Finding where to build
What is a problem, and who said it?
Why it works this way
A problem card shows who said it, and says plainly when no one did.
A problem is only as real as the people who voiced it. We would rather show you a quote you can check, or an honest "No one quoted yet", than a confident label that sounds like evidence. The list is a set of leads to test, and the test is where a lead becomes something you can rely on.
What we gave up: a ready-made priority label, a market size on each problem, and a section of predicted future problems.
What it is
A problem is a struggle that people in your space have today. After you take a space, or start from something concrete, the Problems page shows six to eight of them. Each card has a title, a short description and a rating chip. Each card also shows who said it, in one of three ways:
- A real quote with where it came from: "What they said on" and the site.
- Our read, from 1 quote on this card. The rating rests on the quote you can see.
- No one quoted yet. We found no one saying it, and the card says so.
Some cards add Looking for a fix (people are searching for a solution) or Paying for it today (companies are hiring people to do it by hand), when we could measure them. The N sources button opens "Sources we read", a list of pages we read for the board.
How to use it
- Read the title and the description, then look at who said it.
- Hover the rating chip, or tap it on a phone, to see what the rating rests on. See How do you rate how much a problem hurts?.
- Open N sources to see a list of pages we read, and check them yourself.
- Press a card to work on that problem. Or tick up to three to look for one thing that solves them together. See Can I pick more than one problem?.
What it will never do
- Call a problem proven. A card says what people wrote, not what they will pay for.
- Give a problem a low score because nobody wrote about it. It is marked "not checked".
- Show a quote as a pattern. A card with one quote says "from 1 quote".
If something looks off
- A card says "No one quoted yet". We found no one saying it on the pages we read. You can still pick it, and a conversation will tell you more than the page did.
- A card says "Our read, from 1 quote on this card". One person said it. That is a lead, not a pattern.
- A chip says "not checked", with no bars. We found nothing to read. See the rating guide.
- A card shows "Gathering the evidence…". It is still being researched. Give it a moment.
- A search skipped some lines. At busy times a live search may be skipped. The rest of the board still builds.
- An older board looks different. Boards made before early October may word the evidence line differently, and may not show a quote count.