when it hurts enough, duct tape

Uku Tomikas, CEO at Messente Communications, shared this idea on the CXChronicles podcast over a year ago.

Businesses that used to be doing well are doing not so well, because they thought there were solving a real problem.

Turns out some of them weren’t solving real problems. Or maybe they were solving problems with a little ‘p’ instead of PROBLEMS. Know what I mean?

Uku then says that he was once taught to find problems by looking “for duct tape.”

“Because if it hurts enough, the company has already tried to fix it themselves.” They’ve already pulled out the duct tape and plugged the hole or lashed two things together, all in the hope of quickly solving a problem and moving on.

The duct tape is your opportunity. It’s a sign that there is a problem worth solving and that someone has decided it was worth the effort and few cents worth of tape to fix it.

For those of us with products already built, we should know what problems we solve already*. If you’re just starting out and aren’t certain that you know the problem, looking for duct tape is great advice.

(*If you have a product and are only now looking for a problem to solve with it… God bless. I’ve been there too)

Something I’ve been noodling on recently is both the big problem we aim to solve at Accoil (smashing churn for B2B SaaS companies) and the little problems we can also help with.

The more related problems, big or small, we can solve for our customers, the better off everyone is. So, I’m looking for duct tape to find little ways we can help.

An example of duct tape: as more Saas products adopt usage-based pricing, every customer has to ask “how many MAU do we actually have?” What if we could give them a simple calculator or guide to figure it out?

It helps them get an answer they need without more spreadsheeting and it means that when they talk to us we can have a clear idea of what our usage-based pricing will be.

Whether it’s a big problem you’re hunting or a little quick fix, find the duct tape and provide a better solution than the silver stuff.

When it hurts enough, duct tape. And where there’s duct tape, there’s opportunity.

Peter

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