ON BUSINESS GROWTH || If You're Looking to Grow Your Business Figure Out if You are Solving a Consumer Itch or Pain
After a few years of running your business, you might question whether or not you want to scale. Sometimes the question is whether your business can scale.
If you aren't solving a big enough customer pain, then while you can still grow your business, the size of your business will likely hit a ceiling earlier than you'd like.
Continually growing a business means more customer demand is waiting to be satisfied by your products and services. But what if you feel that regardless of what you do, it seems like your business has hit the ceiling?
This may be because your business solution is a nice to have for customers, scratching a small itch for the customer; when your solution only scratches a small itch, then it makes sense that the market isn’t willing to pay as much for it or many other suppliers are offering similar, substitute solutions. The difference between a million-dollar and a billion-dollar business is usually whether you’ve identified a real consumer pain and built a simple enough solution for most of the target audience to adopt it swiftly (before me-too products or services pop up).
If your business solves a real, burning pain for the customer, they will be willing to pay more to resolve it. Better yet, if your solution is a painkiller that helps a big group of people, then that's when you have a higher probability of scaling your business because you have something the market needs.
Are you scratching an itch or solving a real pain?
So what does it mean to solve a big consumer pain?
To solve the problem of taxis blowing by and leaving you stranded on the street because they don’t feel like picking you up, we have Uber.
To solve the problem of connecting people around the world, we have social platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook.
To solve the problem of having to carry a pager, a phone, an iPod, and a laptop, we have the iPhone, which lets you carry an entire entertainment unit with a camera, tv shows, music, and a phone in your hands to stay connected with and see the world.
To solve the problem of high hotel prices making travel inaccessible to some, we have Airbnb. Since the business's inception, the platform has become a spot to look for unique stays worldwide in addition to economical accommodation for travellers.
To solve the problem of allowing regular people to set up a website and allow them to create engaging social media creatives without recruiting a designer or website developer, you have online services like squarespace.com and Canva.
To make people look great regardless of what they eat on a date night, we've got Spanx.
While hindsight is 20/20, the common thread between these services is that they identified a real need. If you want to open a cafe, bakery, photography studio, marketing agency or any other business, by all means, but it's likely that your brand works within the confines of the local market and faces heavy competition because there will be a wide range of service providers in the same industry.
As the economy puts on the brakes, it’s essential that you invest time in figuring out a way for your business to evolve and anticipate new or growing consumer pains.
So the next time you ask yourself why your business seems to have stalled in its growth, it might be because your business solution is scratching an itch; it's time to evolve your business and solve a real consumer pain.
Pay attention to what people are looking for and start exercising your mind in crafting simple and elegant solutions. The best businesses are based on simple concepts that focus on resolving burning issues, so if you use these two things as your criteria, you will have the basic foundation upon which to build a business.
