Problem
State the customer's pain clearly enough that the audience feels the urgency.
What & why
Naming the problem first works because tension tends to create demand for resolution. Once a listener feels a specific pain, they lean in for the fix, so your solution lands on prepared ground instead of arriving unrequested. A concrete fact paired with a human consequence is easy to picture and remember, which usually beats an abstract trend that slides past. Framing the cost of the status quo also reframes inaction as the risky choice, lowering resistance to whatever you propose next.
Before & after
“Communication is broken in the modern workplace. Teams are struggling with too many tools.”
“Engineering teams lose 5 hours per week context-switching between Slack, Jira, and GitHub. That's $47,000 per engineer per year in lost productivity, and it's why critical bugs slip through.”
When you’ll use it
Framing the opportunity for investors who have never experienced the pain firsthand
Explaining to enterprise buyers why the status quo is costing them money
Setting up a demo by showing what life looks like without your product
Writing the opening paragraph of an accelerator application
Presenting market research findings that validate customer pain
Pro tip
Make the problem feel costly, frustrating, or risky. If the room shrugs, the pain is still too abstract.
Questions & answers
What if my product solves multiple problems?
How do I frame a problem for a market that doesn't know it has one?
Learn more
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