Solving Hidden Challenges Builds Trust

By Alan W

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned as a platform founder and advisor is this:

Your sellers will quietly reveal the opportunities that make your platform truly valuable.

At ClearShift, we connect hospitality professionals with establishments. But along the way, I noticed something interesting: many establishments struggled with tip reporting — it took too much time, and it was messy to figure out.

So I wrote a simple AI workflow to handle it for them. It wasn’t part of our original idea, but now it’s something we offer to establishments on the platform.

Here’s the bigger point → when you sincerely take your sellers’ businesses to heart, you uncover challenges they face every day. If you solve them, even in small ways:

• You create trust

• You deepen loyalty

• And you make your platform harder to replace

For other platform/marketplace founders: don’t just think about connecting supply and demand. Pay close attention to those hidden pain points. The “by-products” you create by solving them might just become your real differentiator.

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