Turning Pain into Opportunity
Inspiration for new business ideas and propositions comes from a wide range of places, but consistently one of the most fruitful ways to generate ideas for profitable, scalable new ventures is to address customer pains and frustrations. Plenty of successful companies have tapped into customer pain to build their businesses: Xerox was founded by a patent attorney who was tired of hand-copying law books at the library; Ryan Air and Easyjet exploited a mass-market desire for travel that was unreachable due to the previously high cost of flying; and more recently, Funding Circle, a peer-to-peer lending start-up is rapidly growing by connecting small businesses with much needed funding that is often unobtainable from traditional banks.
Identifying customer pain and responding to it in new ways is something that many entrepreneurs do well, but it is also something that innovators and proposition developers in big companies can do to achieve breakthrough growth. We set out some basic steps below that you can follow to find the pains that really frustrate your customers – and that they are most willing to pay to solve.
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