HQ Marketing Conference
From Expert to Entrepreneur

Find a Problem Worth Solving

Separate annoying problems from painful, frequent, expensive problems.

Beginner 16 minutes Evergreen session

Why this matters

Separate annoying problems from painful, frequent, expensive problems. Beginners often make marketing harder by starting with tactics—ads, social posts, automation—before the underlying business question is clear. This session keeps the order simple: understand the customer, understand the problem, then choose the mechanism.

The core idea

Score candidate problems on frequency, urgency, money/time loss, buyer authority and current workaround pain.

Example

A once-a-year inconvenience may get compliments. A workflow that wastes 45 minutes every day can get a budget.

A simple framework

  1. Observe: What is happening in the customer’s real workflow today?
  2. Measure: Where is time, money, capacity, quality or opportunity being lost?
  3. Prioritize: Which part matters enough to change now?
  4. Translate: Explain the improvement in the customer’s language.
  5. Test: Put the message or process in front of real buyers and learn from behavior.
Beginner shortcut
Do not try to sound like a software company.

Use the words people in your industry already use. Clear language is a competitive advantage. If a sentence would sound strange in a normal conversation with a customer, rewrite it.

Advanced corner
Turn the lesson into an operating metric.

Once the basic process works, define what you will measure: reply rate, qualified conversation rate, discovery-to-demo conversion, time-to-value, retention, expansion or another metric tied to the actual behavior. Advanced marketing is usually better instrumentation and tighter feedback loops—not simply more tactics.

Outside expert playbook

A validated market can be safer than a never-seen idea

Starter StoryShipper case study: a micro-version of a large SaaS category

You do not need an untouched category. A large incumbent can prove that demand exists. The opportunity is to choose a smaller audience, remove scope they do not need and deliver one meaningful difference better or more simply.

Chapter shortcuts

00:00 — Every idea is taken 00:49 — Founder story 01:27 — Business breakdown 04:14 — The idea 04:54 — Build story 05:45 — Technology stack 06:17 — Growth and marketing 07:21 — Find the 1% difference 09:15 — Advice to a younger self
Let incumbents validate demandA busy category can show that customers already understand the problem and allocate money to it.
Reduce the scopeA micro-version should remove complexity for a specific user—not merely provide fewer features at a lower price.
Find a meaningful differenceThe “1%” must matter to the buyer: a faster workflow, a better default, a neglected niche or a clearer route to the outcome.
Respect intellectual propertyBorrow the market pattern, not another company’s code, branding, protected content or misleading claims.

The micro-SaaS opportunity test

  1. Name the established category and the evidence that customers pay.
  2. Choose one narrower customer the incumbent serves awkwardly.
  3. Identify the single workflow that customer repeats most often.
  4. Write the one difference that makes the workflow measurably better.
  5. Interview five target users before copying the incumbent’s feature list.

Revenue figures and growth claims are presented as reported in the case study and are not a guarantee. Open the original video on YouTube →

Do this before the next session

List five industry problems and score each 1–5 on frequency, urgency and cost.

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