“Everyone hates X and wants it to be easier.”

That's my friend Adam Wathan's simple formula for finding new product ideas.

His current product, Tailwind CSS, emerged during one of his livestreaming coding sessions. He was building a different project, but kept getting feedback from viewers about how he wrote CSS. They were interested in learning Adam’s approach.

When Adam created a landing page for his CSS framework, it got 1,100 subscribers in less than 18 hours. "Developers hate writing CSS and trying to style web pages, and want it to be easier." Tailwind made it easier.

Remember this line from the previous chapter? Mike McDerment was discussing why he started building FreshBooks:

“I was using Microsoft Word to create our firm’s invoices, and I was pulling out my hair because Word simply wasn’t built to create good looking invoices efficiently or report on my business.”

He could have created many things for the web design community: portfolio software, a set of Photoshop filters, or inspirational posters for their walls. Instead, he chose the most frustrating and pressing problem he faced: creating, sending, and tracking invoices. It wasn’t the sexiest or most technically challenging problem to solve, but it was an issue that was making him pull out his hair in frustration.

There is an advantage to choosing an audience that you belong to; finding problems to solve gets easier.

If you’ve been a developer for 16 years, why would you try to build a product for lawyers, real estate agents, or retail store owners? Think about how many hours of practice you’ve put into learning the field of software development. It would be difficult for a lawyer to build a product for developers. He doesn’t have the domain expertise he needs to compete.

The same is true for you, as a developer. If you choose a market you know nothing about, the odds are stacked against you.

The servant’s mindset

A product person is a servant. Instead of thinking about themselves, they think about their customers: “What do they need? How can I help them?”

Building and marketing a product is less like being Steve Jobs, dramatically sharing your wares from a stage, and more like a tow-truck driver, rescuing someone with a flat tire.

B2B markets are lucrative because many businesses need roadside assistance. They need help with software, design, project management, and finances. They need someone (that’s you) who can build them a product that will get them back on the road and in better shape than before.

Find their most urgent problems and solve those first, like an emergency dispatch center prioritizing 911 calls. Also, businesses are willing to pay more to address critical problems.

Types of struggle

Your marketing approach will depend on how much discomfort the customer is in!

“One thing that people don’t appreciate enough is that there are different types of pain.”
– Patrick McKenzie, on the Product People podcast^

Before you start building your product, ask yourself: how intense is the pain I am targeting? The severity of the customer’s struggle will determine:

• How much are they willing to pay for the solution?
• How desperate are they to find a solution?

To explain, I’m going to ask you to think about your dentist (stay with me).

Your dentist deals with different thresholds of pain:

• Extreme pain: “ARGH! This toothache is killing me! I need a dentist right now!!!”
• Moderate pain: “My gums have been bugging me lately. I should book an appointment sometime soon.”
• Low pain: “I haven’t gone in for a checkup yet this year.”

(I also like the way Michael Buckbee defines pain intensity. He asks: “Does this pain need morphine, aspirin, or a vitamin?”)

There will always be some problems that people just won’t pay to solve. If people perceive the problem to have a low pain threshold, there’s little you can do to convince them otherwise.

I once owned a snowboard shop in my suburban hometown. One of my marketing campaigns was to get people to “buy local!” I was trying to target a pain people didn’t have. They were happy to drive 15 minutes to the big city to buy snowboard equipment and get a better price and more selection.

Another way to visualize this concept is to think about how your local dentist might use different marketing approaches for different types of pain:

Extreme pain (morphine)

The customer is highly motivated to find a solution. It’s urgent! They Google “dentists nearby” and book an appointment with the first office that has availability.

In a situation like this, search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) would be the primary focus. This is “pull marketing”: the customer is desperate and in motion. They’re under pressure to find a solution quickly, which is why having good page rank (or an ad at the top of the screen) makes sense.

Businesses targeting extreme pain also have a pricing advantage. Often, the greater the pain, the more people are willing to pay (this is why Uber can use surge pricing).

What are some examples of products that solve extreme pain points?

• Zapier: “If we don’t figure out this integration this week, we’re going to lose this deal.”
• JSON-CSV: “My developer went home for the day, and I need to convert this JSON data to a CSV right now.”
• Churnbuster: “How am I going to deal with all the customers with expiring credit cards?”

Moderate pain (aspirin)

Advertising for “moderate” pain-points should employ both “push” and “pull” techniques.

For example, the dentist might place an ad in the paper that says,

“Experiencing gum discomfort? We can fix that!”

"Pull marketing" proactively reminds customers that there is a solution to their problem.

"Push marketing" occurs when something in a customer’s life motivates them to seek a solution. For example, the Google search “how to get rid of gum pain” is evidence of the pain.

There is an opportunity to solve moderate pain points, but it’s also where many entrepreneurs fail. Finding a pain that people will pay to get rid of isn’t easy.

“You want people who know they have the problem and who are actively looking for solutions, rather than a pain that’s bearable.”
– Patrick McKenzie

What are some use cases where products solve moderate pain points?

• Baremetrics: “I wish I didn’t have to update this Excel sheet manually with our SaaS numbers every month.”
• Slack: “There’s gotta be an easier way to communicate with my team than email.”

Low pain (vitamin)

What do I mean by “low pain”? These are problems that require more of a vitamin, than aspirin.

These solutions require significant "pull marketing." The company needs to show consumers that they have a problem and then persuade them to buy their solution.

Your dentist’s office spends a considerable amount of its budget reminding you to come in for regular checkups. They’ll send you a postcard every six months and follow up with phone calls just to get you to book that appointment.

Most people don’t wake up in the morning and think: “I should call my dentist today.” Getting you to book that appointment requires an outside pull.

Here are some examples of web products that solve low pain points:

• Stamps.com: “Going to the post office is annoying.”
• Squarespace: “My brother-in-law keeps bugging me to build him a website.”

If you listen to podcasts, you know that Stamps.com and Squarespace spend a considerable amount of money trying to get you to visit their websites. This is "pull marketing" at play. If you’re selling a vitamin, you'll likely need big marketing dollars to make sales.

I have a theory: there’s an inverse relationship between the level of pain and the number of exposures a customer needs before he buys.

As an example, the distribution could look something like this:

• Extreme pain: 1–2 exposures
• Moderate pain: 3–7 exposures
• Low pain: 8–100+ exposures (much harder to forecast)

In advertising, they call this effective frequency. There are many theories around optimal frequency (some say three, others say seven is the magic number).

However, there is some evidence that supports my theory:

• Indochino (low pain) bumped up its retargeting frequency from 3 impressions per user per day to 15-20. “Every time we’ve increased it, we’ve seen greater revenue and ROI.”
• When ReTargeter conducted a study on conversions per impression, they found that B2B (high-pain) ads outperformed B2C (low-pain) ads by 402%. “There tends to be a higher sense of purchase urgency with business solutions than with consumer goods.”

It’s not enough to find a pain point and build a solution. You have to remember that different types of pain will require different marketing approaches.

If you’re marketing an extreme pain solution, focus on SEO and SEM.

Moderate pain products require a full spectrum of tactics. You’ll use pull marketing (ads, retargeting, content marketing, PR), and push marketing (SEO, email courses).

If you’re planning to build a low-pain product, you’ll likely need a big marketing budget. The only low-cost acquisition strategy here is “viral,” and that is extremely difficult to get right. Historically, there have been opportunities in SEO to secure low-competition, high-traffic keywords, but those are increasingly hard to find.

Jeremy Hageman makes a good point about pain frequency: some pains recur daily (commuter traffic), while others may only be experienced once a year (income taxes).

Also, pain points move up and down the continuum: what requires morphine today might only require an aspirin tomorrow. There are all sorts of factors that can affect this: improving technology, increased competition, and the changing behaviors and values of customers. Most successful B2B products have both “extreme pain” and “moderate pain” use cases, and they market to both.

Product first, marketing second

In this section, we’ve looked at the importance of building something people want. You can’t put good marketing after a bad product and expect good results.

Now that we’ve laid this foundation, it’s time to build your marketing machine.