Market timing
is one of the most important success factor for a startup. That’s why the BLAC framework is so useful. It can help you time your market entry and the efficient deployment of your resources to find product market fit.
Where should YOU start?
It might therefore seem obvious to after Blatant Critical problems that you can so easily target to address clearly identifiable customer needs. But is that really the best place to start?
Latent Aspirational needs that are poised to become blatant and critical can be a great place for startups to target.
Development time
Why? Because it may take time for you to develop your solution and in that time the need could evolve to being blatant and critical at the right time for you to intercept it.
Competition
Whereas a need that is already Blatant and Critical is probably one that others have seen and begun addressing, making them competitors with a head start on you.
Vision
So if you can identify a latent need before anyone else does and have the vision to see why changes in the market will make it blatant and critical you can steal a lead in the market.
Execution
Again this is not a guarantee you’ll be able to sustain that market leadership unless you execute well to stay in tune with and deliver on the customer’s needs as they evolve.
Pioneering is not always a good thing
If you fall behind an emerging competitor’s ability to execute, you could become the pioneer with arrows in your back as others learn from what you’ve done and benefit from your education of the customer and opening of the market opportunity.
Defensibility
That is also why it is so important to think about how you are building Defensibility into your product and business model from day one.
All of this speaks to the systemic nature of how to think about building your venture. No one thing alone sets you up for success. Systemic vector thinking is essential to build 
RSVPD ventures.
Conclusion
There is no right answer and it is one of the great skills good entrepreneurs develop when there are so many factors invovled, including things like 
YOU: Founder-Market Fit and what is involved in developing the right solution at the right time. Consider how you might 
EVALUATE the Solution before building it.
🎙 Hear how Michael taught it the lecture, cleaned & woven in
▶ Watch the original lecture
Startup Secret: certain shifts in the market create urgency, and timing is often what moves a latent need to a blatant one.
A good example: how many of you have mobile phones? All of you. Ask that question 20 years ago and it’s none of you. That shift created urgency across every industry. Where do you bank today? On your phone, for almost everything; you rarely need to visit a branch. Twenty years ago that wasn’t possible, and banks had to respond urgently. Notice that the first movers weren’t the incumbents: a lot of new banks got started precisely because of that trend. The same thing is happening now with AI: it’s going to be involved in everything, and everybody is scrambling to figure out how to use it to make their processes more effective, more efficient, and cheaper. You can ride urgency created by shifts like these.
Timing is also how needs migrate on the BLAC diagram. Active Endpoints had built a tool to model and smooth AT&T’s customer-onboarding process. That started as a latent need, but it became blatant the moment the iPhone took off and AT&T couldn’t sign customers up fast enough. Being in the right place at the right time turned it into a several-million-dollar order for a product sold with essentially no outside salespeople, and the same pattern repeated with other customers. So often, things that start latent become blatant because of a changing condition. Your job is to be positioned for that shift when it arrives.