The Blind Spot Costing You Customers

Every company has a favorite child.

It’s the feature the entire team loves to talk about and present in meetings. It’s clever, elegant, and showcases how innovative you are. It may even win an award.

But it falls flat in the market.

Because your customers don't care what you think about your children.

Businesses and customers can see value very differently. What a company thinks is important may not match what a customer values. This difference can lead to expensive lessons.

It's easy to get lost in what your product can do and forget what it does for people.

The path to making your brand irreplaceable isn’t paved with more features. It’s found by digging into real-world frustrations.

Listening to your customers is crucial, but don’t expect them to hand you the solution. Real breakthroughs come from digging beneath their requests. And find the source of their frustration.

The goal is to unearth a genuine pain, not a minor annoyance. Then tie your solution to a problem they actually face, not one you believe they have.

It requires shifting focus from features to frustrations.

To understand the customer's world better than they do.

But what does this look like in practice?

These companies succeeded by focusing on the problems they could solve, not on what they wanted to sell.

P&G: The Scent of a Sunny Day

P&G’s fabric enhancer brand, Lenor, had a problem in the UK.

Growth was stagnant.

P&G didn’t invent a new scent or formulate a “20% stronger scent.” That would have been a solution looking for a problem.

Instead, they went into their customers’ homes. Not to sell. But to watch. To understand.

And they found a tension. A belief that the “gold standard” for freshness was the smell of clothes dried outdoors. But it's rare to find a sunny day in Britain.

So, they re-engineered their product to replicate that specific feeling of "outdoor freshness." They named the line "Outdoorables."

And they sold the feeling of a perfect sunny day, finally within reach.

Slack: The Pivot That Found the Real Enemy

In 2012, Stewart Butterfield and his team shut down a video game called Glitch. It had failed.

But it wasn't the end of the story.

While building their failed dream, they had built something else. It was an internal chat tool to help their team communicate across different cities.

It was fast, organized, and even fun.

They realized that the problem their tool solved was much bigger than their game.

The true enemy wasn't a boss in a video game. It was the chaos of creative work. It was the endless, soul-crushing chain of internal emails. It was the anxiety of being out of the loop.

This was the tension felt in every office in the world.

They had a choice. They could either keep wasting their game on a video no one wanted or use their remaining money to launch a new way to communicate.

They chose the latter and launched Slack.

They didn’t sell “a new messaging app.” They declared war on a villain: workplace disorganization.

They sold a way to be less busy and more productive. They tackled a tension that many workers felt each day, something they had come to accept as part of the job.

Starbucks: Selling the “Third Place”

When Starbucks was scaling, they didn’t solve a coffee problem. There was coffee everywhere.

They solved a space problem.

The tension was societal. People had work. They had home. But they lacked a reliable place to meet a colleague, read a book, or just exist for an hour without pressure.

Starbucks sold a solution to this tension.

The comfortable chairs, the predictable layout, and the staff who learn your name. It was all engineered to create a consistent, welcoming environment. They were in the business of providing a refuge.

They solved the tension of needing a place to be.

How to Find the Problem Hiding in Plain Sight

You have to look beyond the walls of your office.

You have to go into the customers' lives. And you have to find the tensions your customers live with every day.

Ask the tough questions:

• What is our customer’s "gold standard"? Forget your product. What does the perfect outcome look like in their world? Like P&G, you might find it’s a feeling or an ideal, not a function.

• What are their "workarounds"? Do they use spreadsheets to supplement your software? Put tape over an annoying light on your product? These unofficial fixes are roadmaps to their real frustrations.

• Confront what you’re proud of, but your customers ignore. This requires brutal honesty. List your "best" features. Now find out if anyone would miss them if they were gone. The answer can be the start of a different strategy.

• What’s the real villain? Is it a broken process, like email was for Slack? Is it a societal need, like the lack of a "third place"? When you define the enemy, you can become the hero.

One of the toughest choices for a leader is to give up a beloved feature. But this decision can solve a customer's problem and lead to greater profits. It requires trading your own pride for their preference.

This is the work. Not just building better products. But building a deeper understanding of the people you serve. That is the only sustainable path to making a brand that matters.

Onward,

Aaron Shields

P.S. Are you building things you find interesting, or things your customers find indispensable? If you suspect there’s a gap, you're leaving your best ideas on the table. Reply to this email and I'll set up a free 15-minute call and I'll help you see how you can find problems worth solving