Chapter 3 · 5 min read
Picking a Customer and a Problem Worth Solving
The Online Business Web Book · Published
Almost every struggling small business makes the same early mistake: it tries to be relevant to everyone. Relevance to everyone is invisibility to everyone. The way out is narrowing — picking one specific kind of customer and one specific problem you solve for them.
Start with a specific customer
A specific customer is a person or business you could name: a real-estate agent with listings to sell, a dentist with an empty schedule on Tuesdays, a landscaper who wants bigger contracts, a boutique that needs more online orders. Specific does not mean small — it means describable.
- Write down three kinds of customers you could genuinely talk to. Use industries or roles you already understand from work, hobbies, or your own life.
- For each, note what they want more of (customers, bookings, orders) and what stops them from getting it.
- Pick the one where you understand the problem best — not the one that sounds most glamorous.
What problem do they actually pay to solve?
Customers rarely pay for information or effort. They pay for outcomes: more customers, filled schedules, fewer no-shows, faster responses, less wasted spending. When you describe your business, describe the outcome — not the mechanics.
- State the problem in the customer’s words. If you cannot, you are not ready to sell to them yet — the conversations in the next chapter will fix that.
- State the outcome you deliver: what changes for them after they buy.
- State who it is for and who it is not for. Clear exclusions build trust and save everyone time.
A one-sentence positioning template
Fill in this sentence and keep it where you can see it — every page, ad, email, and conversation you write later will test against it: ‘I help [specific customer] get [specific outcome] through [what you actually do], without [the thing they fear or hate].’
Notice what the template forces you to decide. Vague words like ‘solutions,’ ‘services,’ or ‘opportunities’ cannot survive that sentence — which is exactly the point.
Positioning checklist
- I can describe my customer so specifically that a stranger could picture them.
- I can state the outcome they pay for in their words, not mine.
- I have written my one-sentence positioning statement.
- I can name one type of customer I will deliberately not target right now.
Next: before you spend money on anything, Chapter 4 shows you how to test whether enough people want this — cheaply.
Sources
About this chapter
Written by the AdvertisingBusiness.us team with the help of AI drafting tools, then edited by our team for accuracy against our own current pages and the official sources linked in the chapter. It is general education, not legal, tax or financial advice. Examples are illustrative, not customer results.