Who Are Your Agonists?
We need a word for the people who are not your customers or users ... yet
Discussions about how to find product-market fit struggle to fill a lexical hole: How should we describe people who have a problem?
They are not customers, because customers pay you money. They are not users, because users interact with your product. Neither of these words describe the kind of people a founder is looking for during the process of problem validation, which comes before building things or getting people to pay you for them.
What is the name of the group of people who have a problem but do not use your thing or pay you for the thing?
I used to call them "problem-havers", but that takes too long to say and explain, a clunky barbarism. Now I call them agonists. An agonist is a person engaged in contest or struggle. Everyone already knows the terms protagonist, antagonist, etc. They all come from the same Greek root "ἀγών" meaning contest, struggle or competition.
There are reasons why this word is important, because the first step toward product-market fit is problem validation. You have a conjecture about a problem that exists. For a problem to exist, people have to have it; ie it must impose costs on them. They don't have to know about the problem, and they may even identify with the life and workflows that their problem has shaped for them, but they must have the problem.
We can name the categories of people a founder needs to look for. Each level expresses a deeper level of need, a greater willingness to pay for a solution, and therefore a stronger indication that a business can be built which solves their problem.
Top to bottom, from weakest to strongest signal, and from problem validation to product-market fit, you have:
Agonist - A person engaged in a struggle or contest; someone who has a problem
Unwitting (schlep blindness) and/or suffering-identified
Witting and suffering averse, but inert (knows they have a problem, unable to act)
For these people, the open question is: what is their activation threshold and in what context is it crossed? (The Mom Test is a great framework for these conversations.)
Acting to avoid suffering (i.e. is seeking to build or buy a solution to their problem)
User - has chosen your product in an attempt to solve their problem
Is unwilling or unable to pay you (yet …)
Examples: open-source users, penniless students, businesses on a free trial
Customer - pays you money for the benefits your product delivers
Still deeper levels of validation than money are:
Frequent use
Feature requests made in anger ;)
Novel applications
Refers other customers to you
Low churn
Anyone who has read the works of Steve Blank and Eric Ries will find these ideas familiar. I believe we simply need to use a new, simple and separate word to describe the initial group of people that an entrepreneur must search for.
They're not users (yet…) because ideally you haven't wasted time building a product before you validated the need and awareness of the problem. They’re not leads or prospects, because this is the language of sales, and you have nothing to sell; you’re just testing a conjecture and listening a lot. To call them strugglers is a little pejorative, although their struggle is precisely what is relevant to you. You just want John Q. Agonistes.