Some venture ideas are not born in front of a whiteboard.
They feel more like a small thorn caught in your throat. You do not necessarily begin by wanting to build a company. You may not even want to build a product. You simply keep seeing the same situation, keep feeling that something is off, and the more you look at it, the harder it is to ignore.
I have come to believe that many worthwhile ideas do not begin with “I have a clever idea”.
They begin with:
This is genuinely uncomfortable, and it is not just me.
This series is called From Pain to Venture not because “pain point” sounds entrepreneurial, but because many people go wrong at the first step.
They are not incapable of building.
They rush towards the solution before understanding the problem.
Essence
As you read these 11 essays, keep the following passage in view. It is the core thinking principle I have relied on for years when solving problems. It works like an overall map, helping you understand what this entire series is doing: not discussing tools in fragments, but taking you step by step from discovering a problem, to understanding it, to analysing it, and finally to forming a solution.
1. Aspiration
We intend, for ① which people in ② which specific situation, to provide ③ what products and services, so that they may reverse the current condition of ④ what major unmet expectation gap in the process of trying to get something done, enabling them to accomplish ⑤ what important job they want to get done, while also undergoing ⑥ what subtle but fundamental change, and thereby creating ⑦ what kind of situation, value, and further meaning for the people involved.
2. Opportunity
Within ① what group, what proportion of people are in ② what specific situation (please describe with insight and evidence), trying to accomplish ③ what important job to be done (please describe with insight and evidence), yet encountering ④ what major unmet expectation gap. Although these people have tried ⑤ what existing solutions in order to solve the problem, they still cannot get the result they want, and so must keep paying ⑥ what costs and consequences because the expectation gap remains unresolved.
3. Solution
After studying ① what evidence, cases, research, and investigations, we believe the real problem lies in ② what leverage point: if it is resolved, the problem can be solved. ③ Why, based on the evidence or research you discussed, can this leverage point be inferred?
Therefore, based on ④ what path for dissolving the core bottleneck (please describe the insight you gained from the evidence), we will build ⑤ what products and services, so that in the process the people involved can ⑥ undergo what fundamental change (please explain what can happen, and on what reasoning this claim stands), and ultimately, once the major expectation gap is fulfilled, arrive at ⑦ what ideal end state.
Many people do not lack solutions. They have them too early.
Plenty of early venture conversations start like this:
- I want to build a platform.
- I want to build a matching system.
- I want to build an AI tool.
- I want to build a community.
- I want to build a membership mechanism.
None of these sentences is automatically wrong.
But they share the same weakness: they describe supply, not demand.
They describe what the founder wants to make before explaining:
- who is stuck;
- where they are stuck;
- what they were trying to get done;
- what result they expected;
- and why the current world keeps failing them.
If those questions are not grounded first, even a beautifully built solution may only be the wrong answer, delivered with confidence.
This is not methodological neatness.
It is practical survival.
The market is not short of products. It is short of people who have seen the real blockage clearly.
Do not call it a pain point too quickly. First, check whether the phenomenon is actually felt.
I prefer a plain phrase here: a felt phenomenon.
What does felt mean?
It is not someone ticking “yes” in a survey.
It is not a polite interviewee saying, “Yes, that sounds useful.”
A genuinely felt problem usually looks more like this:
- the person has been troubled by it for a while;
- they have tried other ways to handle it, but none works well;
- it affects time, emotion, cost, risk, reputation, or quality of life;
- when the topic comes up, they can describe it in detail.
A real problem does not need much help from you to sound real.
The details come out on their own.
If you have to supply the context, supply the emotion, supply the friction, and supply the urgency, be careful.
It may not be a problem.
It may only be a concept.
Do not ask only “who is the target audience?” Ask who is actually stuck.
Early segmentation is often too large.
Young people. Founders. Office workers. Travellers. Students. Independent hotels.
Useful in a deck. Loose in reality.
The better question is:
In this situation, who is trying to get something important done, and cannot do it properly?
That is the starting point for JTBD: Job To Be Done.
JTBD is not a label.
It is a concrete task in a concrete situation.
Not “a traveller”, but:
- a traveller arriving in an unfamiliar city who needs to find accommodation that feels trustworthy, fairly priced, and suited to their preferences.
Not “a content creator”, but:
- a creator trying to publish consistently without losing every afternoon to research, clipping, and rearranging material.
Not “an independent hotel”, but:
- a property trying to build a durable guest relationship without relying entirely on OTA traffic.
Once you replace identity with a person trying to make progress in a situation, the friction becomes much easier to see.
You are no longer describing a category.
You are getting closer to reality.
A job is not enough. You also need the expected outcome.
Two people may be trying to complete the same job, but expecting very different results.
Some want speed.
Some want reassurance.
Some want control.
Some want lower risk.
Some want to avoid mistakes.
Some simply do not want to look foolish.
This is why the job needs another layer: Outcome Expectation.
What result does the actor actually expect?
This layer matters because many products fail here. They appear to solve the task, but aim at the wrong result.
Someone using a budgeting app may not want a complete financial management system. They may simply want to stop reaching the end of the month wondering where the money went.
Someone using a travel planning tool may not want a perfect AI itinerary. They may want to stop drowning in noisy information and make a decision with a little more confidence.
When an independent hotel says it wants more direct bookings, it may not only want more website traffic. It may want guest relationships, control, low-season security, or less dependence on repeatedly buying attention from platforms.
The job is the visible movement.
The expected outcome is closer to the real standard of value.
The useful signal is Important Unfulfilled.
Even then, do not stop.
Most market problems are not completely untouched.
The interesting area is usually where something is both important and still unfulfilled.
Two conditions need to hold:
- Important: it matters enough to affect behaviour.
- Unfulfilled: existing alternatives do not satisfy it well enough, or the cost is too high.
If something is important but already fulfilled, you may be looking at a mature market.
If something is unfulfilled but not important, you may be looking at a minor irritation.
So ask:
- How do they solve it now?
- Why are they still tolerating the current situation?
- What do they dislike, avoid, cannot afford, or still find frustrating about existing alternatives?
- Is the gap large enough to make them change behaviour?
Without this layer, it is easy to fall into a comforting illusion.
Everyone seems to have a need.
In reality, many people merely think the idea sounds nice.
And “nice” rarely moves a market.
Beneath function, there is often aspiration.
Some problems become too thin if you only look at efficiency, cost, and features.
People do not only want to get things done.
They often want to get them done in a way that feels closer to who they want to be.
That is the layer of value, meaning, and Aspiration.
Sometimes a person is not buying a tool, but a more capable version of themselves.
Sometimes they do not want speed. They want calm.
Sometimes they do not want more functions. They want to stop depending on luck.
If you only look at function, you may think they want a drill.
Look a little deeper and they may want:
- a more stable life;
- a more controllable workflow;
- a rhythm with fewer interruptions;
- a way to become closer to the kind of person or organisation they want to be.
These things sound abstract.
But they often decide whether someone adopts a solution at all.
Where does the Gap come from?
Only now is it useful to talk about the Gap.
My simple definition is:
A Gap is the distance between the result the actor expects and the result they actually get.
But the Gap does not appear out of nowhere.
It often comes from a misalignment between demand and supply.
Demand-side causes
- the usage situation is fragmented and contextual;
- the stated problem is A, while the real anxiety is B;
- the actor may not be able to articulate the need clearly;
- the need changes with role, time, situation, and pressure.
Supply-side causes
- the product starts from features rather than jobs;
- the solution is built for the average case, not the real bottleneck;
- the solution is too heavy, too complex, or too expensive;
- the product believes it solves the main problem, but only touches the edges.
Many Gaps are created by both sides at once.
It is not only that users do not know what they need.
It is not only that the market has no product.
You have to look at both.
Do not only ask where it hurts. Ask where the bottleneck is.
Pain is often messy.
The part you can build around is usually the Bottleneck.
That means:
Which point in the system most limits the result?
Not every pain deserves to be solved first.
Some pains are only annoying.
Some are structural.
In a service flow, an ugly form may be irritating. Scattered information may be inconvenient. But if the real blockage is that the user cannot judge which option is trustworthy, then trust in decision-making may be the bottleneck.
Without finding the bottleneck, teams can stay busy for a long time without changing the result.
They improve the surrounding friction.
They never touch the limiting point.
Solutions are allowed, but they should come later.
Once the felt phenomenon, actor, JTBD, Outcome Expectation, Important Unfulfilled, Aspiration, Gap, and Bottleneck become clearer, solution thinking becomes much more grounded.
At that point, avoid falling in love with the first solution type.
Push the idea sideways:
- What if this were solved manually?
- What if it were solved with software?
- What if it were solved by changing the process?
- What if information were reorganised without building a heavy product?
- What if the answer were not a product at all, but a service, intermediary, community, or content layer?
The purpose is not to be clever.
It is to avoid being trapped by the first solution shape that came to mind.
Many ideas do not fail because there was no solution.
They fail because the first solution was treated as destiny.
Then come hypotheses, MVP, and C-P-S Fit.
Once the problem is clearer, the next question is whether it can be validated and acted upon.
This is where C-P-S Fit becomes useful.
I read it as an alignment between three things:
- C｜Context / Customer situation: the actor’s real situation;
- P｜Problem / Promise / expected progress: the job, expectation gap, and leverage point;
- S｜Solution: what you propose to provide.
In other words, this is not only Problem-Solution Fit.
The problem must be understood in the right context.
The same problem, in a different situation, may need a different solution.
What C-P-S Fit contains
In the actor’s real situation, look at:
- what they are trying to get done;
- where they are stuck;
- how far the current reality is from the expected outcome;
- where the leverage point is;
- whether the proposed solution fits into that gap.
How C-P-S Fit appears
It should be expressible in several forms:
- Aspiration: what the actor is really trying to move towards;
- Value proposition: why your offer deserves to be adopted;
- One-sentence articulation: context, gap, and solution compressed into a testable statement;
- User Story: role, situation, motive, and expected result connected clearly.
For example:
For solo travellers arriving in an unfamiliar city who do not want to spend hours comparing options, we provide a way to narrow choices quickly, so they can balance confidence and efficiency instead of jumping between a dozen tabs.
That may not become the final slogan.
But it is useful because it tests whether you actually know who you are helping, and what Gap you are trying to close.
How C-P-S Fit is validated
Many ideas do not suffer from a lack of imagination.
They suffer from too much self-persuasion.
So write the assumptions down:
| Assumption | Why it matters | How to test it | Current evidence | Conclusion |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The target user genuinely feels this problem | Without pain, adoption will not happen | Interview 10 target users | 7 describe the problem in detail | Initially supported |
| Existing alternatives are not good enough | Otherwise there is no entry point | Ask interviewees to describe current behaviour | Most use workarounds and complain clearly | Supported |
| The MVP can reduce decision time | Tests core value | Task test, before / after comparison | Not yet tested | Unknown |
A Logbook also matters.
Looking back, you may discover that you were not inactive. You were simply orbiting the same wrong assumption for weeks.
MVP is not a smaller product. It is the smallest necessary test.
Many people still treat MVP as a reduced version of the ideal product.
That is often the wrong frame.
A better question is:
What is the smallest thing needed to test the most important assumption?
Sometimes it is a landing page.
Sometimes it is a manual service.
Sometimes it is a survey plus a round of interviews.
Sometimes it is a Notion page.
Sometimes it is a flow that pretends the product already exists.
If the key question is whether people will act because of the value, you may not need to write software at all.
An MVP is an experiment.
Not a shrunken dream.
Before launch, the idea should answer six questions.
Before an idea deserves to move forward, it should be able to answer:
- Whose important expectation gap is this?
- How did this important expectation gap form?
- What challenges must be faced to solve it?
- What solution can dissolve the bottleneck behind the expectation gap?
- How will success and value be defined? What concrete, testable indicators can be observed?
- What value does the solution create, and what future meaning or development could it open?
These questions are harsher than “is my idea good?”
They are also more useful.
They ask whether the idea has been compressed into something the market can test.
See the problem before reaching for the recipe.
If this part had to be reduced to one line, it would be this:
A venture thesis does not begin with an idea. It begins with a felt gap that has been ignored for too long.
So the first step in moving from pain to venture is not creative inspiration.
It is seeing the gap clearly.
You need to know:
- whether there is a genuinely felt phenomenon;
- who the actor is;
- what JTBD they are trying to complete;
- what outcome they expect;
- what remains important and unfulfilled;
- what aspiration sits underneath;
- why demand and supply have produced a Gap;
- where the real Bottleneck lies;
- what solution directions are possible;
- which assumptions need to be tested;
- what the smallest necessary MVP might be;
- whether C-P-S Fit could exist.
You may not find the answer immediately.
But you are less likely to begin with the wrong question.
The next part moves into the tools: Design Thinking, Double Diamond, Value Proposition Canvas, Empathy Map, Journey Map, Stakeholder Map, 5 Whys, Assumption Map, and Four D Process.
They will not think for you.
Used well, they make it harder to pretend you already have.