The opening eBook of the Offers, Pricing and Packaging category. It assumes you know what you can do and shows you how to shape it into something a real customer will choose this week, not something that needs a thirty-minute conversation to explain.
Members ebook·7 chapters· 55 minute read
Chapter 2
Starting With the Customer Problem
How to ground every offer in a specific, named customer problem you can describe better than the customer can.
An offer that doesn't start with a customer problem isn't really an offer. It's a description of what you do, dressed up. The work might be good. The price might be fair. The website might be polished. None of that matters if the customer reading it can't see their own situation reflected back. Customers don't buy services. They buy a way out of a specific, painful problem they're already trying to solve.
Most first offers from new businesses skip this step or do it loosely. The customer is described in vague terms ("busy professionals," "small business owners") and the problem is described in vague terms too ("need help with their marketing," "struggle to manage their books"). The result is an offer that sounds reasonable and converts badly, because nobody quite recognises themselves.
This chapter fixes that by walking you through how to write a customer problem statement so specific that the right two customers feel it was written for them personally. By the end you'll have a one-paragraph problem statement at the top of your offer page, in plain language, that you'd be willing to read out loud to a real customer.
The full chapter shows you how to harvest the customer's own words from real conversations and turn them into a problem statement that sells.
Why most problem statements are too polite
Owners writing about their customer's problem tend to soften the language. They say "struggle with" instead of "hate." They say "would benefit from help around" instead of "is sick of." They say "are looking for support with" instead of "don't know where to start." The softening feels professional. It also costs the offer most of its power, because the customer reading it doesn't quite recognise the urgency of their own situation in the polite language.
The problem statement that converts is closer to the language the customer would use in a frustrated conversation with a friend. Not crude. Not hyped. Honest, specific, slightly uncomfortable. "You're spending Sunday evenings worrying about your tax bill, and you can't tell me last quarter's income to the nearest five thousand pounds without going through a folder of receipts." That's a problem statement. "Bookkeeping support for sole traders" isn't.
Where the right words come from
The good news is that you don't have to invent the language. The customers themselves have already written it. It's sitting in three places, free to harvest.
Source one: the words customers use in enquiries and conversations
Every email, every form submission, every first conversation contains the customer's own description of what's going wrong. Most owners read past these and respond with their own framing. Stop doing that. Open a fresh document. Every time a customer or potential customer describes their problem in their own words, copy the sentence in. Within a month you'll have thirty real sentences. Three or four of them will be the spine of a great problem statement.
Source two: competitor reviews
Look at the one-, two- and three-star reviews of competitors who serve roughly the same customer. Not the five-star ones - those describe what the customer liked. The middling ones describe what the customer wanted and didn't get. "Took ages to reply." "Felt like just another number." "Didn't really explain what they were doing." That's a list of things your offer can quietly promise to do better, in the customer's own language.
Source three: forum and community posts
Find the local Facebook groups, the trade association forums, the Reddit communities where your kind of customer hangs out. Search for the recurring frustrations. "Anyone know a good bookkeeper for tradespeople in Leeds?" "My website looks awful on mobile and I have no idea how to fix it." "Trying to find a personal trainer who actually understands hypermobility." Those questions are problem statements waiting to be borrowed.
The customer-language harvest
Open a single document. Title it 'Customer words'.
Copy in every problem-related sentence customers use in conversations and enquiries.
Add five middling reviews from competitors.
Add three real forum or community posts from customers in the right segment.
Re-read the document weekly. The patterns will start to write themselves.
The problem statement template
Once the customer language is in front of you, the problem statement almost writes itself. The shape that works for most small businesses is three sentences.
Sentence one names who you're talking to. "You run a small trade business with a turnover somewhere between forty and two hundred thousand a year." Sentence two describes the recurring pain in their own words. "You're spending Sunday evenings worrying about your tax bill and dreading the moment you have to pull the receipts together each quarter." Sentence three names the cost of leaving it as it is. "It's not just the time. It's the quiet anxiety that you might be missing something - a deduction, a deadline, a number that doesn't add up."
Read the three sentences out loud. If they don't make a real customer in your head nod, rework them with the customer's own language until they do.
Three worked problem statements
The personal trainer for over-fifties
"You're in your fifties or sixties, and you've not done any serious exercise for a few years. Maybe a knee operation, maybe a back episode, maybe just life getting busy. You know you should start moving again, but every gym you walk into looks like it's designed for someone twenty years younger and three injuries away from being you. The cost isn't just the missed exercise. It's the slow drift of feeling less confident in your own body each year."
The freelance designer for first-time service businesses
"You've decided this is the year you go on your own. The skills are there. The first few customers are starting to come in. But the website you threw together in a weekend is letting you down, and every time you send a quote you're embarrassed by how unprofessional it looks next to the people you used to work alongside. The cost isn't the lost sales. It's the feeling that you're still acting like a side hustle when you've decided to take the business seriously."
The local plumber for landlords
"You've got somewhere between three and twenty rental properties, and you're tired of phoning round different plumbers every time something breaks. Half of them don't pick up. The other half show up two days later, charge whatever they like and leave you wondering whether the job was actually done properly. The cost isn't just the bills. It's the time, the tenant complaints and the sense that you're always reacting to problems that should have been handled quietly in the background."
What a good problem statement does for the rest of the offer
A sharp problem statement at the top of the offer page does three useful jobs. It filters - the wrong customers stop reading and the right ones lean in. It primes the outcome - the relief on offer is much clearer once the pain has been named. And it earns the right to charge a real price - customers pay for outcomes that match real pain, and they negotiate hard on outcomes that match vague pain.
The chapter on writing the outcome (next) only really works if this chapter has been done first. Skip the customer-language harvest and you'll find yourself writing outcomes in your own voice rather than the customer's, which is the polite-and-vague trap all over again.
Mistakes to avoid
Three common ones. First, describing the problem in your industry's language rather than the customer's. "Reconciliation backlog," "conversion rate optimisation," "asset allocation drift." Customers don't talk like that. Don't write like that. Second, listing too many problems in one statement. Pick the single most painful, most recurring one. The others can sit further down the page. Third, naming a problem that's real but mild. The offer has to address something the customer would pay real money to make go away. Mild irritants don't convert.
A recurring principle: start with the customer
This principle is the spine of the whole series. It ran through chapter one of How to Start a Small Business and underpins every later eBook. A first offer that starts with the customer problem is much more likely to find its market. A first offer that starts with the owner's capabilities almost always has to be rewritten by year two. The companion eBook Customer Interviews and Buyer Research goes deeper into the technique of harvesting customer language at scale.
What to do this week
Open the customer-language document. Spend an hour adding to it from the three sources. Then write your three-sentence problem statement using the words you collected. Read it out loud. Send it to one real customer or potential customer with a single question: "Does this sound like your situation, or have I missed something?" Their answer will sharpen the next draft more than another hour of solo writing ever could.
In the next chapter we'll turn the named problem into the named outcome - the thing the customer is actually paying you to deliver.
The rest of this chapter walks through the practical steps, the templates and the checklists you need to put it into action. It includes worked examples, copy frameworks and the small decisions that make the difference between a plan that sits in a drive and one that gets used.
Inside you'll find a step-by-step playbook, a downloadable template, a checklist you can run this week and a short list of common mistakes to avoid before you start.
The full action plan, broken into weekly steps.
Ready-to-use scripts, templates and checklists.
Worked examples for different sized businesses.
Common mistakes and how to avoid them.
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