Staking the Claim: How to Know If a Problem Is Actually Yours to Own
Two agencies pitch the same roofing company. Same services, same price, basically the same portfolio. One of them wins, and it’s not because the work is better. The buyer just believes that agency belongs in roofing. The other one happens to be in the room.
That belief is the whole game, and almost nobody builds it on purpose. Owners pick a direction, sharpen the offer, redo the website. Then they skip the question sitting under all of it: do you have any real claim to the problem you want to get paid to solve?
Quick distinction first, because this is where people get tangled up. You probably think you’re picking a niche. Roofers, SaaS founders, dentists, whatever. But a niche is just a group of people. What you actually want to pick is a problem that group has. You can niche on a problem instead of an industry, and honestly it’s usually the better move. The catch is that buyers still read your positioning through the industry lens, so when I say “own a problem,” give it a second. It’s not the same as “pick a vertical.” That gap is where a ton of weak positioning comes from.
Either way, the problem you pick has to be worth solving, and there’s a way to gut-check that. Is it painful enough that people pay to make it stop? Does it keep coming back? Is it big enough to fund a real budget? Can it actually be solved? Can you reach the people who have it? If it clears all that, it’s worth building on. I call that test PRISM.
But passing only tells you the problem is worth owning. It says nothing about whether you get to be the one who owns it. Profitable problems attract everyone who can read a spreadsheet, so wanting the territory and actually holding it are two different things. You have to stake your claim.
There are three ways to do it. Experience, understanding, and resolve. Pick a problem you can’t back with at least one of these and your positioning falls flat, because buyers can tell the difference between someone who chose a problem and someone who belongs to it.
Experience: you lived it
Easiest claim to make. You’ve been on the other side. You worked in the industry, ran the department, made the mistakes you now help people dodge.
Buyers trust experience because it’s hard to fake. You either put in the years or you didn’t. When someone says they ran ops at a manufacturer and they know exactly why the sales team and the floor never talk to each other, the buyer exhales. They don’t have to explain the basics, because the claim does it for them.
The trap is thinking experience is the only claim that matters. It’s not. Plenty of people own problems they never lived, and they own them just fine.
Understanding: you studied it
This next one you build from the outside. You’ve seen enough versions of the problem to know the pattern. You took what works in one corner of the market and dragged it somewhere nobody had tried it yet.
This is the consultant’s claim, and people sleep on it. A buyer who likes new thinking will often take it over raw experience, because experience can harden into “this is how we’ve always done it.” Knowledge travels. Spend two years on the same growth problem across a dozen startups and you can walk into the thirteenth already knowing where it’s going to break, even though you never founded a company in your life.
The trap here is sounding theoretical. If the buyer can’t connect your knowledge to their actual mess, you just come off as well-read. You’ve got to make it concrete or it doesn’t count as a claim.
Resolve: you can’t let it go
Third claim is the one people skip, and I’d argue it’s what separates the owners who stick around from the ones who tap out.
Resolve is the emotional stake. It’s why you keep going when the work gets hard and the results haven’t kicked in yet. The math can’t see it. It’s not in the market size or the pricing. But it’s usually the tiebreaker when a buyer is staring at two providers who look identical on paper.
Take the marketer whose dad was a roofer. He worked the trade as a kid. Then he watched his dad lose the business, not because the work was bad, but because he could never find enough of it. Now that marketer helps roofing companies with the exact problem that sank his father. A buyer hears that and just knows this guy isn’t going to phone it in. The resolve is the proof. It tells the buyer the reason you’re here goes deeper than the invoice, so you’re not going to quit on them halfway through.
The three claims aren’t equal
Which claim matters most depends entirely on who you’re selling to. There’s no fixed ranking, and that’s the whole point.
If your buyer needs exact, measurable results, they lean hard on experience and understanding. They want to know you’ve done this and you know precisely how. Resolve is nice, but on its own it won’t get you the contract.
A buyer who’s into fresh thinking flips it. Understanding can beat experience, because they don’t want fifteen years of the old way walking in the door. They want somebody who can pull an idea from a different field and make it work here.
And when the problem is keeping someone up at night instead of just sitting on a spreadsheet, resolve carries the day. The reason you care becomes the reason they pick you.
So this isn’t a checklist you tick three times and call it done. Picture three circles, and the size of each one changes depending on your ideal client. For one buyer, experience is the big circle. For another, it’s resolve. Your job is to figure out which circle matters most to the people you actually want, then lead with that one.
Can one claim carry the whole thing?
Sometimes, yeah. Depends on what you’re selling and what it costs.
If you’ve got a burning frustration with a problem and the fix costs five bucks, resolve alone might be enough. The buyer sees the conviction, figures you’ve got something worth a shot, and the risk is low enough to roll the dice.
Now crank up the price. They’re putting tens of thousands on the line, and suddenly conviction isn’t enough. They need to see the experience or the understanding underneath it, because being wrong just got expensive. The more your buyer stands to lose, the more claims you need stacked behind your name.
Their risk tolerance plays into it too, along with how you’ve packaged the thing and what you charge. A cautious buyer spending real money wants more proof than an early adopter spending pocket change. Same three claims, weighted differently every time.
Where to start
Pick the problem you want to own. Run the math first, because if it isn’t worth solving, none of the rest matters.
Then ask the harder one. Which of the three claims can you actually make? Not which one reads well in your bio, but which one you could defend in a room full of people who do this for a living. If the honest answer is none of them, you don’t own that problem yet. You just want to, and that’s a different thing.
The owners who win didn’t find the most profitable problem. They found a profitable problem they had a real claim to, and they said it out loud before anyone else got around to it.
