Why you should talk about pain points

Like most people, I loathe commercials — except the rare commercial that is very well done. But when I think about very well done commercials, I’m not thinking about production value. For me, it’s all about how the product is positioned and how well the commercial communicates value.

My favorite one recently is an ad for LASIK. It starts with a question: Are you tired of your glasses fogging up when you wear a mask?

It is brilliant.

I do wear glasses (at least some of the time). And when I do, my #1 pain point is that my glasses fog up if I have to wear a mask. So when I hear an ad asking if I’m tired of my glasses fogging up, I’m interested.

There’s a second reason this ad is great. The glasses-fogging-because-of-masks problem is relatively new. I don’t know what the #1 pain point of glasses-wearers was pre-pandemic, but for me it was wearing glasses in the rain. I don’t ever remember hearing a LASIK ad asking me if I was tired of not being able to see in the rain, though.

How does this translate to a dev tool context?

B2B and B2C are different in some ways, but not as different as some people think. Also, decisions about whether to download and use an open source project are more like B2C than B2B., because they involve an individual making an individual decision.

Clearly articulating the pain that you alleviate is important for helping people find you and helping them decide to try your open source or paid product out. The moment an engineer tries a new dev tool is usually a result of a pain point of some kind. Have they just spent half a day trying to search their code and gotten rubbish results? Did they just have to start an IoT project from scratch because a hardware component has to change and the software has to be completely redone as a result? These are pain points — they are also triggers.

You probably solve a lot of pain points. Which one hurts the most?

Another key point here is that you most likely alleviate more than one pain — but understanding which one hurts your target market the most (and is the most likely to cause them to take action) is the best way to ensure your message is resonating with potential users.

Here’s what I want you to take away from this post: Understand what pain points your target market experiences that you solve, especially the ones that hurt badly. Messages that acknowledge the pain someone is feeling and offer a solution are generally the clear winners, whether you’re selling eye surgery or a CI platform.