The whole 'solving a user pain' is only one aspect of product creation.<p>What about all those businesses that don't solve a pain at all. Isn't that where the real money is?<p>Twitter, Facebook, SmartPhones, even the internet didn't solve a problem at all. These huge markets where created where the customer didn't even know they had a pain.<p>Same with Kindle and tablets, and with tablets we can argue that people are buying them at an alarming rate without knowing what they will use them for, and often from what I've seen don't use them.<p>If Facebook or twitter had taken Steve Blanks advice, would they have created the businesses they did?
I take customer pain with a grain of salt. It isn't the only way to discover opportunities, and it may not be the best.