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We were pitching a company recently, and on the call they pointed at a website they admired. "We want something like that." Two sentences later, same breath almost, "but we don't actually want that."
Different conversation, same week. A creator with a 90,000-person newsletter and a v1 digital product tells us she wants to build a membership. So we ask the obvious follow-up: what is the membership, what's inside it, what does it actually do for your people? She goes quiet. She doesn't know yet. She just knows "membership" is the word everyone keeps saying.
Neither of them is confused, and neither is wrong. They're both doing the exact thing every customer does: pointing in the general direction of a feeling and trusting someone else to go find the real thing.
People don't lack clarity. They lack vocabulary.
The reason customers can't tell you what they need isn't that they're lazy or vague. It's that they live inside the want, not the spec. They feel the problem in their gut every day; they just don't have the vocabulary for the solution, because the solution is your job, not theirs.
So they reach for the nearest available word. "Something like that site." "A membership." "A course." Those words are borrowed. They're the closest thing on the shelf, grabbed in a hurry, and they almost never describe the actual thing the person is hungry for.
And the borrowed word is sticky. Once someone says "membership" out loud, they start decorating it in their head: picking the platform, imagining the welcome video, naming the tiers, all before anyone has checked whether a membership is even the right container for the want. The word becomes the plan way faster than it should.
That's the moment to slow down rather than speed up, because every decision you make after the wrong word just builds the wrong house faster.
The format trap costs real money
Creators have a specific version of this. "I'll build a membership." "I'll do a course." "I need a community." These are the words in the air right now, so they feel like strategy, when really they're just the second most popular nouns in the creator economy this quarter.
The creator with the 90,000-person newsletter wasn't wrong to say "membership." She just said the format first, when the product underneath it didn't exist yet.
Compare that to how the strongest version of this goes. With Ajenda, Dr. Jen Ashton's wellness company, the work didn't start with "let's build the membership platform." It started with a dedicated product strategy phase, weeks of it, before anyone committed to a format. We mapped the actual user journey, the content taxonomy, what a real person needed to feel and do from day one to week eight, and only then did the shape of the product reveal itself. The format came last, on purpose, because the format is a conclusion, not a starting point. The membership was the result of the strategy, not a substitute for it.
That sequence is the whole game. You don't pick the format and then reverse-engineer a reason for it. You diagnose the want, and the want tells you the format. Sometimes that means a membership. Sometimes it means the thing the customer named was never the thing they needed, and you save everyone a year of building the wrong product.
The ask versus the want
Every customer conversation has two layers.
The ask is the format the customer names. A membership, a course, a site like that one. Almost always borrowed language, grabbed off the nearest shelf.
The want is the underlying transformation they're hiring you for. The thing that's actually different in their life, or their customer's life, once this works.
The want is theirs. The ask is everyone's.
Most people in this space take the order because taking the order is easier. It feels respectful, it feels fast, and it lets you skip the awkward part where you push back on a paying customer. But building the literal ask is how you end up with a technically correct product that nobody loves, because you solved the borrowed word instead of the real feeling.
Four questions before you build anything
Before committing to a format (and we mean anything, a landing page, a prototype, an investor deck), ask these:
Six months after this works perfectly, what is concretely different in your customer's life? If the answer is vague, you don't have a product yet. You have a format.
What have your people already tried that almost worked? The "almost" is where the real want is hiding. There's usually failed transformation in there.
If the format you just named didn't exist, what job would you still need done? This separates the want from the borrowed word.
What do people email or DM you asking for, in their own words? Their language is the ingredients list for whatever you're building.
Notice that none of these ask "so, a membership or a course?" That question comes at the end, if it comes at all.
The difference between a builder and a vendor
Taking the order is the easier path. Translating the want is slower, and it requires telling a paying customer that the thing they asked for isn't quite the thing they need (never a fun sentence to say out loud). But we've found it's the difference between a builder people trust and a vendor people use. The people who can hear "we want something like that, but not that" and calmly go find the real thing are the ones who get hired again.
Your personality isn't the bottleneck here. Your patience is.
