Profitable Ideas Come From Your Own Experiences
Most marketers think they’re listening. They run surveys, ask open-ended questions, post engagement polls, and obsess over feedback forms. They believe they’re being data-driven and customer-centric, and that profitable ideas will ensure their future.
But the results don’t show it. New offers flop. “Improvements” to existing products lead to confusion or indifference. They keep adjusting based on what customers say they want, and yet revenue plateaus or drops.
Something is off—but they can’t see it, because they’re too close to the wrong signal. The problem isn’t a lack of effort. It’s that the entire approach is flawed. Marketers are chasing surface-level insights, mistaking opinions for opportunity.
Customers say they want one thing, but their behavior says otherwise. They’ll ask for a dashboard feature and never use it. They’ll demand a content type and then scroll past it.
They’ll beg for premium options and buy cheap hyped up versions anyway. Marketers scramble to implement this noise because they think pleasing people means profits. It doesn’t. It means dilution. It means building the wrong things faster.
The biggest mistake is treating customer requests as gospel. Marketers are so focused on giving the audience a voice that they forget how limited that voice is. Customers can only ask for what they understand.
They don’t know what they don’t know. So they beg for more of the same or offer vague wish lists based on trends they’ve seen. They’re not thinking about innovation. They’re trying to eliminate immediate pain, not imagine a better way.
When marketers follow this lead, they trap themselves in a cycle of shallow upgrades and reactive decisions. Worse, they assume that if they don’t ask, they’re being reckless.
But reckless isn’t failing to ask—it’s failing to see. Most of what customers actually need never gets said out loud. It shows up in the patterns. The pain points. The moments they stop clicking.
The workaround hacks they cobble together because no one gave them a cleaner option. Marketers keep their eyes on the inbox, the DMs, the form submissions—while the real insights pass them by unnoticed.
There’s a better way to build. A more profitable way to innovate. One that doesn’t rely on asking customers what they want—but instead focuses on something far more valuable.
Why Customer Requests Mislead More Than They Guide
Marketers love to feel like they’re listening. They frame it as responsive, user-driven, data-informed. They’ll point to spreadsheets full of feedback and say they’re in tune with their audience and that these are profitable ideas.
They’re not. They’re in tune with the opinions of the loudest or most vocal users. They’re tangled up in requests that sound helpful but lead them down the wrong path. The irony is that listening too literally is often the exact thing holding a business back.
Customers describe what they think they want. That’s not the same thing as what they need. Their perspective is limited to their current experience. They can only express wants based on what they know.
If they’re struggling with a clunky process, they’ll ask for a band-aid fix. They won’t request the removal of the process entirely. If your platform requires six steps to publish something, they’ll ask for a “save” button after step four. They won’t think to say, “Why are there six steps at all?”
This disconnect between what customers ask for and what actually creates transformation is why products stall. Feedback loops fill with micro-fixes. The product becomes bloated with requested features that clutter the user experience.
These additions rarely convert new buyers, and they don’t deepen retention. They just make the original offer harder to navigate. What started as a clean solution becomes a Frankenstein build of bolt-on ideas. The customer thinks they’ve helped. The business thinks they’ve served. Nobody wins.
What shapes most of this feedback is limitation. Customers are reacting inside a box. Their requests come from what they have, not what’s possible. When Uber added real-time driver tracking, it didn’t come from customers asking, “Can I get a GPS feed of my driver’s location?” It came from observing that customers kept calling drivers asking where they were. The problem wasn’t what the customer said. It was what they did that revealed the gap.
Even great customers—loyal, engaged, smart—tend to offer ideas that mirror competitors or trends. They ask for what they’ve seen before. It gives marketers a false sense of urgency.
One person asks for a TikTok integration. Another echoes it. Suddenly, you think it’s a must-have. But these kinds of requests are echoes of the market, not signals of your unique opportunity. You get trapped reacting to someone else’s innovation.
The requests also skew incremental. They’re tweaks, not transformations. “Can you add dark mode?” “Can I filter by tag?” “Can you create more templates like the last one?” These kinds of asks don’t build category leaders.
They maintain status quo. They don’t open new markets. They temporarily please existing users. A tweak can be a quality-of-life upgrade, sure. But if that’s your main roadmap, you’re stagnating. And your competitors will pass you, because they’re building something bolder while you’re fixing button colors.
Sometimes, following requests backfires outright. There are countless examples where companies listened and lost. One of the most well-known is Coca-Cola’s infamous New Coke.
It was a direct response to customer taste tests showing people preferred a sweeter formula. But once they rolled it out, the backlash was intense. Customers didn’t just reject it.
They revolted. What they said in a blind taste test didn’t match what they valued about the brand. Coke misread the data because they trusted surface feedback. Another example: Microsoft’s Windows 8. It was designed with touchscreens in mind because users were increasingly on tablets and hybrid devices.
Early testers requested a slicker, app-style interface. So Microsoft removed the Start menu and replaced it with a tile-based layout. The result was a jarring user experience. Feedback said “modern,” but the reality was chaos. The requests didn’t reflect how people actually used their machines. Microsoft had to reverse course in later versions.
Even Netflix fell into this trap for a while. For years, users requested a better rating system. The company eventually implemented thumbs up/down and began to suggest more niche recommendations. What followed was a drop in engagement and confusion.
People didn’t want a more precise system. They wanted to feel like Netflix got them. It wasn’t about stars or thumbs. It was about trust in the recommendation engine. Netflix had to quietly pull back and focus more on improving their algorithmic modeling than fiddling with feedback.
A subtler problem is the emotional weight customers attach to their own ideas. This is known as the IKEA effect. When people build something themselves—even if it’s poorly made—they value it more.
The same happens when they suggest a feature or tweak. If you use their idea, they feel validated. If you don’t, they feel dismissed. But if you implement it and it doesn’t perform, they still believe it should have worked. This emotional distortion pollutes your product direction. You’re not leading. You’re managing customer pride.
The IKEA effect also shows up in buyer communities, especially in tech, coaching, and course businesses. Someone suggests an “improvement” and becomes vocal in pushing it.
Others rally behind the idea—not because it’s useful, but because it feels like group consensus. You risk building based on validation politics, not actual demand. The loudest request wins, even if it has no strategic merit. You get applause, not performance.
Another trap is that customers rarely understand the cost of what they’re asking. They don’t see the trade-offs. They’ll say, “Add this feature” without knowing it would delay launch, spike support tickets, or break integrations.
They aren’t malicious. They just don’t have the context you have. If you build everything they ask for, you end up with a fragile product that tries to be everything to everyone. That’s not sustainable. That’s not profitable.
Marketers also assume that asking for input creates stronger customer relationships. It doesn’t if you ignore it. The second you crowdsource feedback and fail to deliver on it, people feel betrayed.
You think you’re being open. They think you wasted their time. Ironically, listening badly can hurt more than not asking at all. You’re not expected to grant every request. But when you act like you might, expectations spiral. Transparency backfires when it’s paired with inaction.
This doesn’t mean feedback is useless. It’s just misunderstood. There’s a difference between listening and obeying. Great marketers know how to decode what people mean, not just what they say.
They listen like a detective, not a servant. They treat every comment as a clue, not a command. They know that the most important problems often show up between the lines. Customers might ask for more tutorials. But what they’re really saying is, “I’m lost and need clarity.” A great marketer fixes the onboarding flow, not just dumps another PDF.
If your entire product roadmap is request-driven, you’re letting your users write the story. That kills innovation. It also puts you in a reactive posture. Every quarter is spent responding, fixing, adding.
You never lead. You never step back and rethink what’s truly broken. You never take the risk of building something nobody asked for but everyone needed. You play defense. And defense doesn’t scale. It just maintains.
One of the biggest myths in marketing is that giving people what they want guarantees satisfaction. It doesn’t. People want faster horses until you give them a car. They want more customization until it overwhelms them.
They want access to everything until it dilutes the value. The job of a marketer is to protect users from their own short-sightedness. You’re supposed to dig deeper than their words and ask what’s underneath.
That’s what product vision is. It’s seeing what they can’t. It’s watching for the silent frustration they can’t name. It’s noticing the way they avoid a feature altogether. It’s realizing that three users asked for a complicated function, but hundreds quietly stopped using the tool because it didn’t do the basics well. The best marketers spot the iceberg. They don’t just react to the splash.
If you’ve been listening closely and still feel like your products aren’t hitting, this is why. You’re taking instructions from the wrong data. Requests are comforting because they give you a to-do list. But they’re deceptive. They pull you into fixes, not breakthroughs.
They anchor you to what already exists. Innovation isn’t born from giving people exactly what they want. It’s born from solving what they couldn’t describe in the first place. You can build something wildly successful without a single direct request for it.
In fact, many of the best products in history came from someone observing the problem, not asking about it. Customers didn’t ask for smartphones with touchscreens. They asked for better keypads.
They didn’t ask for Airbnbs. They asked for cheaper hotels. They didn’t ask for Canva. They asked for more PowerPoint templates. What made those companies explosive wasn’t obedience. It was vision rooted in pain.
You have that same ability. But you have to stop trusting requests as gospel. They’re symptoms, not diagnoses. They’re guesses, not truths. The real insight is always one layer deeper. That’s where the opportunity lives. And there’s a better way to find it.
Struggles Reveal What Customers Can’t Articulate
Most people don’t know how to describe a solution they’ve never seen. That’s not a flaw. It’s human nature. But it creates a gap between what customers say and what they actually need.
The words they use—if they even give feedback at all—rarely point directly to breakthrough ideas. What does? Struggle. Frustration. Abandonment. Workarounds. Those behaviors are more honest than any request ever will be.
They’re unfiltered. They expose friction in its rawest form. And if you’re paying attention, they lead straight to innovation. Frustration is one of the clearest signals of opportunity, yet most marketers treat it like a support issue instead of a research gift.
When someone is frustrated, it means they’re trying to engage but hitting a wall. They haven’t walked away yet. They still care. That moment of friction—where they want the outcome but can’t reach it—is the exact window where value is waiting to be delivered. It’s not a complaint to fix. It’s a need that hasn’t been fully met. Stick with it and profitable ideas will appear as if by magic.
You can spot frustration in more ways than just angry emails. It’s in the tone of a comment like, “Why isn’t there just a button for this?” or “I always forget how to get back to this part.”
It’s in the way a user navigates in circles on your site or app. It’s in the call where they say they almost gave up. Those moments are data. Not in the spreadsheet sense, but in the sense of strategic direction. They’re pointing to a design flaw, a communication miss, or a process that needs to be rethought entirely—not patched, but replaced.
Even more revealing than frustration are workarounds. When someone takes a product or system and starts modifying how they use it, that’s where you see unmet needs in action.
A user might manually export data into a spreadsheet because your analytics view is too limited. They might record their screen while using your tool just to remember their workflow.
They might copy and paste text between tabs or swap platforms to finish one task. These improvised behaviors are incredibly valuable to observe because they highlight what your product should be doing natively. If someone’s cobbling together their own fix, it means there’s demand for a smoother solution you haven’t built yet.
Abandonment is another key signal. Not rage-quitting, but quiet departure. A user signs up, pokes around, and disappears. Or worse, they stay subscribed but never engage. Their usage data flatlines.
Most businesses write this off as disinterest or churn. It’s not. It’s a sign that something about the experience failed to create traction. Either it was confusing, overwhelming, underwhelming, or too difficult to commit to. They were interested enough to show up. That means something stopped them. That’s the root you need to dig into.
What makes these behaviors so powerful is that they’re mostly silent. They don’t show up in feedback forms. People don’t usually send an email saying, “I got overwhelmed by your interface so I just left.”
They don’t articulate confusion. They just experience it. That’s why metrics like time-on-page, scroll depth, video watch completion, and bounce rate are more informative than a 5-star review. Reviews reflect what the customer wants to believe about themselves or the brand. Behavior reflects what they actually experienced.
Hesitation is a goldmine. If users pause during checkout, backtrack on a page, or hover without clicking, that means they’re uncertain. Something in the copy, the layout, or the offer isn’t creating clarity or confidence.
Most marketers look for conversion numbers. Smart ones look for hesitation points. Those micro-moments are the seams where trust fails or confusion takes over. They’re not always dramatic. Sometimes they’re just a slight doubt. But enough of those add up, and you lose people.
Overcomplication is another silent killer. If someone has to Google how to use your tool, that’s a signal. If they need to open three help tabs to complete one action, that’s a signal.
If they ask your community the same question five times, it’s not a user problem. It’s a design problem. You may have over-explained, under-guided, or built for power users instead of the majority. People won’t always complain about complexity. They’ll just feel tired and disengaged. By the time you notice they’re gone, the damage is done.
Every product that ever disrupted a market started with someone noticing these patterns. Stripe didn’t come from people asking for another payment processor. It came from developers who were sick of the nightmare that was setting up merchant accounts, API keys, and compliance settings across legacy systems.
Stripe’s founders built for themselves—but they were really solving for a shared frustration. The silence from other tools was exactly what made Stripe’s ease of use revolutionary.
Slack is another example. It wasn’t born from someone saying, “We need a new chat app.” It was born from a team that was building something else entirely, using a clunky internal tool to manage conversations.
They realized the tool itself solved the real problem: messy communication. Email threads were too slow. Project management tools were too rigid. Slack carved into that frustration and turned it into a standalone product. What people couldn’t describe turned out to be the thing they desperately needed.
Dropbox didn’t come from surveys asking for cloud storage. It came from the constant frustration of emailing files to yourself and forgetting which version was which. Users didn’t ask for Dropbox.
They were too busy working around a broken process. The creators of Dropbox saw the pattern and built the solution. It felt intuitive not because it was requested, but because it removed friction no one had named out loud.
The same goes for consumer products. The Swiffer didn’t come from people saying they wanted disposable floor cleaners. It came from watching how people struggled to clean with brooms and mops—how they spent more time cleaning the tools than using them.
Apple didn’t design the iPod by asking what customers wanted. It noticed that digital music was scattered and painful to manage. iTunes and the iPod solved for that chaos. No focus group could have described that need accurately, because they were too caught in what they already had.
These examples aren’t just stories. They’re blueprints. If you want to build something that gets real traction, you need to track behavior—not opinions. Start with customer support.
Look at what people keep asking. Not just the questions, but the tone. Are they confused about the same thing repeatedly? Are they frustrated about something you thought was simple? Those patterns matter. One angry email is noise. Twenty different ways of asking the same question is a signal.
Session recordings are another goldmine. Tools like Hotjar or FullStory let you watch users navigate your product in real time. Where do they hesitate? Where do they rage-click?
Where do they scroll up and down like they’re looking for a lost item? That’s where you’ve lost their attention or trust. Watching users interact is often more humbling than any feedback form. It shows you where your assumptions about clarity or ease fall apart.
Drop-off points in a funnel are a roadmap to product failure. If 90% of people hit your landing page but only 10% click through, the problem isn’t traffic. It’s clarity. If 80% start filling out a form but only 20% finish, something about the form is off-putting or confusing. These aren’t analytics. They’re behavioral tells. They let you diagnose what the user couldn’t say. They give you context, not just conversion rates.
Pay close attention to DIY behavior. If people start building templates, scripts, or plugins around your product, ask why. What does their solution do that yours doesn’t? Why did they feel the need to build it?
That’s not a sign your product is powerful. It’s a sign it’s incomplete. Users only build their own extensions when they’re missing something essential. Those workarounds are demand in disguise.
Communities are another overlooked source. If you run a Facebook group, Discord server, or forum around your product or niche, monitor not just what people post, but what gets repeated.
What complaints get likes? What questions keep coming up? What hacks are shared over and over? That’s not idle chatter. It’s unpaid R&D. Those threads show you the gaps your product isn’t covering well enough.
Even when customers articulate a desire, it’s usually a symptom, not the root cause. If someone says, “I wish I had more templates,” the surface request is for content. But the deeper issue might be decision fatigue or creative overwhelm.
If someone asks, “Can I get a dark mode?” maybe it’s about visual comfort, but maybe it’s also about needing to feel more control. Great marketers don’t just hear the request. They translate it. They look at what the user is really trying to fix, simplify, or avoid.
The best marketing and product innovation doesn’t come from genius. It comes from empathy paired with observation. It’s being humble enough to realize that your user is already telling you everything you need to know—they just don’t say it directly. Their behavior is the language. Your job is to become fluent in it.
When you build around behavior instead of requests, your success rate skyrockets. You’re no longer guessing. You’re solving. You’re not playing feature roulette. You’re delivering clarity and ease in places where confusion ruled before.
You start to get comments like, “This is exactly what I needed—I didn’t even know how to ask for it.” That’s the win. That’s the moment your offer becomes not just useful, but indispensable.
And there’s a process to reach that level consistently. One that doesn’t rely on surveys or focus groups. One that taps directly into the struggles your customers can’t articulate—but would pay you to solve.
How to Turn Customer Struggles Into Profitable Ideas and Innovation
If you’re paying attention, your customers are already handing you a profitable ideas roadmap. Not through their requests, but through their frustration. Through their drop-offs, their complaints, their hesitation, their silence. But spotting struggle is only half the equation.
The real leverage comes when you build from it. When you stop trying to “improve” and start removing friction. The biggest wins come not from adding more but from making less feel like more. You don’t need flashier tools. You need tools that make people feel like they finally exhaled.
The first rule of turning struggle into innovation is this: eliminate pain, don’t just add features. A feature is a response. A solution is a relief. Most marketers confuse the two. When someone says, “This takes too long,” they add a bulk action option.
When someone says, “I forget where to find things,” they add more categories. That’s stacking. It’s reactionary. The better move is to step back and ask, “Why is this painful in the first place?”
Then delete, consolidate, automate, or hide. Solve it so elegantly they don’t even notice the fix. That’s where retention and word-of-mouth begin. People don’t rave about features.
They rave about ease. They don’t refer you because you have more options. They refer you because you made something annoying disappear. It’s the same reason people get hooked on products that seem deceptively simple.
They’re not falling in love with the tool. They’re falling in love with the absence of frustration. That emotional shift—finally, someone fixed this—is what turns a product into a brand.
To build that kind of solution, you can’t guess. You have to validate quietly before announcing bold shifts. The worst thing you can do is redesign something based on assumption and blast it to your entire user base. You think you’re launching an upgrade.
They think you just broke what worked. Instead, start with controlled tests. Shadow users in your system. Watch recordings of real interactions. Soft-launch a feature only to support-heavy users. Use A/B testing where you’re not looking for conversion jumps but for friction drops.
Every change should be treated like an experiment in subtraction. Does this new element reduce clicks, cognitive load, questions? Does it help users move forward faster, not just differently?
Quiet validation gives you cover. It lets you find what works without burning trust. It’s the opposite of hype. It’s confidence earned through restraint. The best innovations rarely need to be explained. They’re self-evident once someone tries them.
But to get to that point, you have to know where the struggle lives. That’s where friction audits replace feature polls. Polls ask, “What would you like us to add?” Audits ask, “Where do people slow down, give up, or work around?” It’s a completely different lens.
A feature poll flatters users by making them feel smart. A friction audit tells the truth about where your product is failing them. The best marketers run audits obsessively. They map every stage of the journey—sign-up, onboarding, main interaction, support, retention—and look for stalls.
Friction audits don’t rely on sentiment. They rely on action. You’re looking at video replays, heatmaps, mouse movement, navigation paths. You’re tracking support tickets, rage clicks, incomplete funnels.
You’re looking at time-to-complete metrics and comparing high-retention users to churned ones. You’re not waiting for people to say, “This was hard.” You’re finding out where they struggled even if they never said a word. That’s where your most powerful innovation angles live—underneath silence.
Once you spot those gaps, don’t jump to solutions. Map the problem first. Not the desire. Most marketers get this backward. They ask what people want and then try to build that. But wants shift.
Wants are influenced by trends and competitors and the last webinar someone watched. Problems don’t shift. They sit there unresolved, pulling at people’s time and energy until someone finally fixes them. If you map the desire, you build for trends. If you map the pain, you build for profit.
Problem mapping means getting specific. “Users drop off on this step” is vague. “Users can’t find where to upload their files, so they try three different buttons and give up” is useful.
Go deep. Ask: what’s the cost of this problem to the user? Time? Energy? Money? Reputation? Confidence? The more clearly you define what’s being drained, the easier it is to build something they’ll feel thankful for. And gratitude is what drives loyalty.
This also shapes how you market it. Your positioning should center around relief, not bells and whistles. Too many marketers lean into complexity when they launch a new solution.
They explain how it works, what’s new, how many options it gives. That’s noise. The right approach is to say, “You know that thing that used to suck? It doesn’t anymore.” That’s what lands. That’s what spreads. Customers don’t care about your system. They care about not having to deal with the old pain.
Apple mastered this. They didn’t say the iPhone had capacitive touch and app sandboxing. They said, “Your whole life in your pocket.” They didn’t pitch Face ID with infrared dot-matrix scans.
They said, “Just look at your phone and unlock it.” It’s always relief-forward. Remove effort. Remove worry. Remove confusion. Every great brand simplifies the message down to “You no longer have to deal with this problem.”
This doesn’t mean your product has to be boring. It means it has to respect people’s attention. Give them the benefit of the doubt. They don’t need to be impressed by how smart your team is. They need to be reminded that your product makes their day easier. That shift—from feature bragging to friction lifting—is what turns marketing from a sales pitch into an invitation.
One of the hidden advantages of building this way is that products that solve unspoken problems are harder to copy. Competitors can’t clone what they don’t understand. If your entire advantage is a checklist of features, someone else will ship that in three months.
But if your advantage is that you built around a friction point only you spotted, and designed the solution so cleanly that people don’t even notice it’s solving a deep problem, that’s hard to replicate.
Even if they try, they’ll miss the emotional angle. They’ll ship a similar-looking tool that doesn’t land because they don’t know why yours works. They’ll build for function. You built for frustration.
You got there by watching the user struggle and solving for that invisible ache. That’s defensible. It’s not about IP. It’s about insight. The more silent the problem, the more protected the solution.
If you want to move into this territory, start rewiring how you evaluate product ideas. Don’t ask, “Is this impressive?” Ask, “Is this a relief?” Don’t ask, “How will we announce it?” Ask, “What pain will this quietly eliminate?”
Stop tying success to launch day metrics. Start tying it to usage drop-offs that never happen again. Obsess less about feature parity and more about user ease. And when someone gives you a suggestion, don’t just log it. Ask what they were trying to solve.
If the only thing you did this quarter was run friction audits and map the emotional cost of unresolved problems, you’d have more innovation angles than you could act on. You’d stop building fluff and start building traction.
You’d finally get out of the hamster wheel of “constant improvement” and make a leap that actually moves the needle. Most marketers think they need more ideas. They don’t. They need to subtract the junk, observe the pain, and build what finally works.
You don’t need more complexity. You need cleaner wins. Build with the goal of having someone say, “Wait—why didn’t this exist before?” Make people feel like they dodged a headache by choosing you.
That’s how innovation becomes profit. That’s how you become category-defining instead of feature-chasing. That’s how you turn struggle into something your customer would pay twice as much for—and happily recommend to everyone they know.
The most profitable products don’t come from customer wish lists. They come from noticing what those customers couldn’t put into words. You win when you stop reacting to feature requests and start solving the invisible problems they’re too overwhelmed, confused, or resigned to name.
Innovation isn’t about flash or volume. It’s about clarity. It’s about building something so aligned with real pain that people feel like you read their mind. If your marketing feels like it’s stalling or your products aren’t converting the way they should, it’s probably because you’re listening to what people say instead of watching what they do.
Flip that. Look for the struggle. Find where they hesitate, abandon, or cobble together workarounds. Map the friction. Build for relief. And before you know it, you won’t just have a better product. You’ll have a market that finally feels seen—and a business that scales because of it.
Perhaps you would benefit from a course I have co-created with Janice Dugas. The Entrepreneur’s Trifecta… Focus, Creativity, and Confidence is new and promises to make a difference for your life and business! Take a look at https://ConnieLoves.me/EntrepreneursTrifecta
I’m bestselling USA Today and Wall Street Journal author Connie Ragen Green. My goal is to help at least a thousand people to reach six-figures and beyond with an online business for time freedom and passive income and to simplify your life. Come along with me, if you will and let us discover how we may further connect to achieve all of your dreams and goals. This is also why I want you to think about how you are sharing profitable ideas every day. Perhaps my “Monthly Mentoring Program” is right for you.
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