Raising Problem Awareness for Niche Products

The look on someone's face when they finally get it is hard to describe.

You explain what Backpocket does, a payment option that makes group events easier, no more chasing, no more wondering who's paid, no more one person stuck doing all the admin, and at first they nod politely. They don't see the problem. Then you ask them to walk through the last time they tried to organise a group of twelve people to buy tickets to something. The face changes. "Oh," they say. Then: "Yeah, actually, that's a nightmare"

That gap between not knowing and knowing is the whole distribution problem for niche products, and it's harder than it looks.

Most products get to market because someone already understands the pain. You're selling aspirin to people with headaches. But some products are more like explaining that a headache was coming, that it was avoidable, and that you have something for it. The sale starts before the person even admits they have a problem.

At Backpocket, a fintech startup based in Australia, we ran into this early. The problems are real: footing the bill, forgetting to pay back, nobody knowing who's confirmed, one person stuck doing all the work nobody asked them to do. But the audience hadn't named them yet. They just assumed it was annoying. They'd been assuming that for years.

So the question stops being "how do I reach more people?" It becomes: how do I get someone to recognise something they've been dismissing as normal?

A few things helped.

The first was a shift in what we were actually communicating. We stopped leading with the product and started leading with the situation. Not "here's a payment option" but "imagine you're trying to get fourteen friends to buy tickets for a NYE event." The moment you anchor someone in a specific moment they've lived in, the group chat, the Venmo reminder that never gets sent, the three people who said they were in and then weren't. The problem becomes real. Educational content, done well, isn't really a lecture. It's a mirror. You're not explaining the problem to them; you're showing them a version of it they already have somewhere in memory.

Second, and this one is harder to replicate: we looked for people who already felt the frustration, even if they hadn't named it. Not anyone with a massive following necessarily, just people whose lives involve lots of group coordination. Event organisers. Sports club treasurers. The person in every friend group who ends up sorting the accommodation money and quietly resents it by Sunday. When they shared their experience with Backpocket it didn't land like an ad. It landed like someone in the same situation saying "oh, there's a thing for this now." I think this is underrated as a strategy, honestly. The right person saying the right thing in the right context converts differently than reach alone.

Third was specificity of messaging. B2C and B2B are obvious categories but inside them are real differences. A consumer planning their first hen's night has a different entry point than a small business owner running a staff event. If you're writing for "people who organise group events" without being more precise than that, you're probably not actually landing for either of them. We got clearer results when we stopped trying to write for everyone and started writing for one specific person in one specific situation. Anyway. The thing that probably mattered most, and took the longest: word of mouth from people who'd actually used it. Not formatted testimonials. Just the organic thing that happens when someone tells a friend "we used this for the surf trip and it was so much easier." You can't manufacture that. But you can create the conditions for it, staying close to early users, making it easy for them to share, asking what they'd tell a friend rather than what they'd post in a review.

The difficulty with building in a space where the problem isn't widely recognised yet is that you can do everything right and still be early. I'm not sure there's a clean answer for that, which is its own frustrating thing. The alternative, treating distribution like it sorts itself out once the product is good enough, doesn't tend to end well.

The right people do find it eventually. Usually because someone they trusted described their own version of the problem first.