Episode 42:The Problem, She Is Forever Expensive
How do you research expensive problems and craft offerings to solve them?
Summary
Nick and Kai work through what makes a business problem ‘expensive’: the client knows it exists, can roughly quantify what it’s costing, and hasn’t fixed it anyway, usually from fear of knock-on effects or lack of the right internal resources. The episode maps the consultant’s role in that gap: clients identify the pain, consultants propose and execute solutions once they understand the shape of it. The second half is practical advice on how to find expensive problems worth building a practice around.
Highlights
- Clients are good at identifying problems because they live with them daily, but they often can’t identify the right solution. Kai’s example: a client with an onboarding problem might propose tripling ad spend through PPC and end up bleeding money through AdWords instead.
- Nick’s bottom bracket metaphor: most bike maintenance takes four tools, but a stripped bottom bracket requires specialist tools the owner doesn’t have. It’s in every bike, it degrades silently under constant stress, and the repair, dozens of loose ball bearings and a tube of grease, is what keeps most people from touching it. That’s the shape of an expensive problem.
- Nick admits DraftRevise launched backwards: he wanted retainer income first and reverse-engineered a service to justify it. He also priced it at $650/month without any price validation and says he left ‘potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table.’
- Kai paid $80/quarter for an e-commerce forum (eCom Fuel) and didn’t contribute, just read. He tracked which questions came up repeatedly in the SEO, link-building, and traffic categories to build a first-round map of problems before any client conversations.
- To find expensive problems: read forums, go to conferences, take people for coffee. Nick specifically says to target practitioners with dirt on their hands, sub-VP level people who actually deal with the problem, not the CEO. End every coffee date with ‘how can I help you?’
- Kai’s advice on positioning: look at where target clients are already spending money. If they’re paying hundreds of dollars a month for Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer, they have a painful need and an investment mindset already. That’s where to set up alongside the cash flow.
- Both Nick and Kai started their retainer services by working backwards from ‘I want recurring revenue’ rather than from a validated problem. Both flag this as the wrong order, though Kai notes that launching underpriced at least generated early traction and social proof before price increases.
Read the transcript
We have an expensive problem.
Tell me more.
It is costing the business a lot of money, so it’s expensive. And it’s a problem, which means we we know that it exists, right? We’re not Donald Rumsfelding this operation and talking about unknown unknowns or known unknowns. We know that we have a problem. We know what the problem is. And we know that it is costing us. It is costing us in opportunity. We aren’t entering an untapped market. It is costing us in lost customers. We don’t have a website that performs well. We don’t have an optimized onboarding flow, that sort of thing. No matter what, it’s costing us, and it’s costing us money, right? In fact, we know how much it’s costing us, and that sucks too.
So tell me, why focus on this problem now instead of six months ago or six months from now?
Well, um It’s just been kind of eating at us for a really long time, and it’s never been a huge priority, right? It’s been one of those things that, like I know it’s happening, but I have this other fire to put out. And then I had to worry about hiring, and we’ve been growing really fast. And then I had to get on the Today show and talk about my business. Like they put on way too much makeup and then I broke out in this horrible acne thing and then I had to deal with my acne thing and then I had to It was just life, you know, like it was a lot of things. And then I started noticing, like, well, there was this problem, right? And The problem never went away. Like, we identified the problem nine months ago, right? But we didn’t really know if there was anybody capable of solving the expensive problem. So we’re stuck with acne and problem.
Did you did you do anything internally to try to address the problem once you had identified it?
I feebly told my developer to get on it, and then he put it at the bottom of his queue.
So he didn’t really feel it.
He didn’t really we never really built anything.
Right. And so when you look at the company right now with this insight, what would you call out as specifically broken or missing or not working? What’s holding you back?
Well, there’s nothing really holding us back. Like we’re still making business and getting customers and stuff. But hiring another developer. That’s one thing. Like we would need to resource the time. But even if we did hire the developer, it wouldn’t be a developer in this particular field of expertise, right? We would be hiring like I don’t know, like a Ruby developer and they would be handling our Rails app, but we wouldn’t be hiring a Ruby developer to manage, say, dunning emails on a Stripe integration or something like that. So there wasn’t necessarily like a thing. That we knew about, that we actually had to be addressing head-on, right? When we hired them, put another way, they would be hired And then we wouldn’t actually resource to solve the expensive problem. We would be resourcing to solve other problems like the fire and the acne and such and such.
So what it sounds like to me is there’s a couple problems at play here. One is you don’t have enough resources internally to tackle these problems as they come up, hence the need to hire a developer. The second is, as you mentioned earlier, the onboarding flow, making sure people are having the best user experience as they sign up and start using the app. And that’s sort of an unknown problem where You know it’s costing you money. You’re still making money nevertheless, but that’s the unknown in terms of solving it. You see that problem, but you’re not sure what steps to take to Identify it, quantify it, and start fixing it.
Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. Like, you can identify the problem, but you don’t know how to address it. You don’t know if the way that you address it is the Optimal way to address it, or if it’s either going to not solve the problem, possible, or it solves the problem but brings on three new problems, right? You can be plugging a leak in one place and then causing all these other knock-on effects that adversely affect the business. And so as a result, that brings on a certain amount of fear. Right? Like we are afraid of actually fixing this problem. Why? Because it might cause more problems, or we might be wasting resources. Or our developer said it would take 100 hours of work. Well, we would be spending 100 hours of work on this developer. It’s our only developer. So that sucks. And then we don’t even know if we’re actually addressing it. And that’s a whole different kind of frustrating, right? So within all of this is a variety of risk calculations and they’re we’re taking as many inputs as we possibly can about the expensive problem, and then deciding the best action to take right now is nothing. And so we never actually fixed the expensive problem. It remains an expensive problem.
And this connects to something that I often say about clients, problems and solutions, and consultants that Clients are wonderful at identifying the problems they’re experiencing because they live and breathe that problem every day. Our onboarding sucks, and yes, we know it. Thank you. People email us about it every day. But clients don’t necessarily know what solution to throw at it. It might be they can’t even identify a solution. It might be solutions have been proposed, but they’re wildly off the mark. It’s not an onboarding problem, it’s a traffic problem. Let’s triple the amount of traffic we have through PPC, and suddenly you’re bleeding money through AdWords. When you flip it around, I think you start seeing the inverse where Consultants, they aren’t that good at identifying the problems from the outside. You can’t look at a business and be like, I intuit through the energy of the business, they have a problem of onboarding. I shall approach them with a solution. We don’t know because we aren’t inside the business. But what we’re really good at as consultants is once we understand the shape and the form of the problem the company is experiencing, then we’re able to say like, okay, you’re experiencing this problem. Maybe there’s five, ten, fifteen different ways a problem could be solved, but drawing on my discipline, drawing on my positioning, drawing on my area of expertise, I’m able to propose solutions that I’m able to execute on or learn how to execute on. that provide direction to you as a business owner. So in the scenario where you as a business owner don’t know, like we know it’s costing us money, we need to hire a developer that won’t quite solve it, we don’t know what direction to take, well The pro the surface level problem is the company doesn’t know what the problem really is. And so a road mapping type engagement to help discover the shape of that problem makes the most sense. Beyond that, Once you as a consultant understand what the expensive problem is, then you’re able to say, hey, to move the company forward, we could do A, B or C. Here’s a proposal for option A, option B, or option C. Which option do we want to begin with to start solving this problem?
Absolutely. So I’m going to make a really tortured metaphor right now. I bike everywhere in the city, and I maintain my bike out of a little workshop that I have in my house. And it’s great. I really like it. In the practice of bike maintenance every day, you need maybe four tools, right? They’re basically a hex wrench, a pedal wrench. If you count grease and chain lubricant as tools, there you go. And a wire cutter. That’s it. That’s what you need to do for like 85% of maintenance on your bike. And 100% of daily maintenance on your bike, right? If you are running a business, you have, let’s assume your bike is the business, right? If you have a business and you’re doing things right, you have those tools on hand. You have the core essential things on hand But then this expensive problem comes along. It’s your bottom bracket. Your bottom bracket’s bearings have gotten stripped of grease, and they’re making a horrible sound when you pedal. Bottom bracket actually sees some of the most amount of stresses in any bicycle and is one of the hardest to actually service. Why is it hard to service? Because every bottom bracket has its own litany of custom tools and you don’t own them. So you take it to a mechanic, right? Most people are not crazy people like me and own their own bottom bracket tools and want to get their hands completely covered in grease. and repack chain loo or repack ball bearings into the bottom bracket, right? No, you go to an expert and you solve your problem. The bottom bracket is your expensive problem, right? It’s the thing that connects the pedals to actually pedal, right? And it’s essentially just a giant ball bearing that runs in the down tube of your bike. And most people don’t bother servicing that because it’s horrible. And that’s when you get the specialist involved into your business, right? So an expensive problem, this is why niche positioning is so critical. It’s really valuable from an info product standpoint because you’re able to educate around why the expensive problem is important. We’ve mentioned this on multiple previous episodes. And it’s also something that does not happen infrequently, right? As mentioned, a bottom bracket goes out of whack. Frequently, right? And it’s a $20 part. It’s an easy to service part, or it’s an easy to replace part, but it’s also a complete pain in the ass to service that part. So it’s some and it’s in every single bicycle, right? You cannot get a bottom bracket list bike as much as you would want to. And while you’re doing the daily quotidian nonsense of lubricating your chain and filling your tires and whatever have you, your bottom brackets bearings are getting stripped as you speak. You know that. It’s obvious, right? If I were writing a productized consulting page for a bottom bracket overhaul service, I would speak to those panes and say A bottom bracket sees the most amount of stresses in a bicycle because it’s where you’re kicking a lot. Meanwhile, it is. You know how hard it is to service. Let’s lay out a bottom bracket on the table with all of its parts there. And you see, like dozens of ball bearings and like a two-ounce tube of grease, and you’re like, oh, fuck. You’re right. It’s horrible. And it’s this visceral reaction that you have to it. It is not unlike the way that I talk about A-B testing. I say, you know you need to be A-B testing. If you have this much traffic, you know that this has been an enormous issue for you and your business, and you aren’t doing anything with it. Why aren’t you doing anything with it? And I call people out. Right, I say, these are the things that are preventing you from doing A-B testing, and it all comes down to fear. I’ve spent a long time building that thesis. It’s taken years, right? But that came about because I spent a long time researching what actually motivated people to. Commit horrible screw-ups regarding A-B testing, right? Like, and it involved talking to them. It involved doing post-mortems on projects that might have broken down. It involved. Questioning their motivations and really figuring it out. And that’s how drafts’ arguments around A-B testing have evolved from A-B testing can make you money to A-B testing is not necessarily a panacea or a sack of money button to you aren’t A-B testing well, to it involves a cultural shift and a mindset shift. We’re at that point now.
So you’ve dramatically changed how you’re defined, broad level, same expensive problem. I need A-B testing, where do I get A-B testing? We’ve narrowed in on a more specific, in Amy Hoy’s words, crispy definition of the actual problem a decision maker is experiencing before they reserve a consultation with you, before they move forward. But we’re still attacking the same problem overall. A-B testing, how do we get started with it?
Yes, that’s exactly right. Now, I think to turn this around, probably quite similar for you. Right. So what kinds of expensive problems are your customers actually experiencing?
Yeah, good question. And I started off from a point of believing it was My customers want to get on more podcasts or want to get guest articles placed and really want to achieve an outcome like growing their audience or exposing their product or service to A wider audience that they might not have reached earlier on. And that’s the point I started from through conversations with clients, through research, through conversations with prospects. I discovered I was 80% there, but really it’s more I know I should be doing this. I know how to do this. I don’t have enough time to do this. And it’s going to take you one-third of the time to do it that it would take me. And I’d much rather pay for that insight, expertise, and efficiency than stumble blindly in the dark until I find a door to go through. So it was really. Iterating and getting further on down. One question I’m interested in asking you is: what was that? What was the process of identifying A-B testing as both a problem to solve and a service offering you wanted to create. Before we had this refinement, when you first launched DraftRevise, How did you identify it as an expensive problem? What was that process like?
The process was slapdash and incorrect. Good. Is not what I would recommend to anyone listening to this podcast. I’ll tell you what the process was, and I’ll tell you what it should have been. Okay. So I um Had I every month, I not every month, every year I take one month off in my business that I call an intermission, and I still go to the office every day. I’m working on my business. It’s basically a self-enforced sabbatical from client work that I’m just going hard on that. I during that came up with the idea of draft revise by basically thinking, what is the Venn diagram overlap between UXE vague services that I could possibly answer with what it is I do. And because I had like an interaction design, user experience design, like classical user experience design background. And things that I can sell on a monthly retainer. I determined that it was reasonable like significant business goal for me to get on monthly retainer with a bunch of clients. I was sick of the like feast or famine cycle that was happening in Draft. And so I went completely backwards. This is the point where I should have paused and said, this isn’t right. Because I thought, I want retainer, how do I get to retainer? I’m seeing these problems, how do I solve these problems? That’s why it was incorrect. That is not what you should be doing. Everybody wants retainer income and they constantly ask me about it and then I throw cold water on it by saying you’re not solving any expensive problems that can be done on retainer. We spend 20 minutes brainstorming it and come to the exact same conclusion because you’re smart, and I’m smart, and we’re both coming at this problem through the exact same door. And we’re not finding Bowser. So that sucks. Now I put up DraftRevise as a one-off LARC because I thought nobody would actually spend $1,850 a month on A-B testing service lol. Or no, it was $650 a month, $18. 50 a quarter. Lol. $6. 50 a month. Remember the draft revised was $650 a month that I grandfathered people for like two and a half years. Bless their hearts. Oh. Oh mercy. I launched it, and of course, it like sold out immediately because I grievously underpriced myself. So, another thing I did that was incorrect was I did not actually do any like price validation or like market validation on How expensive the expensive problem was. So I didn’t do that at all, right? And if I had known better, I would have charged a commensurate amount of money out the gate, and I never did that. I never did that. It was a complete dumbass move, and I left potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table.
Devil’s advocate, it’s easy to point to that, but at the same time, by pricing it low. You got that tidal wave of people, which I know was a stressful life event, but it generated more interest. I think it got people involved and engaged in it and saying, wow, this is interesting. And then you jacked up the price. Had you not raised the price? There would be a serious error there, but starting priced under where you could be in the market, not necessarily the worst position to be in. Right.
Right. Yeah, no, I feel that. But I also think, you know, in hindsight, I left a lot of money on the table. But I was also like. I get why I did it, right? I made sounds preposterous. I made 80 grand a year at the time, which is like a pretty decent salary, but not a decent total comp, right? If you factor in health insurance and other benefits, like you’re getting comped way more than 80 grand a year. And so if that’s raw revenue that’s coming into the business, like that’s actually you’re taking a bath on it. And I thought at the time, like, 80 grand is actually not a horrible take. It maps to like a 35 grand salary, right? It’s not actually all that great. Especially for somebody in the tech industry. And I thought, well, now I’m making like $120,000. This is great. Like, I’m comfortable. I can plot a wedding, you know? Like I was thinking around that, and I didn’t have the kind of abundance mindset necessary to actually charge what I was worth. But this is getting a little further afield from the expensive problem bit.
In jumping back a couple threads, my approach was for my outreach services was very similar. I sat down in the park one day and said, base principle. I want all of my services to lead to a recurring retainer-based engagement. Why? So I avoid the feast or famine cycle. I don’t have to worry about I booked 17 one-off things, I booked zero one-off things. I booked 17 one-off things, I booked I wanted to avoid that wave. So I said, okay, top-level service offering is going to be retainer-based. Then I flipped it around and said, what are problems I’ve identified Clients that I work with currently or worked with in the past or in the market I want to service, what are problems where they’re willing to invest in a solution on a month-by-month basis? And I looked around and I said, oh, building links, that’s one of them. Getting on podcasts, that’s another of them. SEO maintenance. That’s a third one of them. And so I was able to say, okay, these are problems that people are willing to invest in on a month-by-month basis because there is a month-by-month output or month-by-month value to it. Let me construct those offerings. Let me validate those offerings by having conversations with decision makers, with prospects. Let me get a sales page up there and start getting feedback on it. And just start directing people towards it. I knew already people were saying, How do I get links to my e-commerce store? Or how do I get reviews for my products? Okay, let me define a retainer-based service offering that solves that problem for people. And see how the market reacts to it. And the market could react in three ways. The market could be like, hallelujah, here’s all the money. You’re overbooked for the next 12 months. The market could react, eh, we’re not so interested. Or the market could react in the middle where it’s like, I have sold a few seats. Okay, I now need to work on improving the value of this service offering. Yeah.
I think that there’s a lot of good stuff in there. Some valuable things about like trying to actually understand what expensive problems people are feeling. And you never, to be clear, you never have to do that as A worker in a company, right? Like if you’re being hired, the people hiring you are making these calculations by crafting a business offering that actually solves an expensive problem. They never tell you that. They never tell you that. This is like one of the grandest lies in all of American capitalism. You’re called in, and then you’re told, do this thing. And you’re never told why.
Pull this lever every 15 minutes. Okay, boss.
Pull this lever every 15 minutes. Okay, well, what is the lever connected to?
No, no, no, no, that’s above your pay grade. Sorry.
In the first ever conversation we had in person, I flew to Portland for a conference and we hung out for five and a half hours. And I remember drunkenly rambling about trying to figure out where the money comes from from my clients, like what actually motivates them in a business standpoint. And yeah, that teaches you a hell of a lot about how the system works. And it’s so, so important to be doing that.
Yeah, understanding where that cash is flowing. I’ve used the metaphor often. It’s valuable as consultants to set up our agencies alongside the river of money. And we could see that there’s a river of money when people are investing in other services, like Shopify, for example. Our colleague Kurt Elster has done a wonderful job of setting up his business next to people who are already paying money for Shopify and Shopify add-ons, which means People are already approaching this with an investment mindset. If they’re willing to lay out the cash, they’re willing to invest in having consultants help them better. optimize their store, make more revenue. And I think trying to identify, if not where the money is coming from, which can be hard at times, but where else is the money going? And then setting up your business to be alongside that cash flow. That’s an intelligent way to approach it. Because if you’re able to say, oh, they’re spending, you know, $1,500 a month on this additional service or on this package, okay, great. There obviously is a painful need here. How could I facilitate it? How could I help it? I even look at people investing in Visual Website Optimizer or Optimizely. They’re paying hundreds of dollars a month for access to these tools. Here’s an opportunity to serve as somebody who could optimize their experience with these tools.
Yeah, I mean, it’s like the equivalent of buying Adobe Photoshop and then just using it to like crop and straighten photos.
You’ve seen me use Photoshop, eh?
Hey, right? Well, you’ve seen Beeves Photoshop.
But it is important to understand where that money is coming from and where that money is going. Because if you understand where that money is coming from, Are there opportunities to increase how much you’re making there? And that’s a large, broad, abstract question, but there’s hundreds of different ways we as consultants can answer that question using our discipline. Are there opportunities to reduce how much money you’re spending on other things? Again, Broad abstract question, but there’s hundreds of ways we can improve and improve performance. We wrote a CRUD app that makes it so the person who was spending 40 hours a week entering stuff into Excel now takes one hour a week. Congratulations, you saved 39 billable hours a week.
I even told my assistant, the goal is to replace me with you and you with a robot. And she’s like, please replace me with a robot, because when I replace Kelly with a robot, then she has more discretionary time to do whatever like higher level thinky things are necessary in the business and identify more opportunities for her to work effectively. And that makes everything better, right? So now there’s a swarm of robots that my assistant is commanding, like the guy in WhatsApp dock, and it’s great.
But jumping back a point, how so what advice would you give to a consultant who’s breaking onto the scene today, starting an agency has Two or three years with a discipline, but is saying, How do I identify an expensive problem to solve? How would you recommend they approach it today?
Oh my God, research forums, go to conferences and get people drunk. Take people out for coffee. I’m serious. Like, go out and be like, what are the biggest things that you’re dealing with in your business right now? Survey people. Start and then once you get that together, start like following hunches about it. So, I wrote a whole thing about how to create productized consulting offerings, which we’ll link in the show notes called Following the Hunch. And it Yeah, I mean a lot of it is like, okay, well, you come up with this offering. Once you’ve come up with the offering, run it past a guinea pig. See how it works. See how long it takes you to fulfill the thing. Test it with somebody for free or cheap. before you send it out to paying customers. Try and pin down what the value is behind it. I’m serious. Like go on forums and go on hacker news. Go on Stack Overflow. What are the biggest problems people are dealing with? What are the biggest problems you’re opinionated about? Like, talk about it and try solving problems around it.
For my business, one of the best investments I ever made was a paid for e-commerce fuel. It was something like $80 per quarter. And it was just a bunch of e-commerce store owners getting together and posting about their experience running a store. And I did not contribute more than twice. But what I did do was. Read through the most popular questions in like the SEO, the link building, the traffic, the blogger relationship categories, and just say What questions come up again and again? What are people searching for an answer for? Where are they linking to that is providing an answer? And took those. Continual questions or that continual searching on their part as an indication that, okay, this is a problem that people need help solving. And once I had that as sort of a first-round base of data. Then it was easy to approach e-commerce store owners I knew or friends would refer me to and just say questions like, Do you work with bloggers? Yeah, we’ve tried it before, but it’s been really hard. What’s been really hard about it? Ah, we don’t have like a defined system, and we’re not sure on how to track the ROI, and it takes a lot of time. I’m busy running the company What would it look like ideally? And from that, I was able to go from: okay, I’ve identified these problems in these online sources or these conversations or these conferences to, okay, now I’m talking to actual business owners. Pitching them on the service, but asking questions that are pain-focused. Is this a pain you’re experiencing? Yes. Tell me more about that. Tell me more about that answer. And collecting more data. And it got to a point where I was able to say, okay. I don’t have a perfect understanding, but maybe I have a 60% understanding of what this expensive problem actually is. Now I could craft a service offering that targets it. And my service offerings have changed dramatically since that first day, but The same thread carries through. I identified a problem and I’m iterating on the solution I provide as a consultant. The problem, I think, is Forever. The problem is something people will always experience. The solution I’m able to offer, that’s malleable. That’s something that could change over time.
Yeah, absolutely. That’s where I would start. I mean, we can get into some like 500-level stuff in future episodes of the podcast where you have an offering together. When do you know how to change it and like whether to kill it off? Like, that’s a bigger question. But for now, I think this kind of Tackles it pretty well and gives people some like first steps.
So let’s break from form and summarize the takeaways from this one. So, dear consultant listening to this episode, dear independent business owner. What are the three or five things you should do if you’re searching for those expensive problems? If you’re trying to move from a generalist positioning to a more expensive positioning, what steps should you take?
Yeah. Okay. Do a lot of research. I love talking about research. Go into forums. Take people out for coffee. I’m dead serious. Like just read as a Like disinterested third-party, like what expensive problems people are feeling. What is in vogue right now? Why is it in vogue? What motivates people to find the next new thing? Understanding answers to those questions in a very like detailed and nuanced way is tremendously valuable to the long-term viability of your business.
Yeah, I agree with both of those. The ROI on a coffee date or a lunch date is absolutely insane. Like, let’s say you drop 40 bucks on sandwiches for two people, and you get to Pick somebody’s brain for 60 minutes. This doesn’t need to be a CEO. This could just be like a director of Badonka Donk inside of a company. But if they’re in that target market, nah, if you I know you.
The CEO doesn’t have dirt on their hands. It’s the like, you know, sub-VP of whatever that actually has to deal with all of the people making it. They know what’s up, you know?
Right. Yeah. And just honestly, giving them, I come to this again and again, but it’s less, I think, about Asking a specific set of questions and more about creating an intentional space where they are able to talk about their experience working in this industry. That’s where they just start like emotional therapy dumping, and they’re like, These are the issues I’m facing. These are the problems the company is facing. Not like NDA violating, but like these are the things that keep me up at night. I am stressed because I’m not sure how we’re going to close 15 more leads. Oh, tell me more about that. And then you start getting into what the actual issue is. Our sales process is broken. We don’t have a qualification process. Our marketing doesn’t align with our value proposition. And all of those, all of these painful things that people could describe in those meetings. those become the seeds of an expensive problem you could solve as a consultant.
Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. And just to be clear, like when you’re taking people out for coffee, don’t be like, just pick my brain. You know, nobody ever wanted their brain picked. Come on. Just like Talk about what I would love to go on a coffee date with you. I’m trying to think about X, Y, and Z. Here’s what the outcome is. And then, last thing you ask at the coffee date: how can I help you? Yep.
Yep. Such a valuable question to ask.
People take coffee dates when there’s something in it for them. Because we’re all selfishly motivated. I do it. You do it. But yeah. So that’s kind of a last parting word about that.
Yeah, but no, if you’re searching for expensive problems to solve in your practice, research, invaluable. Conversations with people, invaluable. And realizing you aren’t going to get it right or perfect in terms of pricing or the offering the first time. Solutions, there’s a hundred of them for any problem. Start by identifying that problem and then iterate through the solutions. And try, if you can, to identify how expensive a problem really is to the company. Oh, our deployment process is a bit broken. Okay, how much is that costing you? It takes like 30 minutes to fix once every other month. Okay, that’s not really that expensive. Oh, our website is literally on fire and we haven’t had any sales in four months. Oh, that probably is costing you money. Let’s dive into that problem a little more. Right, right, totally.
And then you profit. That’s it. Yeah, you just are awash in money from expensive problems that you’ve solved.
Scrooge McDuck into that bathtub, my friend, because you’ve got it solved.