The misconception that you can pivot yourself out of all problems, including not understanding your market.
The sad reality of startup and new product innovation is that the odds are against you. Many studies show that the success rates for startups are challenging: 9 out of 10 start-ups fail.
The top reason? They make products no one wants.
CB Insights parsed 101 post-mortem essays by startup founders in 2014 to pinpoint the reasons they believe their company failed. On Thursday the company crunched the numbers to reveal that the number-one reason for failure, cited by 42% of polled startups, is the lack of a market need for their product.
In product innovation, the success rate might be a bit higher, somewhere between 8% and 25%, but nevertheless equally challenging.
So why is it that these odds are so dismal and if we know about these numbers, why haven’t they we learned how to improve?
The Wrong Product
The main reason given for the misadventure of these startups and new products that have failed is that they were the wrong product, i.e. the companies involved put a lot of time, energy and resources to build something nobody really wanted. You might be inclined to conclude that they failed to find a market for their product, but the key aspect here is that these companies, startups and large enterprises alike, failed 
to understand and define a true need in the market. Without a clear problem definition, you will not be able to address the need in the market in the right way, successfully and sustainably. Steve Jobs is known to have said, “It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want.” Indeed, it is the job of the entrepreneur and marketing strategist to fully understand what drives human purchasing behaviour. Here lays the kernel of many a failure: insufficient understanding on why people behave the way they do and the problems they are dealing with. What many startups and large enterprises do is pay lip service to this process. Needs are taken at face value.
Another frequently used quote comes to mind, that of Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The beauty of this quote is that we know immediately want people want: faster transportation. But what Henry Ford brought to market was way beyond transport. As no other, Henry Ford understood the predicament of farmers and ranchers, often living in isolation under very difficult conditions. Henry Ford understood that these people needed affordable mechanical solutions addressing the grinding drudgery of farm chores and fieldwork and in addition and on a higher level, transportation and freedom of movement.
Consumer Insight
Front loading your understanding of the need in the market, identifying and defining the problem in the market is the way to avoid building the wrong stuff. Only when you have built a deep understanding of the need in the market (the customer or consumer insight), only then start thinking about how to address the need in the market (the solution). Henry Ford has been front-loading this understanding all his life, having grown up on his father’s farm; that’s how long he has been working at it.
Identifying the need in the market is no mean feat. It’s difficult. It requires a combination of consumer psychology, empathy, structured analysis, interpretation and creative thinking. Most of these skill sets are soft and the combination is difficult to find. In addition, these skill sets collide with the typical technology push attitude of most startups. On top of this, even if you have these skills, you can still get it wrong. Under today’s pressure of an ever-increasing speed of technological innovation, these skills need to be addressed more frequently under duress. This is why identifying and correctly defining consumer or customer needs are given less attention than is warranted.
Nail a relevant problem
In the startup environment the Lean Startup principles are
very much en vogue. Iterative processes 
with build /measure/learn-cycles ensure that startups build something that is relevant and worthwhile for the market. It speeds up the whole process of innovating. However, even with this pivoting, if you are addressing the wrong need in the market or, even worse, no need in the market, you can come up with solutions that will miss the target. It’s not about finding a market for your solution but finding the market and then start thinking about the solution – you can’t pivot your way out of this. Nail a relevant problem then move forward. Invest more time, resources and energy in finding and defining the problem, front load customer and consumer insight and then, and only then,
build your way to success.
