Problem-market fit
Lining up the right problems with the right solutions is something that everyone deals with all the time.
Hi,
Lining up the right problems with the right solutions is something that everyone deals with all the time. Since this is where I live the vast majority of my existence, I thought I would share with you the three questions I ask all the time, and have been the most helpful reframes inside my community.
What am I missing here?
This is my favorite single question I’ve ever asked in my whole career. No matter how much knowledge we have, we are always filtering through our own lived experience and always missing something.
As Donald Rumsfeld said: “There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
He got a lot of flack for it at the time, but there’s not a month that goes by I don’t think about, quote, and/or ruminate on this idea. No matter how much we know, there are always unknown unknowns, and this question allows us to acknowledge that truth and pull them out of the ether without judgment.
Is that even true, though?
Recently on a call, somebody brought up the fact that online connection wasn’t the same as in person connection, which caused me to push back and ask “What if connection could be the same, though? What would that look like?”
Connection being inherently different online than in person doesn’t actually make sense when you think about it, does it?
I mean we make things that people connect to without ever hearing our voice. We text friends and connect without seeing them. Telephones are still great at developing connection, even though we’re not in the room together, so it’s not like people have to be in the same place to connect. Even Zoom calls with my niece are amazing at connecting with her.
I don’t discount that online connection doesn’t feel the same all the time, but sometimes it does, right? Sometimes, in the comments of a post, you’ll connect with somebody very deeply, or through a group text chain, or even in an email like this one.
Why would I even bother to write this and send it out if I assumed deep, meaningful online connection wasn’t possible?
It would be pointless, and most every email we send is likely built on this same premise.
In fact, Hapitalist was built on the premise that online connection can be as good, or almost as good, as in-person connection, and it broadly works pretty great. Funnily, this person not only found me online originally, but then built a connection with me deep enough to come to our mastermind in person, and then joined Hapitalist, almost exclusively by connecting with me online.
So, something about online connection works, and we should be asking how we can get more of that, instead of making a blanket statement that blocks our ability to solve our real problem.
I love The Royal Tennebaums, and the quote I think about all the time related to this topic is Owen Wilson saying “Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is... maybe he didn’t.”
So, what is the presupposition that you can turn on its head to help unblock what’s blocking you? Because that’s where you’ll likely have a breakthrough.
Is this even solving the right problem?
In another recent call, somebody said “I would love to grow my audience by going to live shows, but I don’t think they’ll be profitable.”
This made my ears perk up, and I pushed back saying “But that’s an income block. You can’t solve an audience problem using income logic”.
Last year, I spent $50k growing the audience to this publication, which left me -$28k in the hole. It caused a massive income problem, but it solved my audience problem.
Now, I don’t recommend blowing so much money fixing one problem only to cause another, but we often limit our problem solving by throwing up irrelevant roadblocks.
Yes, losing money at conventions could cause an income problem, but if you have a job and stability, that might not even be a problem. Maybe you can blow money doing unprofitable things to bolster future you. After all, that’s one of the great things about having a full-time job, right?
If you have the money to blow, or a way to replace it, then the income problem isn’t actually a problem, and yet it’s blocking you from solving your actual audience problem.
The only reason I was able to blow so much money on growth is because I spent several years building up a nestegg for exactly that purpose. Yes, it meant I had to live low on the hog for a long time once it failed, but it didn’t bankrupt me, and I’m roughly back to how much money I had in my war chest after chilling out on audience growth and production for a year.
If I put up an income block, even though I didn’t have one, it would have prevented me from solving my audience problem.
So, what really is your biggest block and how can you actually solve it?
