You Don’t Need More Leads — You Need More Struggle

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A few weeks ago, I found myself halfway through a Slack message… rewriting a sentence I’d already dictated twice.

Native voice tools just don’t cut it, do they?

Clunky. Inconsistent. Unreliable. And with an Irish accent? Even worse 🙂 

I’d been quietly putting my trust in the natural evolution of technology, trying to go more “keyboardless” for months. But this constant friction kept pulling me back.

I wasn’t just indifferent. I was struggling. And that distinction is everything.

If you’re building or selling something new, your job isn’t to manufacture desire out of thin air. It’s to find the people who are already struggling, and name that struggle better than they can.

When you do that, everything else clicks: your message, your positioning, your product roadmap.

Focus on the Job

The presence of struggle is the clearest signal that someone is in-market.

It might feel counterintuitive, but struggle is where demand lives. If someone isn’t wrestling with an imperfect solution, they’re probably not even looking.

Put simply: no pain, no pull.

And the more vivid the struggle, the stronger the readiness to change.

What struggling looks like in practice

Here’s how this looked in my quest for voice-enabled productivity:

• Struggling moment: Constantly re-editing dictated messages

• Habit: Reverting back to typing out of muscle memory

• Push: Tired of wasting time with native voice tools.

• Anxiety: “What if it misunderstands me and I end up wasting more time?”

• Pull: The promise of seamless dictation, anywhere.

• Hiring criteria: Must integrate smoothly with macOS 

• Firing criteria: Too many corrections required

• Basic quality: Must be faster than typing

• Outcome: Frictionless productivity, even on the move

This framework is how we map and understand when someone is truly ready to switch from the status quo, or hire your product.

How to uncover the struggle

What’s the struggling moment your best prospect is living through right now?

It might be quietly pulling them toward a solution like yours.

The best way to figure this out is to talk to some of your existing customers who lived through it. Why? Because they have all the context. What life was like before, and what it’s like now.

This is how acting on the voice of your customer enables you to win more of them, and separate ‘prospects who are struggling’ from those that aren’t.

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