People are generally pretty rubbish at judging the true value of something
Imagine trying to buy the world’s first smartphone. Not the iPhone in 2007, but a hypothetical device before smartphones existed as a category.
How much should it cost? £50? £500? £5,000?
The problem isn’t simply the price. It’s that you have nothing to compare it against.
This is one of the biggest commercial challenges facing genuinely new products. Before customers decide whether something is worth buying, they first need to understand what it is, what problem it solves, and what they would otherwise have done instead.
We Don’t Value Products, We Compare Them
Pricing is rarely an absolute judgement. Instead, our brains compare one option with another.
A customer doesn’t ask “Is Microsoft Office worth £99?”
They ask “Is it worth paying instead of using Google Docs?”
Likewise, someone considering project management software compares Asana with Monday.com, ClickUp or Trello.
Even if they’ve never used any of them before, they know they’re buying into an established category. The comparison provides confidence.
New Categories Don’t Have That Luxury
When a product creates a new niche, customers face a different problem.
They have no benchmark.
There isn’t a competing product they can point to and say “This one is cheaper.”
Or “This one has more features.”
Instead, they’re trying to answer three questions simultaneously:
What exactly is this?
Often the safest answer is simply to do nothing.
The Hidden Cost of Familiarity
There’s another psychological factor at work: people naturally value things they already understand.
A CRM feels valuable because businesses have used CRMs for decades.
Accounting software feels valuable because everyone knows what accounting software does.
Market research feels valuable because companies have been commissioning it for generations.
New categories don’t have that inherited credibility. They have to earn it from scratch.
SignalCraft and Market Opportunity Intelligence
I’ve experienced this first-hand while building SignalCraft.
SignalCraft isn’t an idea generator.
It isn’t a business consultant.
It isn’t a traditional market research firm.
And while it touches on idea validation, that’s not really what it does either.
Its purpose is to help founders gather evidence before they build a product. It analyses publicly available discussions across multiple sources to identify demand signals, customer pain points, competitive positioning, risks and assumptions. Rather than asking an AI chatbot whether an idea “sounds good”, it tries to answer a different question:
What evidence already exists that supports – or challenges – this opportunity?
I’ve started describing this as Market Opportunity Intelligence.
Write on Medium The challenge is that customers have no established benchmark for that category.
“Compared With What?”
One of the first questions every founder subconsciously asks is: “Compared with what?”
Should they compare SignalCraft with ChatGPT?
With an idea validator?
With a startup consultant?
With a market research agency?
With doing nothing?
The answer is that it sits somewhere between all of them. That makes positioning more difficult – but it also highlights why new categories take time to develop.
Creating a Category Means Educating the Market
History is full of companies that had to explain a category before they could dominate it.
Salesforce didn’t simply sell CRM software. It helped redefine how CRM should be delivered through the cloud.
Gong popularised “Revenue Intelligence.”
Snowflake positioned itself around the “Data Cloud.”
These companies didn’t just market products. They educated customers about why a new way of thinking was valuable. Only then could customers decide whether it was worth paying for.
Value Isn’t Always Obvious
Suppose a founder spends six months building an app before discovering there is little demand.
The cost isn’t just the software. It’s the evenings. The weekends. The marketing budget. The opportunity cost. The emotional investment.
If better market intelligence could have prevented that, how much is it worth?
There isn’t a universal answer.
But it’s probably more than the cost of discovering the mistake after launch.
Trust Comes Before Pricing
For products in established markets, pricing is often the main question.
For products creating a new niche, trust comes first.
Customers need confidence that:
the product does what it claims;
This is why early-stage companies often spend as much time educating the market as they do improving the product itself.
The Long Game
Creating a new category is rarely the fastest route to revenue.
It requires explaining unfamiliar concepts, answering the same questions repeatedly, and overcoming understandable scepticism.
But if the category genuinely solves an important problem, something interesting happens over time.
Customers stop asking “What is this?” and start asking “Which one should I choose?”
That’s the point at which a market has truly been created.
For founders building products in entirely new spaces, that may be the hardest challenge of all – not building the technology, but helping customers recognise the value of something they’ve never had the opportunity to buy before.
Pricing evidence is only one part of a wider validation picture. The business idea validation guide shows how willingness to pay fits alongside problem severity, alternatives and market signals. It is also worth comparing stated willingness with what customers actually do.