We built the product, but customers don’t feel enough pain to switch. What would you test next?

My cofounder and I are building a booking SaaS for salons and beauty businesses in Bahrain.

We have a working product and have spoken with many local businesses, but getting customers to actually change their current workflow has been much harder than building the product.

The biggest surprise:

Many salons still manage appointments through WhatsApp + a notebook.

We assumed these would be our easiest customers.

But when we ask whether this causes problems, many basically say:

“Sometimes, but it works fine.”

That made us realize that an inefficient process doesn’t automatically mean there is enough pain to switch.

So we changed our approach from:

Pitch → demo → follow-up

to:

Understand the current workflow → confirm real pain → demo only when there’s a reason to change.

Now we’re trying to figure out what deserves to be tested next.

For founders who have been through this stage:

1. Would you narrow down to a much smaller ICP?

2. If customers say their manual workflow works fine, would you move on immediately?

3. Would you change the positioning or question the core problem?

4. What would you try to learn from the next 100 prospects?

5. How do you distinguish weak sales execution from weak product-market fit?

I’d rather discover now that we’re targeting the wrong customer or solving a weak problem than spend months optimizing the wrong process.