How to Identify Your Customers' Burning Needs
Successful products satisfy burning needs, not interesting ones. A practical method for discovering, validating, and communicating customer needs — using JTBD interviews, needs surveys, and a framework that aligns your whole team.
How often do you talk about needs and benefits? Frequently, I’d guess. But ask yourself how certain you are that:
- You know what your customers’ needs really are?
- Everyone in your team knows what you think your customer’s needs are?
- Customer needs are really the basis for product features, content, and messaging?
Whilst scaling my own startup and helping other founders scale theirs, I’ve found misunderstood needs to be the root cause of more problems than almost anything else.
What is a “Burning Need”?
A few definitions to make the rest of this useful:
- A need is the same as a benefit — it’s how your customer wants to achieve their outcome.
- A need is generally not the same as the outcome. If I take an Uber, my outcome is get from A to B. My needs are things like without owning a car, without the hassle of cash payments, quickly.
- A burning need is shorthand for the most important and urgent need(s) a customer has.
Burning Needs for Pre-PMF Startups
If you’re pre-product-market fit, you need to find people (your ideal customer profile) who have a burning need your product delivers on. This is why narrowing your focus accelerates sales — you can’t find burning needs without a focused segment.
The best way I’ve heard this described was at a YC event: imagine your hair was on fire. Your desired outcome is to put out the fire. You need a fire extinguisher, a fire blanket, or a fire hose. But if all I have is a stinking bucket of putrid water, you’ll happily pay me for it.
Think about how much most new products technically “suck.” They are stinking buckets of putrid water — but someone uses them, because the burning need is real.
| Product | It sucked because | Burning need |
|---|---|---|
| It was down a lot | Share my ideas quickly | |
| Figma | Lacked lots of features | Collaborate with other designers |
| Salesforce | Lacked lots of features | Avoid costly CRM software |
Three Mistakes to Avoid
Mistake 1: Validating the Need But Not Its Importance
A product team I was working with recently ran a survey to validate that needs they’d identified through customer interviews were present in a larger population. They asked “how important is this need?” and got promising results.
The problem: when we started exploring competitive solutions, it turned out those needs were very well met by heavily funded competitors. Groceries in 20 minutes is a need — but in most cities, it’s already solved.
Failing to identify a burning need (important and unmet) means you can only compete on execution and price. That requires very deep pockets.
Mistake 2: Identifying a Need But Not Sharing It With the Team
I’ve seen this in teams of 10 and teams of 500. The needs identified through 30 customer discovery interviews and validated via a survey weren’t being used by the sales team in their customer communication.
The startup was struggling to convert demos to sales. It turned out the sales reps hadn’t been briefed on the new positioning. Each was making up their own pitch. When you succeed or fail in your sales and you don’t know why, you can’t learn. And learning is more important than revenue for a startup.
Mistake 3: Reverting to Ideas and Opinions for Product Features
With another startup, the CEO guided the team to brainstorm features that customers had asked for — rather than building hypotheses based on what customers needed to achieve their goals.
Customers are experts in their own struggles, not in what’s possible with your product. Build from their struggles upward.
How Needs, Jobs, and Features Relate
| Description | Uber Rider Example | |
|---|---|---|
| Features | How your product helps users achieve their goals | GPS tracking, arrival notifications |
| Needs | How your user wants to achieve their goals | Prompt arrival of transport |
| Goals (Jobs) | The outcome your user wants to achieve | Get from A to B |
| Pains | Things that stop them getting their job done | Late or unpredictable transport |
How to Discover Needs by Talking to Customers
To discover needs, talk to your customers and ask questions to identify their desired outcomes, the problems they have, and how they measure success. (Our buyer psychology reference covers JTBD interviews and discovery techniques in depth.)
Run JTBD-style interviews. Identify:
- Their desired outcome (the job) — an outcome, never a task. “Get from A to B” not “use Uber.”
- Their gains — qualitative descriptions of a good outcome. “Early arrival.”
- Their pains — things that stop them getting the job done. “Unpredictable transport.”
Then generate needs by combining verbs with the gains and pains:
- For gains: “increase,” “improve,” “speed up” + gain
- For pains: “reduce,” “eliminate,” “remove” + pain
Example:
| Desired Outcome | Gain | Pain | Need | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Uber | Get from A-B | Early arrival | Late transport | Prompt arrival of cabs |
| Calendly | Schedule meetings | Less back-and-forth | Complexity of scheduling | Fast meeting scheduling |
| Hubspot | Close deals | More deals closed | Losing track of next steps | Increase deals closed |
How to Validate Needs with Fast, Cheap Surveys
Once you have a list of 10–20 needs, survey your users. Ask two sets of questions for each need:
- “When you [do job], [need] is important to me…” (1–5 scale)
- “When you [do job], finding/getting access to [need] is easy for me…” (1–5 scale)
The first question tells you whether a need is important. The second tells you how well met it is.
Your goal: find needs that are important AND underserved by the market.
Survey incrementally:
- 1 person: validate they understand the survey
- 10 people: check the survey is working
- 50 people: look for differences between needs (if everything scores equally, add control needs)
- 100 people: look for obvious winners
How to Spot a Market Opportunity
With your survey done, create a 2×2 matrix: importance (high/low) on one axis, how well met (high/low) on the other.
A well-differentiated product addresses needs that are important but underserved. That’s your burning need — and your wedge into the market.
Want to identify your customers’ burning needs? This is the foundation of everything we do at VECTOR with founders. Apply to work with us — or read about the Four Forces of Progress that explain why even great products get stuck.