Businesses that sell one thing to one type of customer hit a ceiling that no amount of marketing raises. The next offer is the obvious answer and the expensive one to get wrong — most new products fail not because they are bad but because they solve a problem the customer was not trying to solve.
Short answer: Sell the adjacent offer your existing customers already struggle with and pay someone else for. This uses capability you already have, removes acquisition cost and credibility risk, and gives demand you can verify rather than forecast. It is usually unglamorous, which is why businesses reach past it for something more exciting.
Customers do not buy products; they hire something to make progress on a situation. Understanding what your customers are actually trying to accomplish — including the parts they currently handle with workarounds, spreadsheets or another supplier — tells you what to build far more reliably than asking what they want.
The gap between what people say they want and what they will pay for is where most product roadmaps go to die.
The strongest candidate is normally something your existing customers already need, that you are already trusted for, and that uses capability you already have. That combination is rare and valuable — it removes acquisition cost, credibility risk and capability risk from the same decision.
It is also unglamorous, which is why businesses reach past it for something more exciting and more likely to fail.
This question routes to Jobs-to-be-Done Innovation — one of 29 engagements the platform runs. It does not produce advice in general; it produces this analysis for your business:
✓ Identifies the jobs your customers are hiring you — and others — to do
✓ Finds the workarounds they currently tolerate, which is where unmet demand hides
✓ Tests each candidate offer against willingness to pay, not stated interest
✓ Checks which use capability you already have versus capability you would have to buy
✓ Sizes the revenue realistically, including cannibalisation of what you sell now
✓ Sequences the roadmap and names the cheapest test for the riskiest assumption
You watch the analysis get built before you pay anything. Read a complete report here if you would rather see the depth first.
Look at what your existing customers already struggle with adjacent to what you sell, and which of those problems they currently pay someone else or work around manually. That intersection gives you demand you can verify rather than forecast, and buyers you already have access to.
Ask what they currently do and where it goes wrong, not what they want. People are reliable reporters of their own problems and unreliable predictors of their own future purchases — which is why interest in a proposed product so rarely converts into sales of the built one.
Find the assumption that would sink it if false, and test only that. Usually it is willingness to pay, which can be tested with a real offer to real customers long before the thing exists. Building first and testing after inverts the cost of being wrong.
Describe the situation in your own words and we will tell you which analysis answers it — before you sign up for anything.
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Each of these works the same problem through a specific industry's economics, with an unedited excerpt from a real analysis.