After running problem discovery interviews for LEANSpark, I had a list of insights and a dozen feature ideas. The temptation was to start building.
But which features do you build first? And more importantly, how do you frame them so customers actually care?
The answer lies in understanding the difference between wants and needs — and why most founders get the order wrong.
Features Are Needs. Outcomes Are Wants.
Every product lives in two contexts: the solution context (where features live) and the bigger context (where outcomes live).
Think of needs as eating your vegetables or exercising regularly. Think of wants as living a healthy, energetic life. Most people care more about the want than the need. They’ll skip the broccoli, but they’ll never stop wanting to feel good.
The same is true for products.
When I looked at LEANSpark through this lens, the difference was stark. Originally, I was thinking about building discrete workflow tools — things like creating an elevator pitch, running a business model assessment, or generating an interview script.
These are needs. They’re the equivalent of vegetables. Good for you, but not what gets founders excited enough to pay.
What founders actually want is:
- Validating their idea
- Acquiring customers
- Finding product/market fit
These are outcomes. They’re the equivalent of health and energy — the reason you eat the vegetables in the first place.
The Primary Job: Traction in 90 Days
This realization led to a complete reframe of LEANSpark’s positioning.
Instead of leading with features (“Run a 7-dimension business model assessment!”), I led with the outcome: Help founders achieve traction in 90 days.
What makes an outcome specific is timeboxing it. “Achieve traction” is vague. “Achieve traction in 90 days” is concrete and measurable.
This became the primary job to be done for LEANSpark. Not running assessments. Not generating interview scripts. Helping founders get from idea to first paying customers — or from initial customers to a repeatable customer factory — within a 90-day cycle.
Wants Before Needs, Not Instead Of
The insight isn’t to ignore needs. It’s to lead with wants and use needs to reduce friction.
Using the Customer Forces model, picture the desired outcome at the top of a hill. Achieving any outcome takes effort. To achieve traction, founders need to do a bunch of things: create business models, stress-test them, talk to customers, design experiments, and run campaigns.
The secondary jobs — the needs — are all about reducing the effort required to reach the outcome. They remove friction and obstacles standing in the way.
Good products balance wants with needs this way:
- Target the want — the destination at the top of the hill
- Remove friction — the obstacles standing in the way
For LEANSpark, this meant:
- Want: Traction in 90 days
- Need: Stress-test your business model (so you don’t waste months on a flawed idea)
- Need: Run structured experiments (so every action connects to your goal)
- Need: Learn the methodology (so you know what to do next)
The three features on our Demo-Sell-Build landing page mapped directly to this hierarchy — each one addressed a top problem from the Lean Canvas, but framed in the context of achieving the bigger outcome.
Product/Launch Fit Before Product/Market Fit
This wants-vs-needs thinking extends beyond feature prioritization into launch strategy.
Product/Market Fit is the long game. But before you can scale, you need Product/Launch Fit — proving you can deliver value to your first 10, then 100, then 1,000 customers.
Each level requires different capabilities:
At 10 customers: You don’t need analytics dashboards or scalable infrastructure. You need to deliver the best possible experience. High-touch, manual, concierge. This is where you learn which needs actually matter by watching customers use the product.
At 100 customers: You start automating the repeatable parts. You introduce light infrastructure — onboarding flows, progress tracking. You test pricing and packaging. You start trading high-touch learning for scalability.
At 1,000 customers: Full self-serve. Robust infrastructure. Automated onboarding. Clear product metrics.
The mistake is trying to build for 1,000 when you have 10. At 10 customers, the right features are different from the features you’ll need at 1,000. Premature scaling of features is just as dangerous as premature scaling of the business.
How This Shaped LEANSpark
Instead of building seven specialized workflow agents (one per dimension of the business model), I scoped the MVP to three core capabilities that served the primary job of achieving traction in 90 days.
This wasn’t a compromise. It was a deliberate choice to ship something complete enough to deliver the outcome, rather than something broad but shallow that covered every possible need.
The three features became the demo on the landing page. Customers bought the outcome, not the feature list. And because they bought it, I knew exactly what to build first.
The Takeaway
Stop leading with features. Start leading with outcomes. Features are what your product does. Outcomes are why anyone cares.
Frame your product around the want — the destination — and then prioritize the needs that remove the most friction on the path to getting there. Build for 10 customers first, then 100, then 1,000. Each level teaches you which features actually matter.
I walk through the full solution design in Episode 6 of Building LEANSpark.