I’ve been scratching an entrepreneurial itch since the very beginning of my career. The biggest takeaway from my undertakings has been the importance of having an extreme focus on the product solving a real problem. Not just any problem – a critical one.

I found, particularly when first evaluating the potential of the business, nearly all potential customers will provide positive feedback that is almost exactly want you want to hear. This is either because they don’t want to be discouraging, or because the idea really does sound useful to them. But even in that case, when it eventually comes time to fork over real money for the product or service, they get cold feet.

This lesson became crystallized shortly after I set aside my last project, and was gifted the excellent book All in Startup. In it, Diana Kander explains that it’s not enough to build a product for a customer that says they want it. The product must solve a true migraine problem – their biggest problem that is literally keeping them up at night. In fact, since they need your solution so badly, they should be practically begging if they can pay for the rough-around-the-edges unproven prototype.

If you aren’t solving that type of problem for someone, everything is going to be far more difficult, if not impossible, when it comes time to make your first sales and grow your customer base.

I realized that this is exactly the problem I faced in both of my startup endeavors.

For Confidently, every recent college grad loved the idea of a job search engine exclusive to entry-level positions, but the reality is that finding entry level positions with current resources was not much of a problem at all. For Obitium, many funeral directors explained they faced an important problem of declining subscribers in local newspapers. They had a need for other obituary publication solutions for their clients. But when it came down to paying for a new platform, the problem just wasn’t (yet) as dire as they said.

If it isn’t keeping you up at night, do you really need pay for an unproven solution?

I was reminded again of this important lesson during a recent introduction to the concept of design thinking in support a intrepreneurial innovation project. I was introduced to David M. Kelley’s IDEO framework. In it, desirability, feasibility, and viability are three core elements of an innovation. But it is emphasized that the idea must start with desirability – customer first. What problem are you solving and for whom? Always keep the customer’s need top of mind.

When innovating, it is natural for your thinking to drift toward what is possible given your current resources, limitations, and culture (feasibility). This makes it easier to envision the path to implementation. But this shortcut leads you away from the core of true innovation, and what makes innovating difficult, which is developing an entirely new approach to solving a migraine problem for the customer. Without this, your innovation will remain unused, collecting dust, while your customer loses sleep.