Pain Described in Adjectives

Every doctor eventually stops asking how it feels and asks for a number between one and ten.

It's a strange question the first time. Pain isn't a number. It's throbbing, or sharp, or the specific one that only arrives when you turn your head a certain way. The scale flattens all of that into a digit and loses almost everything interesting about the experience.

They ask anyway, because "quite bad" cannot be compared to anything. Not to your pain last week, not to the person in the next room. Seven can.

Pitch decks are still stuck on the adjectives.

The pain points slide arrives and it says: manual. Inefficient. Frustrating. Time-consuming. Error-prone. Lots of bullets, each one true, none of them a measurement. Everyone nods, because who could argue — of course that's frustrating.

Then the meeting moves on and nothing about that slide can be used for anything.

Because the investor's next question isn't "is this bad?" It's "how bad, and therefore how much would somebody pay to make it stop?" Adjectives can't answer that. A company can be built on a seven and cannot be built on a three, and both of them are described as "frustrating."

The fix is unglamorous arithmetic.

How many hours a week, and who does them, and what does that person cost? How many times does it go wrong, and what does one mistake cost when it does? How many people in the company touch this, and how many companies are there?

Four hours a week, at a fifty-dollar-an-hour loaded cost, for three people, is thirty thousand dollars a year at one customer. That's not a bullet point. That's a budget, and your price now has something to sit next to.

Sometimes you run the numbers and the pain turns out to be a three. That's genuinely useful information, delivered cheaply, before you spend two years on it.

More often it's worse than you thought, and you'd been describing a seven in the language of a two.

"Frustrating" is how it feels. Investors are asking what it costs. Those are different slides.

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More on sizing the pain properly in The Pitch Deck Book.

Composite characters, invented companies. The mistakes are real; the people aren't.