Startups Obsessed With Pain

A Healthy Obsession

I've been thinking a lot about customers' pain lately. Pain. Pain. Pain.

The longer I play this solopreneurship game, the more convinced I am each and every week that we need to be obsessed with users' pain. We need to swarm to it like a fly to an electric lamp. The critical difference between us and the fly, though, is that when we obsess over users' pain, we likely won't die. Just the opposite, actually: we make money.

If someone asked me to produce a golden nugget of entrepreneurial wisdom (I'm not famous, so no one ever does, but just play along), this is what I would say: be obsessed with pain.

The Mechanics of Pain

Users' pain is a complex subject, and it would do us well to adequately reflect over each aspect of the matter to make us the proper, obsessive lethal painkiller-entrepreneurs that we need to be.

Opportunity

When I see a target group of people experiencing pain, what I really see is opportunity.

As software developers, we have the beautiful gift of bringing into creation that which we dream up in our minds. Not unlike an artist, and I think superior software design is a legitimate work of art. It's simply wondrous to me that we can dream up a computer software in our minds, craft it together line by line (; by ;), and release it into the wild like a wild animal.

When we make our wondrous works of art, we actively and intentionally capitalize on that opportunity.

The opportunity to help another human being.

The opportunity to make the world slightly better.

The opportunity to build a brand and legacy for ourselves.

The opportunity to get our bills paid from something besides our day job.

I don't think I've ever met a human being who feels miserable after visibly making our society better.

Financial Freedom

And speaking of money, I think this is a fundamental truth of the most successful startups in the world: they remove people's pain, so people want to pay them for their efforts.

Think about it: you see dozens upon dozens of indie hackers try to promote their products on various forums and social media platforms, but it falls so flat so often.

Why? I'm convinced because many projects are not actually solving real pain points. Consequently, the software is less impactful to the target customer, and they are less inclined to part ways with their credit card. And if they are less inclined to part ways with their credit card, then you are less likely to attain financial freedom.

If you want them to help your bank account, then you need to make their life easier and less painful. When they feel their life magically become easier, your efforts speak more for yourself than your best sales pitch or H1 can.

Listen

So if you want to remove pain for users, grow your bank account, and be a true and lethal painkiller, then make yourself drawn to other people's pain. Listen, record, document, reiterate, ask clarifying questions, listen more, and then do the one thing that separates the wannapreneurs from the entrepreneurs: act.