Republished from Vernacular Nicely Said #50
Hello. Nice to see you again. I’ve missed you. Especially you PWBNhe7Ywu@qq.com
I read somewhere that nearly half of all startups fail because nobody is prepared to pay for the new thing. Ouch. The figure is a little shocking given how hard new businesses work at understanding target customers and their problems.
Solving problems is the only way to ensure the sustainability of a business. Yet, problems are sometimes misunderstood, and just because you’ve identified one or two that doesn’t mean customers will cough up to get them fixed.
For example, if an office manager spends four hours every week manually sorting emails, that could be a problem. If they say it annoys them but they’ve never tried to fix it, their pain isn’t intense enough to drive purchase behaviour.
Perhaps the manager prefers to sort their email rather than leave it to an AI agent, or they consider the task’s mundanity as necessary easy time. Who knows. But your solution to this problem is unlikely to fly.
Gauging problem intensity is something all businesses should do, particularly when things are changing fast. Ask: what business am I really in? Is a drill maker selling drills, or holes? Is there an easier way to make holes than your drill? Do customers even need holes anymore?
I think about Vernacular and the problems it solves and how their intensity is changing.
Most people can write and yet they whistled up Vernacular because they wanted the job done better and faster. These days, people are convinced tools like ChatGPT and Claude can do the job.
However, still plenty of people value a human writer, because they want critical thinking with their writing.
I’ve always said: good writing flows from clear thinking – from the idea up, not the prompt down. And that requires hard questions and head scratching to solidify arguments, understand audience beliefs and what’s standing between them and the action you want people to take. These are strategic problems that writing solves.
The AI shortcut collapses that process, producing output that is fluent, even elegant, but without a well-formed idea to drive it.
Human writing, done properly, is the product of deep thought about a genuine audience. It persuades because it’s built on an accurate model of the reader and meets them where they are rather than where a training dataset suggests they might be.
So, what problems does Vernacular solve? Writing, or thinking?
Thinking, expressed as words, that changes minds?
Strong ideas nicely said, perhaps.
Is it a problem with sufficient intensity?
Time will tell.