they should take.
Here’s an example of what one of these could look like
Subject: Logistics delays?
Body:
Hi Jane,
I am researching supply chain logistics to see how they can be more efficient. As a supply chain logistics manager, what are the biggest problems you face on a day-to-day basis?
This is not spam and I am not trying to sell you anything. I am just trying to learn about the pain points you have in your profession.
I would love to hear back from you and if you are open to a brief chat, please let me know a time that works for you and a number I could reach you on.
Regards,
$NAME
$PHONE
$SOCIALS (facebook, linkedin, etc)
A couple things to note:
The entire email takes less than 15 seconds to read. The reader can quickly make a decision whether to respond or not at a glance.
The text is very modular. You can easily make changes to any line to test performance.
The CTA (call to action) is clear and well spelt out
It includes some small amount of personalization (name, job title)
It has trust signals by including all the ways you can be tracked down if you misbehave
In my experience, the expected response rate for cold outreach like this is about 10%. If you email 100 people, you should expect about 10 of them to get back to you. If you are getting less than that, tweak the messaging or the targeting until the response rate improves.
This also gives an idea of the volume of outreach you need to perform. If you want to talk to 100 people, you will need to email about 1,000 contacts. Outreach, like sales, is a game of numbers.
Discovery interviews
Now you have interviews lined up, how do you conduct them so they yield useful information? You should conduct the interviews with a standard format. This makes it easier to compile information across all the interviews and compare responses. Each interview should be a half-hour. That is long enough to get useful insights without taking up too much of your interviewees time. The interview format should go something like
Context setting - Get the details of the interviewees work. Where do they work, what segment of the industry do they fall into, etc. This may help you interpret their responses better and may help provide some nuance to place their feedback relative to others
Process descriptions - I like to get people to describe their work process (“tell me about the steps involved in setting up a product supply chain”?). This gets them out of the automatic mode of doing their work into a more intentional mindset. It also has the added benefit of being a great way to get up to speed on a role you may not have a ton of familiarity with.
Frustrations - Ask about the most recently frustrating thing they encountered in the last couple of weeks. Each job has a lot of frustrations but those that are worth solving are both severe and happen often. I like to repeat the answer back to them in my own words so I can be sure that I really do understand what they are trying to describe.
Tedium - Ask about the most tedious thing they have had to do recently. Tedious work is often work that can be automated.
Repetition - For the questions about frustration and tedium, keep asking “what else?” after each response until they have exhausted all the items.
Magic Wand - I like to ask the magic wand question (“if you had a magic wand that can only help with one thing in your work, what would you use it for”?). This gets people to really prioritize their problems and let you know which ones they really care about. You should deep dive and find out why they chose this particular problem and how they think the magic wand could go about solving it.
Sometimes, the person wants to talk about something else. Either they already have a list of problems they want to share with you or want to talk about a specific issue that is important to them. When the interview goes off the beaten path like this, just go with the flow. Sometimes it is useful, sometimes it isn’t. Either way, it is just one interview out of many so there’s not much to lose.
At the end of the interview, you should ask two final questions:
Would they be open to you reaching back out to them for feedback on whatever your conclusions are? When you are done analyzing all the information across all the interviews, you want to have some type of sanity check of your conclusions. It would be helpful if the interview subjects could let you know if your conclusions are valid (or where you went wrong)
Would they be open to connecting you to some of their colleagues so you can interview them as well? If you are successful, this turns a cold outreach into a couple of warm introductions. Of course, they will only introduce you to their network if they had a good experience with you. So be sure to be respectful of their time (don’t be late, run over time, etc), be polite and professional and make the interaction as fun as you can make it.
Evaluation
You should take notes during the calls as you are unlikely to remember the details of calls afterwards. In your notes, include some verbatim responses if they catch your attention. They may come in useful in creating marketing content later on. Make note of what terms they use to describe their roles, tools and processes. You want to speak to your target in the same vernacular they are used to. Make note of the other products they mention they use. You can study them later on to pick up marketing tactics and consider partnership opportunities with them.
As you make your notes, you will start to see commonalities in the responses. In my experience, by the time you have spoken to 20 people, the patterns start to emerge pretty clearly. We are all not so different after all. Some entrepreneurs say they speak to 100 - 200 people but I find the interviews get repetitive well before you get to that point.
Write problem statements for the issues that stand out to you (eg “logistics managers find it hard to source replacement parts when vendors notify them of late deliveries”). Problem statements are just bald facts. They do not include any detail of how they could be solved. For each problem statement, evaluate the following:
How severe is this problem? What does it cost them (in time, money, reputation, etc) when it happens?
How often does this problem happen?
How do they solve this problem today? How well does this solution work? How much does this solution cost? Your solution will need to be 10x better (on some dimension) than current solutions to have a chance at adoption
What other factors are involved in this problem? Are there other products that will need to be integrated, regulation, etc)
Potential ways to solve the problem
Follow up
The last step is to share your analysis with the interviewees to get their individual feedback. You should share the list of problem statements (but not the additional analysis e.g. potential solutions) and ask if any of them resonate with their experience. They should also identify which, if any, they would want to have a solution to.
Beware of people telling you what they think you want to hear. If you let on that you are committed to any idea, people may not want to hurt your feelings and go along telling you that it is a great idea even if they really do not think so. This is especially a problem with people who know you personally. Take pains to let people know that you are fine (would be happy even) for them to tell you that nothing you have found is relevant to them. It is less expensive (for you) to spend a couple weeks on idea discovery that ends up with nothing than waste several months of development to arrive in the same place.
If any of them raise their hands that they would want the problem solved, offer to build the product with their input and feedback along the design process. In return, they may get discounted usage or special treatment for their participation. You may even ask for a (small) refundable deposit just to further test their need for a solution. Hard experience will teach you never to underestimate people’s ability to misstate their actual preferences.
At this point, you can rerun the entire process but fine-tuned towards these specific problems you have identified. You select a new set of contacts and reach out to them to ask about these problems specifically. This provides another sanity check to ensure the problems you have identified are not anomalous to the first group.
Benefits
This is a pretty involved process that takes a couple of weeks to execute. Why is it better than spending a couple of hours brainstorming problems and getting to work right away? Well, at the end of this process, you will have the following:
An understanding of a couple important problems that your target market has told you they have and are actively looking to solve (or at worst, an indication that there are no relevant problems that you should be tackling for them).
An understanding about how to reach people in your target market and how to message to them using the language they speak.
Potentially a source of first customers that will provide early product design feedback and guidance.