Customer need canvas.
The Customer Need Canvas helps you to make sense of the different needs you have uncovered for your potential customers.
The Customer Need Canvas helps you to make sense of the different needs you have uncovered for your potential customers.
you want to select the most interesting problem to solve
The Customer Need Canvas helps you to make sense of the different needs you have uncovered for your potential customers, and separate the ‘latent needs’ (nice to haves) from the ‘core needs’ (must haves). When coming up with problems (you think) people face, there are a number of aspects to keep in mind.
Market Size - How many people face this problem?
Customer Segments - What do people that face the problem have in common? How can you group them together and characterize them? And where are they best reached?
Real Need vs Latent Need - Is the problem a real need for the potential customers? Or is is a nice to have?
Think of the Maslow pyramid. At the wide base of the pyramid, you find things everyone needs, such as food, water, rest. These are things you can't do without. At the narrow top, you find things that only become important to people once their basic needs have been fulfilled. If you think of problems to solve for your business, think about where that problem is in the pyramid. Is it on the bottom, or at the top? This is a way to visualize latent needs vs real needs. The problem with latent needs is that people don't really know or care about fulfilling them yet. They are 'optional problems'. That does not mean that a latent need can't be huge: in a 1999 interview, people in Amsterdam laughed at having a mobile phone in their pocket every hour of the day. They simply could not imagine what it would be like yet.
Convincing people of a solution to a latent need is an uphill battle. It can be done, but it is a lot harder than fixing something people are aware of as a problem. The easiest way to tell if people have a real problem is to look for problems that people actually have a workaround for. Some way that they already solve that problem today. If that workaround is unsatisfactory for them, for instance it is expensive, takes time, or only solves part of their problem, then you have a candidate for a real need.