Nobody Asked for This

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"You can observe a lot by just watching." — Yogi Berra

In the late 1980s, a retired housewares guy named Sam Farber rented a house in the south of France with his wife, Betsy.

Betsy was an architect. She also had arthritis in her hands, and the rental kitchen was stocked with the same tools every kitchen had back then. Thin metal handles. Hard edges. The vegetable peeler that feels a little hazardous and hurts a bit, even when your hands work fine.

For Betsy, peeling an apple actually hurt.

But she didn't quit cooking. She didn't write a letter to the peeler company. She found some clay and molded it around the handle until she had something her hand could hold.

Sam watched her do it. And he asked questions that turned into a company:

Why do ordinary tools hurt? And if you made one comfortable for someone with arthritis, wouldn't it be better for everyone?

Those questions became OXO Good Grips. The fat, soft-handled peeler you've probably used yourself at some point.

In fact, a few years later that peeler landed in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. You can still buy one for about $15.

The thought that hung around with me all week was this: the demand for that peeler existed before the peeler did.

It was sitting there in a farmhouse kitchen, in the hands of one specific person, trying to do one specific thing; cook a meal without pain.

If you’d surveyed 1,000 home cooks in 1989 and asked what they wanted in a vegetable peeler, I’d bet good money that not one would’ve said "a soft, thick rubber handle with little slits on the side, please."

They'd have probably said "a bigger blade” or “a sharper blade."

Because the blade is the answer they already had words for. But the real need was underneath, and nobody could name it. Betsy didn't invent that need when she reached for the clay, she just exposed it and decided to do something about it.

Many of us get this backwards. We think our work is about going into a dark room and conjuring something brilliant, then convincing the world to want it. So we build the thing, ship it, and wait for the applause. And more often than not…it lands flat.

The trick is to remind ourselves that demand is almost never ours to create. It’s already out there, walking around inside real people, waiting to be seen.

Our job as builders is to do an unreasonable amount of listening, noticing, and hunting for pain, in order to identify problems to solve.

There’s a really sharp version of this idea in Rob Snyder's new book, The Power of Pull (worthwhile summer read IMO.)

Snyder is a founder and a fellow at Harvard Innovation Labs, and he's spent years on this question: why does work with obvious value sometimes still go nowhere?

His answer is that people don't buy because your thing is good. They buy because they're stuck.

Not curious. Not mildly interested. Stuck.

Snyder boils it down to 4 conditions: a real project they're trying to finish, urgency that showed up for a reason, options they've already tried, and none of those options getting them where they want to go.

When all 4 are true at once, they don't need to be convinced of anything. They'll “pull” the thing right out of your hands, or off the shelf.

Most of the time, your customer isn't stuck. And no amount of polish on your end changes that. So the real skill isn't making a better pitch. It's learning to spot the specific person who REALLY IS stuck, in the specific way your work could fix.

Which brings us to how you actually spot them.

It’s really difficult to Q&A your way to the truth.

Snyder tells a story about a business school friend and founder who while developing a product, ran hundreds of customer interviews and basically came up empty.

So he gave up on asking and started intensely observing. He shadowed people for hours while they worked, and there it was. They were literally shouting at their computers in certain situations. Banging on the desk. Miserable in a way that never showed up in a single interview.

Nobody writes "I feel a swelling rage right around 2pm when I…" on a survey. But you can see it if you've worked out a way to be in the room.

That pain is the most honest product or creative brief you'll ever get. The sigh, the eye-roll, the little workaround someone builds because nothing on the market actually fits. Betsy wrapping clay around a handle was pain-relief you could hold in your hand.

The people you serve are usually telling you exactly what they need. Just might not be with their words.

In the OXO story, I think there’s a tendency to shrink Betsy down to "the inspiration." The wife with arthritis who gave Sam the idea. But that sells her short.

She was a trained architect. She shaped that first clay handle herself. She helped design the tools and helped name the company.

The person who was stuck became the co-creator of the fix.

That's a reframe worth carrying into your own work. The people you serve aren't an audience to win over or a market to crack. They hold one half of the work; the deep knowledge of what they're trying to do and why nothing quite fits.

You hold the other half; the craft to build something that actually fits, and provides relief.

The magic isn't in either half alone. It shows up when you get close enough to the people you seek to serve, that the two halves meet.

Use this to stop guessing what your customers or audience want, and start noticing what they're already trying to do.

Copy/paste this prompt into your AI tool of choice:

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And I’d appreciate your help:

Both make a real difference.

Thanks for spending time with Red Threads this week, I’m glad you’re here.

~ Jaime