Step 2: Identify your customer segment’s (biggest) problem The problem should be a specific one that a specific customer segment is having. Nonetheless, you need to acknowledge that you and your team are working solely on assumptions, and that’s just the reality of where you begin when making a product. You make assumptions about your users, their needs, and how to solve them. You just need to be very honest about the assumptions you’re making and to take them for what they are: facts people take for granted. Or, as the great Coach Buttermaker (Walter Matthau) in the movie Bad News Bears said to his baseball team, “When you ‘ASSUME,’ you make an ASS out of U and ME.” At the beginning of the chapter, Paul the movie producer stated that he understood his customer’s problem because it was his own: he was a busy man with money who didn’t have time to shop. Therefore, all busy men needed an online shopping experience to build a high-end custom wardrobe. If that logic worked for every value proposition, I could easily look at the digital value proposition and say, “When I planned my own wedding, I was a bride-to-be on a limited budget, and my biggest pain point was finding a wedding venue in Los Angeles that I could afford.” Which was true for me, but is it true for every frugal bride-to-be? This is where you want to write out the customer and problem hypothesis in a statement. Here’s what it could look like: Brides-to-be in Los Angeles have a hard time finding wedding venues that are affordable. Which, if proven true, would validate an important need for the value proposition: Airbnb for Finding Wedding Venues. It would seem, then, that the next logical step would be to start dreaming up the entire feature set for this much-needed solution, right? No. Not yet. Remember the software engineer from Chapter 1? He jumped straight into building out the solution for his startup. He assumed that customers like him (addicts’ loved ones) would be interested in a digital platform with which they could negotiate prices with treatment centers. He also assumed that there would be a lot of customers like this or at least enough to help keep the business model afloat. Yet, these assumptions were just that: assumptions. He could not pinpoint the reason why his product was unsuccessful until my team ran validated user- research experiments. The experiments exposed the fallacy to him, which was that customers, including those with a decent budget, were highly unlikely to