The $8.3 Billion Product/Market Mistake

March 15, 2022Wesamuddin Azzaidani

The $8.3 Billion Product/Market Mistake

Mike is at the doctors office. He looks at the pain-scale questionnaire. He’s a bit creeped out by the pictures of pained faces printed next to the high numbers.

Mike selects his pain as a 1 or a 2 and is taken to the room to see the doctor.

The doctor looks at the smiley face Mike selected––and prescribes him oxy.

Fast forward a few months and Mike doesn’t have an ear infection anymore. Now he has something much worse–an opioid addiction!

There are thousands of folks just like Mike in this country & here’s why: the “1-10” pain scale was crafted by Purdue Pharma to sell opioids and make it easier for physicians to prescribe them

This system of scoring is pretty new. The concept of “scoring” pain and then handing out opioids based on this score was something that started around 30 years ago.

So why did Purdue Pharma come up with this idea? Was there a problem they were trying to solve for patients?

Yes. Patients complained of being in pain.

Great, we’re off to a good start….

Is there strong clinical evidence backing the idea of a subjective pain score?

Hell no! That’s purely a marketing gimmick by Purdue to profit off of peoples’ pain. As a matter of fact, Purdue came up with the idea of pain as the “5th vital sign”—they literally invented a vital sign to profit off patients!

So now doctors offices are being flooded by opioid addicts and employees faking back injuries for Workman’s Comp. No problems solved.

The takeaway here is that it ain’t enough for your product to identify a problem and establish “product/market” fit. You have to establish product/market fit AND make sure you’re taking care of your customers’ long-term interests.

Might take a bit more thinking and work now but it’ll pay dividends in the future.

As for Purdue Pharma? It had to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection–from all the lawsuits—and pay a settlement worth $8.3 billion.

P.S. Want to save a ton of time and make a lot of money? Then get my Business Baroque system for FREE and turn your ideas into cash-generating assets. Get it here: https://powerpersuasion.net/

Highly Recommend

“I want to highly recommend Wes if you are in need of great copy and/or sales page! I was doing my own copy around my sales page for a high ticket service product and needed help!! I didn’t have a fully blown “sales page” that could explain this complex product as well as why someone should pay me a lot of money to buy this product and that is when I reached out to Wes. As a result of working together, I now have an amazing sales page that is already converting new customers. Also, when I have worked with copywriters in the past, I’ve needed to make massive edits as they didn’t spend the time to research and actually understand what it was I was selling. With Wes, he did massive research and even though the “copy” was about 20 pages long, I had very few edits. He also was super responsive and timely with the work! I would highly recommend Wes for your work project!”

Andrew Hunzicker

Founder of The CFO College

Wes is Process-Oriented

“Wes is process-oriented and was instrumental in providing the team a baseline for quality expectations and direction for overall performance improvement. He is a strong advocate for Agile methods and a believer in practicing known principles that lead to expected outcomes. That said, Wes was always open to new ideas and adjustments for the benefit of team. He is comfortable working with management and executive stakeholders to meet common goals. Additionally, Wes contributed his talents in crafting presentations and content for business case value and promotion.”

Mark Himeda

CEO of Versiq LLC

Exceptional Leadership Skills

“Wes leads as Scrum Master for an external IAM (Authorization) based application, to which I have the pleasure of serving as Product Owner. Wes has a mastery level of understanding of agile principles and it’s application. Attention to quality, exceptional leadership skills, and a builder of relationships with customers is why I depend on Wes day in and day out. An underrated prowess for Wes is his ability to persuade stakeholders through written communication. This skill is an asset to the team as executive style summaries are needed to detail out the objectives and business impact of our production releases. If you are looking for someone who is solution oriented in their thinking and cares about the “TEAM’s” success, then Wes is someone who I would strongly recommend.”

Shawn Ervin

Product Owner at the Boeing Company

Proactive, Hardworking, and Knowledgeable

“Right away I could tell Wesam was a pro. He is proactive, hardworking, and knowledgeable. He is skilled at applying Agile concepts and tools. Perhaps most impressive is Wesam’s ability to make the most of my time with the team, keeping conversation and objectives crisp and focused. We often ended sprint cadence meetings early due to his ability to drive us towards outcomes. In the end, we completed the project on-time and under budget. I highly recommend Wesam to any IT team in need of an experienced, energetic and success-driven project manager.”

Joshua Schlager

Senior Manager, Enterprise Architecture at Boeing

Quite Beneficial

“Wes is quite skilled at his trade and is willing to share his knowledge to help my team realize success. The knowledge Wes shared has been quite beneficial for the project team to make substantial progress toward delivery of a solution.

Wes is very professional and a great team player. Wes contributes to my projects success and is more than willing to take on more responsibility. I would gladly work with Wes on future endeavors.”

Jimmy Floyd

Sr. Manager, Boeing IS Access Management Technologies

Highly Recommended

“I learned of Wesam’s copywriting work because of our shared professional interests in the “Lean” methodology. In working with Wesam, I appreciate how he used the practices of experimental problem solving to a business challenge I was facing. Wesam worked with me to define the problem related to my email marketing list, and he worked with me in a very collaborative way, writing copy that I used to invite people to remain active on my list. His writing was effective and, again, the process and the approach that he used were much appreciated. Highly recommended”

Mark Graban

Author of "Measures of Success" & Senior Advisor with KaiNexus and Value Capture

Would Recommend

“With Wesam coming onboard as Scrum Master, our teams are starting to see improvement. I appreciate Wesam’s encouragement to solve the root cause instead of the symptoms. Documents like the 4SPS, Standard Work, and Quick & Easy are all tools introduced to identify and document the root cause. I would recommend him as an Agile Scrum Master with the qualifications and communications skills to push teams to improve by investing time to solve the root cause when possible.”

Mohamad Sales

Senior Software Engineer at IHS Markit

Best Performing Copy in Years

“The marketing team at SamCart has historically been very small, and our day to day involved scrambling to dump new visitors into our funnel or to put out fires. Unfortunately, this left very little manpower to think about long term nurture campaigns or really increasing our customer understanding and front-end messaging.

As we continued to grow and gain funding, it quickly became clear that we needed resources dedicated to those very initiatives and now had the money to expand our team.

After bringing Power Persuasion on, we noticed a marked increase in the effectiveness of our ad, email, and sales page copy. By really getting into our customer’s minds, Power Persuasion was able to write copy that emotionally resonated with our buyers like never before, and their copy led to some of our best performing copy in years.”

David Franklin

CreatorU Product Manager st SamCart

CONTACT