A is for Assess: The Step That Tells You Whether the Market Agrees With You

After Widen, there is a specific kind of clarity that settles in.

You know who the problem belongs to. You understand how they experience it. You can describe the gap between where they are and where they want to be. The problem is defined and the direction feels right.

And that is exactly when most founders make their next mistake.

They take that clarity and move straight to building. The problem feels real, the solution feels obvious, and momentum feels like progress. What they skip is the one question that actually determines whether any of it is worth pursuing: does the market already agree with you?

That is what the Assess step is for.

What assessment actually means

A is the second step of the WAVES Method™. It stands for Assess.

Where Widen is about defining the problem correctly, Assess is about finding out whether real demand already exists for a solution to that problem. Not assumed demand. Not potential demand. Evidence of demand that is already there, already being expressed, already being acted on by real people.

The distinction matters because having a well-defined problem and having a viable market are two entirely different things. People can acknowledge that a problem is real and still not be urgently looking for a solution. They can be tolerating the problem because the cost of solving it feels higher than the cost of living with it. Or they can already be paying someone else to solve it, which tells you something equally important.

Assessment is not research for its own sake. It is the structured process of answering one question before you go any further:

Is there evidence, not assumption, that real people want this enough to act on it?

What getting this wrong costs

In 1985, Coca-Cola had a real problem and real data. Pepsi was gaining share, and blind taste tests consistently showed people preferred the sweeter taste of Pepsi over Coke. The company did not skip assessment. They ran one of the largest market research efforts in consumer history before reformulating the recipe into what became New Coke.

By the metric they measured, the market agreed with them. People liked the new taste better, cup for cup, in a blind test.

What Coca-Cola failed to assess was what they were actually being asked to change. Customers weren't just buying a flavour. They were buying a relationship with a brand that had been part of family traditions, national identity and personal memory for a century. The taste test measured preference in a vacuum, but it never asked the question that mattered: what happens when you take away the original, not just introduce a new option next to it?

The backlash was immediate and enormous. Within three months, under public pressure, Coca-Cola brought back the original formula as "Coca-Cola Classic." New Coke was quietly discontinued a few years later.

The lesson isn't that Coca-Cola failed to do research. It's that they assessed the wrong thing — taste in isolation — instead of the thing that actually determined demand: what customers were emotionally and practically unwilling to lose. Evidence of demand is only useful if you're asking it about the right variable.

What assessing actually looks like

Assessment is a cluster of connected questions, each one pressure-testing a different assumption about the market.

Is anyone already paying for something adjacent to this?

Existing spend is the clearest evidence that a market exists. If people are already paying for something that partially solves the problem you have identified, the market is real. Your question then becomes whether your solution is different enough, and better enough, to make them switch.

What does the competitive landscape actually tell you?

No competition is not automatically a green light. It is a question. Either the market is genuinely underserved, which is an opportunity, or others have tried and found the economics don't work, which is a warning. Both possibilities deserve honest investigation before you commit.

How often and how urgently does this problem occur?

A problem that happens once a year and causes mild inconvenience is a very different market from one that happens weekly and costs real time, money or clients. Frequency and urgency are two of the most reliable signals of whether demand is strong enough to sustain a business.

What are people currently doing about it?

Nobody does nothing. If your target customer has the problem you have identified, they are solving it somehow right now — through a competitor, a workaround, an internal process, or by tolerating the cost. Understanding what they are already doing tells you exactly what you are competing against.

The question that grounds this step

At the Assess stage, the most clarifying question is this:

If your ideal customer did nothing and bought nothing, what would happen to them?

If the honest answer is "not much" then the problem, however real, may not be urgent enough to build a business on. If the answer is "they lose time, money, clients, or sleep" then you have a market worth pursuing.

The size of the consequence is the size of the opportunity.

Why this comes before Validate

You cannot validate an offer in a market that does not exist. That sounds obvious written down, but it is the step most founders either skip entirely or rush through, relying on conversations with supportive people rather than evidence from representative ones.

Assessment done properly gives you one of three outcomes, all of them useful:

None of these is a failure. All of them are better than finding out six months into building.

Where to start

If you have a defined problem and a clear sense of who experiences it, the next question is whether the evidence supports building a business around it.

If you want to go through the full Assess diagnostic — the structured questions that surface real demand signals, map the competitive landscape and pressure-test your market assumptions — that is what we work through together in a Prime consultation.