Asher's Blog

At one of the last events where I was invited to speak, somebody asked me a very good question: how do you know when a problem is big enough to build a company around, rather than merely something people complain about?

It is an important distinction because people complain about thousands of things every day. They complain about traffic, their banks, software, customer service, taxes, employers and the cost of living, but a complaint is not automatically a business opportunity. Sometimes the problem is irritating but not painful enough for anybody to change behaviour. Sometimes people want the problem solved but are unwilling or unable to pay for the solution. Sometimes the market is large, but the proposed product is not meaningfully better than what people already use. Sometimes founders correctly identify a real problem and still build a bad business around it.

The standard startup answer is to talk about market size, and market size certainly matters. If only twenty people in the world could ever need what you are building, you probably do not have a venture-scale company, no matter how much those twenty people love it. Yet market size is not the first question I would ask. Before calculating how many people might theoretically experience a problem, I want to know whether a smaller group of real people care deeply about the solution we have already created.

How many people love this product? How often do they use it? What happens when it is unavailable? Do they tell other people about it without being paid? Do they reorganise part of their work or life around it? Are they willing to tolerate the imperfections of an early product because the underlying value is already indispensable?

A problem begins to look like the foundation of a company when the solution creates not merely interest, but attachment.

Complaints are cheap; changed behaviour is evidence

One of the easiest mistakes in entrepreneurship is to treat what people say as if it were identical to what they will do. If you ask someone whether they would like a faster, cheaper and easier service, almost everybody will say yes. If you ask whether they would use an app that improves their finances, helps their employees or saves time, they may praise the idea enthusiastically. None of that proves they will create an account, complete onboarding, move their data, change an established habit or pay you.

People are often sincere when they praise an idea. They are simply answering a hypothetical question without experiencing the costs of switching. Real behaviour begins when something has to be sacrificed: money, time, attention, familiarity, data, political capital inside an organisation or the comfort of doing nothing.

This is why I place more weight on actions than compliments. A person who says, “This is brilliant,” has given you encouragement. A person who brings three colleagues into the product, uploads company information, pays an invoice and returns the following month has given you evidence. A business that says your solution would be helpful has identified a possible need. A business that assigns an executive to implement it and accepts the internal disruption of changing systems has revealed a much stronger need.

The first test of whether a problem is company-sized is therefore not how loudly people complain. It is whether the problem is strong enough to change behaviour.

Start with one hundred happy users

One product story that has always resonated with me is Paul Buchheit’s account of building Gmail. Buchheit, who created Gmail at Google, described an iterative process of making users happy, and the team worked toward having one hundred happy internal users before launching more broadly. His emphasis was not on impressing millions of people with a grand announcement; it was on building something a much smaller group genuinely valued. The Y Combinator conversation with Buchheit remains a useful study in how enormous products can begin with concentrated usefulness rather than immediate mass adoption.

That principle is deeper than the number one hundred. It is better to have a small group who love your product than a very large group who are mildly interested in it. Mild interest does not create resilience. It disappears when a competitor reduces its price, when your marketing budget stops or when the novelty wears off. Love, in the product sense, produces repeated use, patience, recommendations and a genuine sense of loss when the product is removed.

The Gmail story also teaches something about sequence. You do not need the entire market to love you before you launch, and you certainly do not need to solve every possible use case. You need enough people in a defined group to show you that something important is happening. Once you understand why those people love the product, you can look for more people who share the same need.

Founders are sometimes too eager to broaden the audience. Ten users ask for ten different things, and the founder begins to build ten different products. That usually produces complexity rather than love. The better question is: which users receive the deepest value from what we do, what do they have in common, and what would make the product dramatically better for them?

The path to a large market often begins by serving a narrow group so well that they become proof of what the product can become.

What does it mean for customers to love a product?

Product love is an attractive phrase, but founders should not use it vaguely. Customers do not have to write poems about enterprise software or become emotionally attached to a payroll platform in the way they love a person. In many categories, love looks like trust, relief and dependence.

A finance manager may love a product because it allows her to complete a difficult monthly process without fear. An employer may love it because employees are paid correctly and statutory obligations are not forgotten. A logistics business may love a routing tool because it reduces fuel costs and makes delivery times predictable. A parent may love a savings product because it converts an uncertain hope for a child into a disciplined plan.

The emotion comes from the outcome, not merely the interface.

You can observe that love through several signals. Customers return frequently enough for the nature of the product. They complete the important actions rather than merely logging in. They retain the product when a free trial ends. They recommend it to people who resemble them. They complain when something breaks because they depend on it, and they invest time in giving feedback because they want it to improve. They may even resist an attempt to remove it from their organisation.

Retention is usually more revealing than registration. A thousand people may register because of a promotion, while fifty remain because the product solves something important. Referral is more revealing than social-media excitement because recommending a product puts some of the customer’s own credibility at stake. Willingness to pay is more revealing than praise because payment forces the customer to compare your value against every other use of the same money.

One familiar product-market-fit test, associated with Sean Ellis, asks active users how they would feel if they could no longer use the product. The often-cited benchmark is that if at least 40 per cent say they would be “very disappointed,” the company may have a strong product-market-fit signal. It is a heuristic rather than a law, and the result can be misleading if the respondents are badly selected, but the question itself is powerful: would your disappearance create a meaningful loss?

That is far better than asking whether people like your logo.

Your best users are unpaid product owners

When you have a close group of users who care deeply about the product, they become something like trusted advisers. They understand the problem from inside their own work and can show you where your assumptions are wrong. They are almost like unpaid product owners, although we should never forget that their time is valuable and their generosity deserves respect.

These users can tell you which part of the product creates the greatest relief, which steps feel unnecessarily difficult, which failure would destroy their trust and which new feature would merely be nice to have. They can show you how the product is actually used, which may be very different from the journey your team imagined in a meeting room.

The founder’s job is not to build every request. Customers are experts in their pain and experience, but they may not always be experts in product architecture, strategy or the needs of the wider market. If five customers request five different features, the answer is not automatically to place all five on the roadmap. You must listen beneath the requests and identify the common job they are trying to complete.

A customer may ask for a particular report, but the deeper need could be confidence before a regulatory inspection. Another may ask for an export button, while the real problem is that a senior executive needs information in a format the existing workflow does not provide. If you build only the literal request, you may add complexity without resolving the underlying problem.

Good customer conversations move from “What feature do you want?” to questions such as: What were you trying to accomplish? What happened the last time you attempted it? What does the current process cost you? Who else is involved? What goes wrong? What have you already tried? What would success look like? What would make you unwilling to return to the previous method?

The purpose is not to collect opinions. It is to understand behaviour, stakes and context.

Measure the pain, not merely the population

Once early love is visible, market size becomes more meaningful. A market is not simply the number of human beings who could theoretically use a product. It is the number of suitable customers who experience the problem strongly enough, have the authority and resources to adopt a solution, and can be reached at an economically sensible cost.

Nigeria has a population exceeding two hundred million, but “two hundred million Nigerians” is not a market definition. How many people experience the particular problem? How frequently? How are they solving it today? What do they spend in money, labour, delay, risk or anxiety? Can they afford your proposed price? Do they control the buying decision? Can you distribute the product to them reliably?

The same discipline applies across Africa and the rest of the world. A founder may point to millions of small businesses, but those businesses are not identical. Some have no digital records, some cannot afford the service, some operate in jurisdictions your product does not support, and some do not experience the problem often enough to change. The realistic initial market may be employers of a particular size, in specific sectors, with a defined operational complexity and an identifiable decision-maker.

That narrower answer is not a sign that the company lacks ambition. It is the beginning of an honest strategy.

I find it useful to evaluate pain across a few dimensions. How severe is the consequence when the problem is not solved? How frequently does it occur? How much is already spent on workarounds? Is the problem becoming more urgent because of regulation, technology or changing behaviour? Does solving it unlock revenue, reduce cost, prevent loss or create peace of mind? Is one person affected, or does the problem spread through an entire organisation?

A rare inconvenience affecting millions may be less commercially attractive than a monthly problem affecting one hundred thousand businesses, especially when each occurrence carries financial or regulatory risk. Frequency and consequence can make a seemingly “boring” problem extremely valuable.

Look for evidence in the existing workaround

One of the strongest signs that a problem matters is that people already spend something to solve it badly. They may use spreadsheets, WhatsApp messages, paper files, manual reconciliation, several disconnected vendors or employees whose time is consumed by repetitive work. The current solution may be inefficient, but its existence proves that the job cannot simply be ignored.

If nobody spends money, time, attention or reputation on the problem, you should ask whether it is truly urgent. You may still be early to an important change, but you have more work to do because you must create both the category and the demand.

Existing workarounds also help you estimate value. If a company employs four people to perform a process manually, suffers recurring errors and pays penalties when deadlines are missed, the economic burden is visible. A product that removes most of that burden can price against real value. If the customer’s alternative is free, effortless and satisfactory, your product must create a substantially different benefit before adoption makes sense.

Founders often describe their competitor as another startup, but the most important competitor may be a spreadsheet, an employee, an accountant, a bank branch, a notebook or the decision to tolerate the problem. Understanding that competitor tells you what your product must beat.

Love without economics is not yet a company

There is another side to the answer. Even when customers love a product, you should not automatically scale it. You also need a credible economic story.

How will the company generate revenue or cash flow? What does it cost to acquire a customer? How long does the customer remain? What does it cost to serve that customer well? Does each additional customer strengthen the business or deepen its losses? If capital is required to expand, how will that capital create additional value, and what evidence suggests it can eventually be returned or multiplied?

This is where founders must separate a loved product from a sustainable company. A service can be beloved because it is heavily subsidised, underpriced or supported by manual work that will collapse at scale. Customers may love receiving more value than they pay for, but investors and founders cannot finance that imbalance forever.

The economics do not need to be perfect at the beginning. Early companies frequently do unscalable work to understand customers, and infrastructure costs may decline as volume grows. What matters is whether you understand the path. Which costs are temporary? Which improve with scale? Which become worse? What will customers eventually pay? What must retention look like for the model to work? Which assumptions have been demonstrated, and which still depend on hope?

Scaling magnifies whatever is already present. If customers love the product and the unit economics are improving, scale can multiply value. If onboarding is broken, customers leave quickly and every transaction loses money, scale can simply accelerate the company’s death.

Before scaling, the founder needs a coherent story connecting capital to an operating outcome: we will invest this amount in these capabilities, reach this type of customer through this channel, earn this revenue with this margin, retain customers for this reason and use the resulting cash flow or enterprise value to reward the people who supplied the capital.

That story will contain uncertainty, but it must not contain magic.

Do not confuse fundraising with validation

Capital can create the appearance that a problem has been validated. A strong founder tells a persuasive story, respected investors participate, the announcement receives publicity, and everybody assumes the market has spoken. It has not. Investors have expressed a view about the future; customers still have to express their view through adoption, retention and payment.

Fundraising may give you time to discover whether the problem is company-sized, but it does not answer the question. In fact, too much capital before learning can make the answer harder to see. The team grows, spending increases and everyone becomes emotionally invested in defending the original idea. It becomes painful to admit that users are not returning or that the market is smaller than expected.

Constraint can preserve honesty. When resources are limited, founders have to stay close to customers, identify what creates value and make choices. They cannot build everything, so they must discover what matters most.

The ideal time to raise expansion capital is not when you have merely identified a complaint. It is when you have evidence of love, a sufficiently large reachable market and an economic model that deserves acceleration.

The signals that tell me to keep building

If I were answering the event question again, I would look for a combination of signals rather than one magical metric.

First, the problem has consequence. Leaving it unresolved costs customers meaningful money, time, opportunity, trust or peace of mind.

Second, the problem recurs or creates a sufficiently large one-time transaction. Frequent problems produce repeated demand, while major infrequent problems can support substantial value per customer.

Third, customers already attempt to solve it. Their workarounds reveal both urgency and the shape of the opportunity.

Fourth, a defined group loves the product. They use it, return, pay, complain constructively, refer others and would be genuinely disappointed if it disappeared.

Fifth, you understand who those people are. “Everyone” is rarely a useful first customer segment. The strongest early users share circumstances that help you find others like them.

Sixth, the wider reachable market is large enough for the kind of company you want to build. A profitable specialised business and a venture-backed global company do not require the same market size, capital or growth rate. Founders should be honest about which one they are building.

Seventh, there is a credible path to sustainable economics. The revenue, cost to serve, retention, margin and capital requirements do not have to be fully mature, but they must point toward a business rather than permanent subsidy.

Finally, the company has a repeatable story and distribution path. You know how to explain the value in language customers understand, and you are learning how to reach them without depending entirely on the founder’s personal relationships.

No single signal is enough. A large market without love produces expensive indifference. Love without a large enough market may produce a wonderful small business but not the company investors expect. Growth without retention fills a leaking bucket. Revenue without healthy margins can conceal fragility. Capital without discipline can delay the moment when reality becomes unavoidable.

Build love before you buy scale

Founders naturally think about expansion. We imagine new countries, larger teams, enterprise customers, partnerships and capital. Ambition is useful, but ambition should not cause us to skip the intimate stage in which we learn why anybody cares.

Return to your users. Watch them use the product. Ask what they were doing before they found you. Ask what they would do if you disappeared tomorrow. Study the people who remain and the people who leave. Look at referrals, repeated use, retention, willingness to pay and the operational consequences your product changes. Treat your best users as advisers, while maintaining the judgment to solve the underlying problem rather than every literal request.

Then complete the business story. Determine how the company will make money, how capital will be used, what must be true for the economics to improve and how you will reach the wider market. Do not scale because the problem sounds enormous in a presentation. Scale because real customers have demonstrated that the solution matters and because your model shows that serving more of them can create durable value.

The best evidence that a problem is big enough is not the volume of complaints surrounding it. It is the depth of dependence your solution creates in a small group, multiplied by the number of similar people you can economically reach.

Find the first hundred people who love what you have built. Understand exactly why they love it. Prove that serving the next thousand will strengthen rather than weaken the company. Once those pieces come together, you are no longer trying to turn a complaint into a business.

You are standing in front of something worth scaling.