How Pain Convinces People to Buy Your Product

You're at the chaotic grocery checkout, your lane comes to a standstill while someone argues about expired coupons. Frustration pours in.

Next to you, lane 3 opens, completely empty. A miracle in this economy. But you stay put. Why? Because the pain of waiting wasn't sharp enough to make you move those three steps.

Guess what? Your potential customers do the same thing daily, and I’ve noticed the same thing while building Product Potion.

If the problem you're solving isn't painful enough, 90% of your potential customers won't jump lanes. And you don’t want that! 🙅‍♂️

Here's the crackers for your chili: most solopreneurs are solving problems that sound important but don't hurt enough to make someone switch. You're shouting into the dark void about features and improvements while your customers are standing in lane 2 thinking, "Ehhhh, this is fine."

P.S. I was eating homemade chili with saltine crackers when writing this.

First time reading?

Anchor to one painful problem that your customers feel during their current week. Not last month, or casual a nice-to-have. Especially not a theoretical improvement from ChatGPT. You need a problem that burns a hole straight into their brains right now.

This is why you focus and anchor: loss aversion and cognitive load reduction work together when you focus on a single, sharp pain point. Your customers are hunting to stop bleeding revenue, users, time, or credibility. That urgency is your weapon.

One painful problem simplifies your messaging, your product, and your path to revenue. Stop adding more features, more ideas, or more angles. Anchor to the one thing that actually hurts, and everything else gets easier.

Next, let’s focus on the #1 thing you need to know when confirming what works or not with your product, so you can rest peacefully at night.

People lie without meaning to. They'll say a problem matters, but their behavior exposes the secret. The brain only prioritizes pain that's fresh and frequent. Everything else gets archived.

Products with high activation (people subscribing, paying, etc.) always address a pain that users feel daily, if not weekly. We can’t focus on nice-to-haves in this economy anyway. Recency and frequency are the real predictors of whether someone will take action.

If someone can recall a specific moment ("Yeah, this screwed me big time on Tuesday"), that's your big signal. That kind of vivid recall only happens with real, repeated friction. And that's the behavior that predicts willingness to pay, switch tools, sign up, or stick around.

So if you only had the energy to do one thing: Ask three to five people when this problem last slowed them down. If it didn't happen in the last seven days, drop it. That's the closest thing solopreneurs have to a cheat code.

Build a productized offer that’s easy to explain, easy to sell, and gets you paid faster.

Over 4 weeks, we’ll tighten your offer, message, and first-time experience so customers immediately understand the value.

👉 A simple, sellable productized offer
👉 A landing page framework that makes people say “Yep, that’s me”
👉 A plan to get your first 3 paying customers

Curious what this looks like? Read the breakdown from a previous post here.

Ready? Fill out the short intake and I’ll confirm if we're a fit. And if the first session isn't valuable, I’ll refund it.

Notion’s new email feature is a perfect example of anchoring a product to a real, current pain people feel every single day.

“The inbox that thinks like you.”

Inboxes are a war zone. Everyone is drowning in spam, or newsletters that are not as cool as us. It taxes your mind, emotions, and time. So, Notion doesn’t just pitch “better email.” They pitch sweet relief.

They’re selling removal of cognitive load. That’s why this works. If you want people to switch lanes to your product, study Notion’s position.

So when you’re positioning your offer, don’t ask: “What feature can I add?”

Ask yourself: “How much time or mental bandwidth does this pain steal every week?”

If the answer is “a lot,” you’re sitting on a gold mine.

You just learned why users only act when the pain is sharp and recent, how to validate that pain through real behavior, and how to anchor your product to the problem that steals the most time and mental bandwidth.

This week, talk to 3–5 people and confirm the last time this pain hit them, and if it wasn’t in the past seven days, drop it and move on to the one that was.

Remember: One painful problem. One clean entry point. One reason to move now.

👋 I’ll see ya next week! — Dana

P.S. If you enjoy my emails, move them to your primary inbox and let me know by sending a reply or clicking the poll below.

I respond to every reply. Let’s make this community about YOU!