In 25 years I've watched founders quietly kill good ideas and pour a year into bad ones — for the exact same reason. They never separated the idea from the way it was framed. When a project stalls, the instinct is to read it as an effort problem. Work harder. Add a hire. Run one more push. But most stalled projects aren't stuck at the effort level. They're stuck at the root-problem level — and no amount of effort fixes a problem you've diagnosed wrong. You just get to the wall faster. There are really only two reasons a project won't move, and they look identical from the inside: The idea is wrong. There's no real problem underneath it, or no one who'll pay to solve it. Effort here is expensive theater. The framing is wrong. The problem is real and worth solving — but you've aimed it at the wrong buyer, entered through the wrong door, or described it in words that don't match how anyone actually experiences it. Effort here isn't wasted; it's just pointed at the wrong target. The trap is that both feel the same. Both produce silence, flat numbers, and a team that's working hard with nothing to show. So before you spend more, the question isn't "how do we push harder?" It's "which of these two am I actually looking at?" Here's the diagnostic I run: Does the problem exist when you're not in the room? A real problem shows up in what people already do — the workarounds, the spreadsheets, the money they're spending to cope. If the problem only appears when you pitch it, you likely have an idea problem, not a framing one. Effort won't save it. Change the words, not the product — does the response change? Describe the same thing to the same person using their language, their trigger, their stakes. If a sharper frame suddenly gets nods where you got blank stares, the idea was never the issue. The framing was. Follow the "no." When people pass, are they saying "I don't have that problem" or "I have it, but not like that / not from you"? The first is an idea signal. The second is a framing signal — and it's fixable without starting over. Would a different buyer make this obvious? Sometimes the idea is right and the audience is wrong. Moving the same solution to a segment that feels the pain acutely turns a hard sell into an easy one. That's framing, not effort. The reason this matters: the cost of confusing the two is enormous. Treat a framing problem as an effort problem and you burn a year grinding on something that only needed a repositioning. Treat an idea problem as a framing problem and you keep polishing the message on a thing the market was never going to buy. Clarity here is cheaper than persistence. Diagnose the root before you spend the next quarter on the symptom. So a question worth sitting with this week: The project that's stalled right now — are you actually sure it's a bad idea, or have you just never tested whether it's a framing problem wearing a bad-idea disguise?

When your customer research keeps contradicting itself, the problem usually isn't the research. It's that you're talking to two different people and treating them as one. I see this constantly. A founder runs a dozen conversations, and the signal is all over the map. One group swears the onboarding is the dealbreaker; another barely notices it and cares only about price. Half describe the product as a time-saver; half call it a status thing. The founder concludes "customers are confused" or "the market is fragmented," and goes hunting for a cleverer message to paper over the noise. But the noise is the finding. Contradictory insights are what a blended audience sounds like. You're not hearing one confused market — you're hearing two or three coherent ones averaged into mush. And you can't message an average. Nobody is the average customer. The reason this stalls companies is subtle: an average feels like data. It has quotes, a deck, a ring of rigor. So you make product and go-to-market bets on it — and the bets keep missing, because you're aiming at a person who doesn't exist. The fix is in how you structure discovery, before you ever synthesize: Segment on the way in, not on the way out. Decide the cuts that might explain different behavior — job to be done, trigger event, stage, buying context — and tag every conversation as you go. If you only segment after the fact, you've already blended. Recruit on purpose, not on availability. A convenient sample is a blended sample. Deliberately fill each segment so a pattern in one group can't hide inside the average of all of them. Read patterns within a segment, never across the pile. The question isn't "what did customers say?" It's "did this segment say the same thing to each other?" Agreement inside a clean segment is a signal. Agreement across a blended pile is a coincidence you'll pay for later. Here's the bar I hold: an insight is decision-grade only when it's consistent inside a segment you could actually go acquire. Anything short of that isn't evidence — it's an anecdote wearing a percentage sign. The uncomfortable part is that this makes your findings messier before it makes them clearer. Two sharp, opposing truths are worth more than one blurry consensus. Consensus is comfortable. It's also where stalled companies go to feel productive. So a question worth sitting with this week: The last time your customer insights contradicted each other — did you treat it as noise to resolve, or as a sign you were listening to more than one audience at once?

Back in 2007 my mom wrote a book, and no one would publish it. It's called "Butterfly Girl" — the story of a little girl lost in a storm and her long journey home. She wrote it for one reader: my daughter. She wanted her granddaughter to know where she came from, in her own words. The traditional publishers all passed. A beautiful, personal story about one family's journey wasn't a big enough market for them. So I told her not to wait for anyone's permission. We'd do it ourselves. What I didn't fully understand until we were in it: self-publishing back then was brutal. Formatting, printing, distribution, ISBNs, cover files — every step was manual, expensive, and built to make you quit. We pushed through it anyway, and she held her book in her hands. That moment was the whole point. Then Christmas came. And at the table, one relative after another leaned in and said some version of the same thing: "You know, I have a book in me too. How did you do it?" That's when it clicked. The pain I'd just spent months fighting through wasn't my mom's problem. It was everyone's problem. As I put it later: "there's a million other moms out there hundred million other moms you know actually billions of people out there who think they have a book in them and will never publish so it was the business model" That became FastPencil — an online writing and publishing platform. It didn't start with a market analysis or a TAM slide. It started with one person I loved, one urgent human problem, and a Christmas dinner full of people stuck behind the exact same wall. I've come to believe this is one of the most underrated sources of a great idea: proximity. Not brainstorming what the market wants in the abstract, but solving something real for someone you actually care about — then noticing how many other people are quietly living the same frustration. The narrow, personal problem is often the universal one wearing a disguise. So here's my question for you: Is there a version of this in your own story — a problem you solved for someone close to you that turned out to be universal? 🎙️ From my conversation with Julia Lucidi on the Founder Tactics podcast. Full episode: https://youtu.be/M58Dnn2UAlM

Customer Discovery