Founder never knows what buyers wants

Here’s my necro-analysis perspective (I use this term to revert a GTM perspective from positive to negative):

1. Customers already use a bunch of tools to edit videos — that market is hot with Youtube and social clips frenzy
2. The market is big and can be sliced into smaller segments by different criteria, e.g. agencies vs creators, etc. 
3. The waste of bad product decision in the past is all over the market and every newcomer must bear a proportion of its weight 
4. Inherited waste is, first, “closed ears” (hard access to customers) but, also, opportunities too — a room to improve the existent
5. From analyzing the inherited waste, the founder thinks he has found one problem that’s real — time economy to produce short highlights from a longform video
6. It means: people don’t want to watch longforms — highlights are most important, but to make them takes a whole lot of time scrubbing

Let’s apply the logical fallacy framework to this case.

Proposition 1: The problem is real. But does a buyer need to solve it? In other words, is this buyer’s priority? If so, for whom?

The founder found a problem that lies in speed or time economy (addressable metric). So, it is relevant for time-sensitive operations, but it is not acute — “we still can perform, but it will be better if we can do it faster”. So, my blind guess is that it's a problem, but customers don’t necessarily need to solve it as a matter of first priority. This is to say: if other constraints are applied to the process under the same budget (strictly!), this solution is not a priority — buyers may sacrifice this feature at all.  

Once I fired it, the founder argued — you don’t have much experience with it, it is important for customers. Especially, for agencies who charge to a 90 minute video and deliverables are highlights (among other things).    

Right, let’s go on with Proposition 2: if a customer has this problem, will he or she pay for it? The founders normally go for introductory interviews and sales calls to discover it. In my case, the founder did a clipping of narrative of other (similar) products that’s used in their promotion — competitors' marketing claims. That’s the second order Voice of the Customer. So, I can’t seriously discuss it. Simply, no data here (too prone to speculations). But what is the role of this question? It’s a blocker discovery. Customers may lie and they often do. Narratives might be malformed or malinterpreted (most often). But the question reads one important thing — is this a blocker? 

My perspective is as follows:

• Customers don’t buy — that’s the rule. 
• Customers buy — that's an exception.

This is a necro-analysis premise. If you need to pressure-test your GTM, the negative perspective is essential. In our case, it’s the largest flaw — building the MVP on a mental construct that sound like this:

• Step 1: quantified time lost
• Step 2: saving from usage of a tool
• Step 3: willingness to pay recognized 

Does it hold together? No, it does not because there’s no separate recognizable line for this in a balance sheet. Any product’s value is a whole. If someone — as in our case — tells this: … "If [the feature ] saves you 30–60 minutes per project, then even $10–$20 is nothing for a working editor [like this]" it means that they are trying to sell the bundle of features at a discount from its face value (a marketing trick). If you unbundle, you can’t claim the pricing logic holds in your case. Simple as this.

Final reasoning: if we solve a problem, a customer will pay us. This forms an invalid syllogism: if the problem’s priority and a status of a “blocker” is confirmed, then, the customer must buy. But it’s not so.  

Customers will buy if it's weird not to buy — it’s easy and all conditions are met, including: a perfect integration (export) to their preferred editing tools and a fair pricing. What’s important is the product is the third layer assistant tool (deeply in-flow):