The money is in the problems, not the product

Everybody wants to build the thing. Almost nobody wants to go find the problem.

I was on a call this week with a couple of guys I'm building with, and one of them asked a question I hear ALL the time.

"Do we build something for an industry and then go find customers? Or do we find somebody and build something bespoke for them?"

And look, I get why people ask it. Building a product feels productive. You can see it. You can demo it. You can put it on a landing page.

But here's what I've learned watching this play out over and over...

The money is in identifying the problems.

That's it. That's the whole business.

Not the app. Not the SaaS. Not the dashboard. The money is out in the field, in the conversations, where somebody says "I've got this thing, but I'm stuck HERE, and I want to get THERE." You hear that, and then you go find the solution.

And I know that sounds ambiguous. Because it is. The solution could be technical. Maybe they need a dashboard or some automation built. It could be on the content side. Maybe they need a community or a newsletter or somebody to run their socials. It could be a connection to a person who already does the thing they need.

That's the point. You're not a dev shop. You're not an agency. You're the NODE.

Here's what I mean by that. Over the last year I've had dozens and dozens of conversations with people who have a unique skill set, or a unique tool, or a unique app. And every one of those conversations goes into the ecosystem. So now, at any point, whatever somebody needs... I probably know a person, or I've seen a tool, or I've built something close to it.

Everything connects back to the node. And the money is in just making that connection out in the field.

Let me make this really concrete with a fake example.

There are a LOT of plumbers doing a million dollars a year with two or three trucks who are still running things on the back of a napkin. Nobody's running their leads. Nobody's following up with last year's customers. Their website hasn't been touched since 2019.

That guy is not going to buy your SaaS. He's not going to sit through your onboarding.

But if you sit down with him and ask "who are you, what do you actually do, how do you do it right now?"... the cracks show up on their own. And a lot of those cracks are genuinely simple to fill now. Ads that used to take a team can be built by one person with AI in an afternoon. Follow-up sequences that never got sent can run in the background. A picture of a business card can turn into a newsletter subscriber.

None of this is new. What's new is that the cost and the friction dropped through the floor. So one moderately talented person with the right pieces in front of them can do what used to take three hires.

And if you save a small business from making one or two hires, you just saved them five to ten grand a month. Charging a couple thousand for that is a no-brainer.

One more thing on this, because it came up. Somebody always asks about lead gen. And yeah, everybody wants leads. But if the client can't afford ad spend, don't pretend you can make that cost disappear. Somebody has to pay for the ads.

So go semi-organic. What does their social look like? Do they have a newsletter? Do they have a podcast? One of the best plays I've seen for a local business is starting a hyper-local podcast. Not a national show. A show about YOUR town, talking to people in YOUR town. That builds a local following faster than almost anything.

Okay. Here's the takeaway.

Stop asking "what should I build?" Start asking "who's stuck, and where?"

Go have ten conversations this week with people who run something. Don't pitch. Just ask what they do, how they do it, and where it hurts. Write down every crack you hear.

The cracks are the business. Everything else is just plumbing.

Stay in the fight, Kevin