Sympathy Doesn't Sign Purchase Orders

Plenty of problems are real, painful and widely acknowledged, and still nobody will pay to have them solved. Customers tell you in interviews how frustrating something is, nod along to your prototype and ask to be kept informed. Then nothing happens. Sympathy is easy to earn. A purchase order is not.

I've come to think a problem becomes worth paying for when three things are true at once.

1. •An owner, someone whose job it is to fix it and who controls a budget.
2. •A clock, a reason it needs fixing now, felt at the moment the customer would buy.
3. •A cost that the owner feels personally if it isn't fixed.

I call these the owner, the clock and the cost. A problem with all three almost sells itself. A problem missing any one of them tends to generate plenty of enthusiasm and very little revenue.

The clock is the one most often missed, and I learned that working with a high street bank's business banking innovation team. The bank had spent heavily on new ventures and was going big on one in particular: a service to help entrepreneurs start every part of their business, from registering the company and opening a bank account to setting up their accounting and even winning their first customers. When the team tested the concept with people who had recently started a business, the response was loud and clear. They loved it, and they said they'd use it next time.

Digging deeper, the problem became clear. Those entrepreneurs hadn't experienced the pain as a single problem at the time. It was spread across months and dozens of separate steps, each of which felt manageable on its own. Only looking back did the whole thing seem painful, and looking back is exactly when nobody is buying. A problem that only becomes visible in hindsight has sympathy, but it has no clock. And "I'd use it next time" is not the same thing as an addressable market, particularly when most people only start a business once.

This is easy to miss because pain is visible and budgets aren't. Research measures how much people dislike a problem, not whether they'd recognise it at the moment of purchase or who would pay to make it go away. The person who feels the pain is often not the person who holds the budget. And businesses mistake the size of a problem for its value, when a large problem that everyone shares and nobody owns is far harder to sell than a smaller one with a name, a deadline and a budget line attached.

When a problem does acquire all three, things move quickly. Regulation is one of the most reliable ways that happens. In a ratings business I worked with, new fair value rules turned the burden of proving products offered good value into a problem with an owner in product and compliance teams, a clock in the regulatory deadline and a cost in fines and reputational damage. Ideas that had been nice to have became things people would pay for. That's why red tape is so often a revenue line for whoever makes compliance easier.

To tell the difference, follow the money rather than the pain. For every problem you're considering, name the person who would sign, the budget it would come from, the moment they'd feel the need and what happens to them if it isn't fixed. If you can't name all of them, you have an interesting research finding rather than a product.