The problem people have is not always the one they can name
Some of the best products answer a need their users would never have put into words. The difficulty is that imagined needs look the same from the outside.
You have to solve a problem that people actually have. But it’s not always a problem that they know they have, so that’s tricky.
Before del.icio.us existed, Joshua Schachter kept a long list of interesting links in a plain text file and shared some of them on the web. In 2003, while he was working in finance, he turned the habit into a website where anyone could save bookmarks online and label them with short tags instead of filing them into folders. Other people could see the links and tags, which turned private bookmarking into a way of discovering what others found interesting. Yahoo bought the service in 2005.
Few people in 2003 would have said they had a bookmarking problem. Browsers already saved links, and most users never thought about it. But the symptoms were everywhere: people emailed links to themselves, lost their bookmarks when they changed computers and could never find the article they had read last week. The need was real; it just had no name, so nobody asked for a solution.
That is the tricky part Schachter describes. If people know they have a problem, they search for solutions and a new product can be tested against their demand. If they do not, a founder has to infer the need from behavior, and inference is easy to get wrong.
Plenty of products have been built for needs their founders inferred and customers did not share. Iridium spent billions putting satellites into orbit so that people could make phone calls from anywhere on earth. The need was real for a small number of sailors, soldiers and explorers, but most travelers already had a mobile signal where they went, and the company filed for bankruptcy in 1999, less than a year after launch.
The difference between del.icio.us and Iridium lies in the evidence. Schachter had watched himself and others go through awkward workarounds to solve the problem, which showed the need existed, even unnamed. Iridium’s case rested on a forecast of how people would behave. A useful rule is to look for workarounds: text files, emails to oneself, spreadsheets held together by hand. Where people already spend effort on a clumsy fix, they have the problem, whether or not they could describe it.
del.icio.us has had a difficult year. Yahoo said in December that it would find a new home for the service, and its future is uncertain. That says more about how Yahoo ran it than about whether the need was real. Millions of people used it for years to solve a problem they had never asked anyone to solve.