There are 3 stakeholders critical to a product’s success:

• User: the primary end-user of the product.
• Payer: pay for the product.
• Channel: responsible for getting Users to adopt the product.

You must solve each stakeholder’s distinct pains or else your product will fail. Fail to solve the Channel’s problems and no one will hear about your product. Fail to solve the Payer’s problems, and no one will pay you for your product. Fail to solve the user’s product and the only people using the product won’t generate any value from it… making it unsustainable for them to pay you.

Example: You make B2B software. Your customers’ CEOs (the payers) are trying to grow EBITDA and need actionable data to make strategic decisions. The sales teams (the channel) need to deliver quotes faster and more accurately to earn big sales commissions. The operations teams (the users) want to stop working unpaid overtime because of looming deadlines.

Fail to make the operations teams happy and quotes don’t go out faster and remain as inaccurate as ever, upsetting the sales teams. Upset the sales teams and you can’t deliver the improved EBITDA & strategic data to the CEOs.

At PixelEdge we use the KISS Canvas to help us clearly identify all key stakeholders and document our hypotheses about what pains them, what value we need to offer, and how we will get each group to adopt the product.