Understanding Customer Problems - Master Plan Part 3

Just skip this section if you haven't had your third cup of coffee yet. Because, it's time for the highly anticipated third installment in our What's the Plan Playbook. We're opening our gates boldly and showing you exactly how we're running our business. Getting out our brainstorming notes and everything.

But first, we want to address the elephant in the section. WTF is that image? Come on Stable Diffusion!

In our last rundown we covered what we are good at, what we love, and whether or not there was a market opportunity for it. After a big hoorah and hell yeah from the team, we left you hanging for more. Today, we're going to focus on problem faced by our target market. That's you!

99 problems and opportunities

As a team that's been mostly self-employed for more than a decade, we put together a list of $#!t we dealt with ourselves, otherwise known as identifying business opportunities. Then, we considered what other people thought and gathered data from Upwork, Payoneer, the ILO, World Bank, and PayPal.

Here's a summary:

1. 100% want to improve their skills
2. 86% need help keeping their clients
3. 84% want to grow their client relationships
4. 72% or so don't know how to price their services
5. 70% are struggling to create predictable income
6. 65% are challenged to get new clients

We were blown away by the demand for skills improvement and weren't too far off on the others. We're glad that getting paid on time or staying sane wasn't as big of a challenge as we thought.

So, we had our marching orders. Ready to get cracking? Not quite. There were other problems that needed to be addressed.

Systemic bias and inconsistencies

Like every free-market, the global marketplace of self-employed professionals benefits too few of its members. Let's take a look at some of the upsetting things we discovered when we stepped back to look at the market as a whole:

1. Inequality in wages. Men earn up to 48% more
2. Access to inside knowledge is restricted
3. Understanding of best practices is limited
4. Underdeveloped/under-skilled workforce
5. Disparity in the cost-to-value perception

Armed with these new found golden nuggets, we started to work on solution mapping. We'll be back to explain that and more the next time we help you fall asleep first thing in the morning.