First you hardly notice it. Then it starts to bother you. The more you think about it, the more you wonder if there is some way to make the problem go away. You try a few things. They don’t work. There’s no easy solution. Of course, if it was easy, it would have already been solved by someone else.
You try a few more things. They don’t work. You put it down for a while and go on to other matters.
Then one day, via a different route, you get a glimmer of how to go about it.
More blind alleys, more failed experiments. But you feel you are on the right track. You persevere.
Then one day it comes to you. You try it a different way. It works! Feeble, clumsy, but it works. Getting it to work consistently in an elegant way will come later. The main thing today is that you closed the gap. A gap that had bothered you for a long time between your desire to solve the problem and the reality of being unable to find a solution.
What a relief. It’s exciting, this thing you’ve worked on for so long. You want to tell other people about your solution. And you do tell them. But they don’t seem as excited. In fact, the opposite, they are bored, even annoyed.
How could this be? It’s such a problem. Don’t others want to know how solve it?
Well, no, they don’t.
Why? Because they don’t feel the problem the way you did. And until you can help them feel the itchy, bothersomeness of this problem, the gap between what they want and the reality of what they can do, until they feel that it is a problem they MUST solve, they won’t be interested in how you solved it.
That’s the irony of marketing. You have the solution. But your audience won’t be interested in your solution until they feel the problem as deeply as you do.
You have to go back to the beginning when you barely registered the problem, when you just started to notice it. Then you have to walk the other person through a simulation of your experience. Answering their questions along the way. Highlighting the gap between desire and the harsh reality that they don’t have the solution yet.
It was a mystery for you. Make it a mystery for them too.
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