What is painstorming? The new brainstorming for marketers

Everyone loves brainstorming.

It feels productive. Almost like ideas are being born just from proximity.

But most brainstorming sessions confuse volume for depth, novelty for usefulness, and noise for insight.

Teams are left with dozens of ideas but most of them collapse on contact with reality.

That’s why we need a different approach. One that starts with the source of all motivation, innovation, and purchase behavior: pain.

If you want ideas that sell, hunt the thing people are already desperate to avoid.

Painstorming finds that thing fast and turns it into a product, message, or offer that converts.

Read this and you’ll have a repeatable method to surface urgent problems, validate them in days, and sketch solutions that people actually pay for.

What is painstorming?

Painstorming is the practice of generating ideas through the lens of human discomfort.

Instead of asking “What could we build?”

You ask “What hurts badly enough that someone would pay to stop it?”

It flips the creative process upside down.

Where brainstorming multiplies possibilities, painstorming filters them.

Why pain outperforms ideas

Ideas are everywhere. Pain is scarce.

When you start from pain you get three advantages instantly:

1. You know who will care.

2. You know how much they’ll pay.

3. You know how to frame the offer so it feels necessary.

If you can name the pain in a sentence and describe the relief in one more, you have the start of a business.

How to painstorm step-by-step

1. Start with a single, brutal complaint

Ask yourself: what makes your customer curse quietly?

Find one sentence they say aloud when frustrated.

For example: “I waste two hours every morning hunting files.”

That sentence is your hypothesis.

2. Translate the feeling behind the complaint

Every functional problem carries an emotion.

Time lost = humiliation.

Data you can’t trust = fear of being wrong.

Swap the symptom for the feeling. This is where urgency lives.

3. Measure the cost in real currency

How often does it happen?

How many minutes, percent of budget, or lost deals does it create?

Even a rough number turns annoyance into value.

“Three hours lost weekly” maps immediately to potential pricing and ROI.

4. Brainstorm relief instead of features

Ask yourself: how do you make that pain stop forever?

Sketch three radical ways to remove it.

Don’t design product yet.

One of your three will be the simplest, fastest test.

5. Test the pain signal in the wild

Talk to ten people who match your customer profile.

Read their voice, closely.

If their tone tightens, if they relive the moment while describing it, that’s a real pain.

If they shrug, the idea dies. Yesterday.

Do that loop once a week and your backlog fills with validated problems, not opinions.

How to run a painstorm session (30–60 minutes)

1. Write one customer complaint at the top of the board.

2. Spend 10 minutes listing consequences (financial, social, emotional).

3. Spend 10 minutes listing “life without the pain” scenarios. Pick the simplest.

4. Draft a single test: landing page headline + one-sentence value prop + a CTA. Run it for 48 hours. Measure clicks and signups.

If 5–10% of visitors sign up on a promise, you’re onto something.

Words that sell the relief

Lead with what they lose now. Close with what they gain.

Before: wasted mornings, missed deadlines, awkward excuses.
After: one-click search, reliable results, calmer mornings.

Make the promise specific.

“Save three hours per week” beats “be more productive.”

“Stop losing files” beats “better organisation.”

Why this aligns teams and wins markets

When everyone agrees on the pain, priorities become obvious.

Roadmaps self-prune. Copy writes itself. Decisions suddenly make sense.

The takeaway is this:

Every breakthrough, startup, or story worth remembering was born from someone trying to escape discomfort.

Ideas are cheap. Pain is expensive, and that makes it valuable.

So the next time you’re tempted to fill a wall with ideas, pause.

Ask what’s broken. Ask what hurts.

And painstorm your way to something that actually matters.