It is the most natural thing for entrepreneurs. When they see a gap in the market, an idea emerges, along with an instant urge to fill that gap. And so they do. They move fast, really fast. The new and shiny thing is out there for consumers to enjoy.
Then comes the painful wait. Inaction. A thought creeps in: "Why isn't it landing the way I envisaged?"
The issue is rarely the building process. The issue is often what happened, or more accurately, what didn't happen before the building started.
The Widen Problem
W is the first step of the WAVES Method™. It stands for Widen. I chose that name deliberately.
Most founders start too narrow. They have already decided what the solution is. The idea has been cemented in their minds. All that remains, in their view, is execution.
What Widening asks entrepreneurs to do often feels uncomfortable: step back far enough to question whether the problem you think you are solving is the problem that actually exists.
Do not look for refinements immediately. Instead, genuinely reopen the question and ask:
- Who exactly is experiencing this problem?
- How are they experiencing it right now?
- What are they currently doing about it?
- Is the problem you have identified the same problem they would identify?
In most cases, the answer to that last question is no. Not completely. There is a gap between the entrepreneur's understanding of the problem and the customer's lived experience of it. That gap, however small it seems, is where products go to be ignored and businesses go to underperform.
What Getting It Wrong Actually Costs
Using the classic example of Blockbuster, they believed customers wanted the video store. The physical browsing experience, the new-release wall, the impulse rental on a Friday night. That was their entire business model, and for years it was true enough to make them dominant.
What they missed was the gap between that belief and what customers actually wanted underneath it: to watch what they wanted, when they wanted, without hassle or penalty. The late fees, the drive across town, the "sorry, we're out of copies" were friction customers tolerated because there was no better option yet.
Netflix started by removing exactly that friction. DVDs by mail, no due dates, no late fees. Blockbuster read it as a niche, slower alternative rather than a direct answer to what their customers had been quietly unhappy about all along. Blockbuster even had the chance to buy Netflix in 2000 for around $50 million and passed, because from inside their own model, mail-order rental looked like a worse version of what they already did rather than a better version of what customers actually wanted.
By the time Blockbuster tried to copy the model, it was too late. They had spent years optimising the thing customers tolerated instead of noticing the thing customers actually wanted.
That gap between "what we think we are selling" and "what job the customer is hiring us to do" is the whole story. And it is not unique to Blockbuster. It shows up in small businesses every day, with far less press coverage and far more personal cost.
What Widening Actually Looks Like
Widening is a clarity exercise, not a market research exercise. The goal is to leave this step with three things clearly defined.
1. A precise description of the person experiencing the problem. Not a demographic. A real, specific person. What they are trying to do, what is getting in their way, and what a good outcome looks like for them.
2. A description of the problem in their words, not yours. The language you use to describe a problem is not the same language your customer uses. When your marketing, your offer, and your product all speak a language your customer does not recognise, the business feels invisible, even when it is right in front of them.
3. The gap between where they are and where they want to be. Not where you think they want to be. Where they actually want to be, based on evidence: conversations, behaviour, what they are already paying for, and what they complain about.
Most founders who go through the Widen process properly discover that at least one of their assumptions was materially wrong.
The Question That Changes Everything
If your customer described their problem to a friend, not your solution, not your product, just the raw problem, what words would they use?
Not your words. Theirs.
The gap between how you describe the problem and how they describe it is exactly where your business needs to start.
Why This Is Step One
The WAVES Method™ is a five-step framework: Widen, Assess, Validate, Engineer, Scale. I chose the sequence deliberately. Each step builds on the one before it.
You cannot properly assess demand for something that has not been correctly defined. You cannot validate an offer built on a misunderstood problem. You cannot engineer delivery for something that does not resonate. You cannot scale what has not been proven.
Widen is the first step because everything else depends on understanding the root problem. It is also the most cost-efficient step to revisit.
A founder who discovers at the Widen stage that their problem definition needs work has lost a week of thinking. A founder who discovers the same thing after six months of building has lost significantly more.
Where to Start
If you have an idea, an offer, or a business that feels like it should be working better than it is, the first question to ask is whether you have truly widened your horizon.
If you want to go through the full Widen diagnostic, the ten to fourteen structured questions that surface assumptions, test problem definitions against evidence, and produce a clear problem statement, that is what we work through together in a Prime consultation.