Last week ended with an idea written as a claim: a kind of business, a problem, a promise. If the week went well you also spent an hour or two reading what those businesses say about themselves. This week is about the person in that sentence, because most ideas that fail in the first year fail on the customer, not on the product. The product was fine. It was built for someone who did not quite exist.
Every idea we send names a kind of business. That is a category, and a category does not buy anything. A sign shop does not have a problem with quotes. The owner of a three-person sign shop who does the quoting herself between jobs has a problem with quotes, and she has it at four in the afternoon when a customer calls back asking where the number is. The move this week is to get from the category to that person, and to describe her in enough detail that you could recognize her if she walked in.
Start with who does the work that the problem lives in. In a small business the owner often does it, but not always. In a court reporting agency the scheduling that goes wrong may sit with an office manager who has been there eleven years and has a system nobody else understands. In a wholesale tortilla maker the compliance paperwork may belong to whichever family member is best with forms. The person who feels the problem and the person who signs the check are sometimes the same and sometimes not, and you need to know which, because you will sell to one and build for the other.
Then find out what the problem costs. Not roughly. In their terms. Two days on a quote costs a sign shop the jobs that went to the shop that answered first, and you can put a number on that by asking one owner how many quotes she sends a month and how many she thinks she loses to slowness. Hours are a cost too, and often the one they feel more, because the owner’s hours are the only thing that does not scale in a small business. An hour a day on something that could take ten minutes is a real number when the owner’s day is the whole company.
The third question is what they do about it today, and last week I said it carries the most weight. Here is why. The way a person handles a problem now tells you what they would accept as a fix. If the office manager built a spreadsheet, she wants something that works like her spreadsheet and takes less of her time. If the owner pays a part-time bookkeeper to chase it, she wants it to cost less than the bookkeeper. If nobody does anything and the problem just sits there, it may be that the problem is smaller than it looks from outside, or that everyone in the trade has accepted it, and either way you are selling into indifference. Indifference is the hardest thing to sell against. It is worth finding out early.
Write the person down. One paragraph, plain words, as if describing her to a friend who might build the thing with you. What her business is, what she does in it, where the problem shows up in her day, what it costs her, and what she does now. If you cannot fill that paragraph from what you have read, you have found the gap to close next, and it closes by reading more or by talking to one of them, which is the subject of week five.
One caution about this exercise. It is easy to write the person you want to exist, the one who has exactly the problem your idea solves and is waiting for you. Watch for that. A useful check is to write a second paragraph about the same person that argues against the idea: why she would not buy, what she would say to a salesperson at the door, what she tried before that did not stick. If the second paragraph is easier to write than the first, that is information.
Next week is about the sentence. Once you can see the person, the idea needs to be said in words she would use, and that turns out to be harder than building it.
The guide before this one: What to do with an idea the morning you read it. Next in the series: Say it in one sentence they would repeat. The worksheet for this week: worksheet 2, one page of questions to answer on paper.