Complaints Are Free. A Credit Card Isn’t.

A few years ago I set out to test a consumer product idea in the home energy space. The timing looked right. Energy prices were unstable after COVID, the grid was in transition, and 2022 brought the largest annual jump in household electricity spending the EIA has recorded since it started tracking in 1984.

The customers I spoke to were frustrated, and they were specific about it. Time-of-use pricing they didn’t understand. Bills that spiked with no explanation. No idea what had caused the increase, and no time to dig into it. Every interview added to the pile. I kept hearing the same pain in different words, and it looked like a problem worth solving.

So I tested it properly. I ran repeated surveys of hundreds of people and several rounds of interviews. I kept a landing page live for weeks, tested different price points (including ones that couldn’t support a business), and showed people what the product could do. Then I asked for a real credit card and messaged the same people who had complained to me.

They liked it. They wouldn’t commit.

When I asked why, the answer was never about the product. They were busy. They had jobs, families, and bigger problems than a utility bill. They were annoyed by it, but not enough to change what they did.
The problem was real. It just wasn’t a priority.

Most founders treat “painful” and “prioritized” as the same thing. They aren’t. Complaining costs nothing. Paying means you’ve ranked a problem above everything else competing for your attention and money.
I never built it. That saved me months of work and real money, and it taught me more about discovery than most things I’ve shipped.