Why it matters
A business begins with a change someone wants badly enough to act on. A broad topic such as “wellness” gives you very little to test. A specific person struggling with a specific job gives you somewhere to start. Your first goal is to find a problem you can investigate with people you can actually reach.
How to do it
Choose a reachable group.
List three groups you understand or can get access to. Be precise: independent studio owners who run the front desk themselves is more useful than small businesses.
Look for a recent struggle.
Think about a task that caused delay, lost money, repeated work, or an awkward workaround. Describe what happened, when it happened, and what the person was trying to accomplish.
Write a testable problem statement.
Use: “[Person] struggles to [job] when [situation], which causes [consequence]. Today, they use [workaround].” Treat every part as an assumption until you have evidence.
Choose the riskiest assumption.
Ask what would make the opportunity disappear. Perhaps the problem happens only once a year, the workaround is good enough, or nobody controls a budget for it. Investigate that first.
A worked example
Small businesses need better software.
Independent fitness studio owners lose time filling last-minute class cancellations. Today, they manually message a waitlist.
This is an illustrative hypothesis. You still need to learn whether it happens, how often, and whether the owners care enough to change.
A common trap
Falling in love with your proposed solution before understanding the problem. Put the feature list aside for the first conversations.
Try it yourself
Choose one reachable group. Write one problem statement and list five people you could ask about their experience this week.
This practice note stays in this browser tab. Download it if you want to keep it.