Ignored Struggles

What most people mean

The industry defaults to “pain points.” Every discovery call template, every buyer persona doc, every strategy deck. “What are the customer’s pain points?”

Pain points are vague. They’re abstract. They don’t explain what makes people act. You can have a painful lower back for more than a decade without doing anything about it. A “pain point” is just a label for a category of discomfort. It doesn’t tell you which specific problem is unsolved, by whom, or why the existing solutions are failing.

Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) gets closer. Moesta’s framework is solid. But JTBD is product-centric. It helps you understand the goal. It doesn’t tell you which obstacles on the way to that goal are being ignored by the alternatives. And that’s where the real value is.

Where the definition breaks

Marketers get stuck on pain points, which are too abstract to act on. Corporations get stuck on rational problems, which every competitor is already solving. And everyone overlooks the irrational stuff.

By “irrational,” I mean the bizarre stuff humans do that doesn’t make sense. Irrational struggles are the emotional and often subconscious problems that prevent a certain group of people from getting a job done. This kind of struggle is the juiciest because the big companies you’re competing against tend to see people as rational decision-makers, which means they overlook the irrationality of human behaviour.

In most places, “you can never be fired for being logical,” argues Rory Sutherland. “If your reasoning is sound and unimaginative, even if you fail, you will unlikely attract much blame.” But solving rational problems will get you “exactly in the same place as your competitors.” To find ignored struggles, start with the irrational ones.

Take civet poop coffee. People don’t buy the world’s most expensive coffee because it tastes better. They buy it to use as a party trick to impress guests. To gift to a coffee lover. To satisfy curiosity. To relive memories from a trip to Indonesia 28 years ago. Those are irrational reasons. And they’re the reasons no mainstream coffee brand is addressing.

How we define it at STFO

Ignored struggles are the super-frustrating problems that prevent a certain group of people from getting a job done, which the competition isn’t solving well, if at all.

They are the holy grail of differentiation. You take your list of prioritised struggles, plot them against the alternatives, and look for the gaps.

The LatinUs Beauty example makes it concrete. The founders noticed there were no household hair care brands designed specifically for Latinas with curly hair in humid climates. The customer quotes say it all:

“My hair is like lo mein noodles; there are times when I go outside and I look like a witch.”

“Never in my life was I able to weigh my hair down enough and control the frizz.”

Can you feel the frustration? The vivid, almost visceral language? This perfectly illustrates an ignored struggle: a super-frustrating problem that existing solutions don’t cater to.

Go wild when hunting for them. Meaningful differences emerge in granular, specific struggles. What you might dismiss as insignificant could be the key. Resist the urge to merge struggles.

And if you can’t find any after all that? It probably means you’re in a super-competitive market with no meaningful differentiation. In this case, developing a distinctive brand is your best bet to stand the f*ck out.

What it is NOT

• Not “pain points” (too vague, too abstract, doesn’t explain action)
• Not a feature gap (ignored struggles are about people, not products)
• Not limited to rational problems (the irrational ones are the juiciest)
• Not something you identify in a brainstorm (you find them in customer conversations and reviews)
• Not permanent (what’s ignored today might be addressed tomorrow)