Justify the right pain to solve — Make sure you do.

The power and freedom of current technology and globalization provide tremendous advantage, an opportunity for anyone to start the business without country border. The rising no. of start up not only make a world a better place but it also speed up and tear down the traditional business strategy thinking method to an agile framework which several big companies beside Tech firms are keen to adopt it.

On the other side, the fail rate of start up is terrified, with 90% fail rate, how can we start with the right step and mindset before burn down the passion and energy.

Let’s talk about the early step of “Ideation stage”. The ideation stage is before “0–1 Phase” or achieving Product market fit. ( 0–1 “zero to one” refers to a phase that your solution can get first customer. )

Firstly, if you yourself want to start the business idea, answering the following list of questions.

Do you have the pain of that domain?

If you are trying to solve your own pain — equally you have an insights and aspect of the problem you’re willing to focus or else if you are trying to solve the pain for others, please ensure you are capable of extracting the information and input from those people. Otherwise, the relationship between you and the pain is not strong. That means you have huge gap; spending more time or struggling to find input much harder than your competitors who focus on similar pain you are trying to solve.

Does the pain really exists?

Now this is not to discourage yourself from the start, but you shall keep asking until you have clarity that the pain exists out there so that you are able to ensure the market. In some case, the pain is not to solve the current problem but provide a new opportunity to the emerging market, possibly niche and have a growth. If you’re connected to the pain domain from previous question, I’m sure you are able to validate this point.

Define the pain degree — Pain intensity & Pain frequency

Dig deeper of you focused pain to assess the pain intensity.

• Does the target user struggle to solve the issue?
• Do they ignore because it does not cause big impact to their life — e.g. waste of time, costly, or inefficiency.
• Do they have alternative to solve that pain? If yes, why do you think you should continue solving this pain? Any gap to provide a better way to the market?

Next one is checking the pain frequency.

• Does the problem happen on daily-basis? — If the user encounter the problem every day, it has possibility for you to create a solution to fix that pain.

The degree of pain intensity and pain frequency is relevant to assess if the pain is worth to solve. For example

High intensity, High frequency — Task management tool or Website builder tool. Those services provide benefit (gains) to the user. Reducing the time, Improving the efficiency to work and collaborate on project.

The other B2B example is Access management SaaS — controlling the user to access the application securely.
High intensity ➡️ Security matter to protect company data.
High frequency ➡️ Employee needs to access every day to work.

High intensity, Low frequency —Airbnb. The business is providing alternative than hotel, for people who travels. The customer does not travel every day but the problem to find the accomodation with reasonable prices and connect with local for experience matters to them.

The B2B example can be the Email Archiving/Back-up SaaS .
Low frequency ➡️ IT admin does not necessarily check it on regular basis.
High intensity ➡️ If any incident happens, they have back-up to track for suspicious case (auditing ) or restore the loss email for the employee.

Low intensity, High frequency — Note taking application like Evernote. The problem is resonate for the user to take note and manage it in organize way. However, the intensity is relatively low because many alternative exist. The user can takes note in his/her task management tool or simply use bookmark and jot down in Word or Google doc. It does not cost them much to do that.

Low intensity, Low frequency — Google glass, a gadget for user to control their daily life through glass instead of using smartphone?! The market does not respond positively on this product because they do not struggle with smart phone function or speed to perform tasks like calling, managing appointment on calendar or navigating. The other reason might be the timing was way too early for the market to accept.

The key-takeaways to justify the pain of 「Ideation Stage」 is checking if you have domain knowledge of the focused pain. Carefully check for Pain Existence, Pain intensity, and Pain frequency.

The next article, I will still focus on the to-do-list in 「Ideation Stage」, introducing the design thinking concept to help shaping the idea with some useful methodologies you can utilize.