The newspaper industry is a good example of folks that are trying to solve a supplier problem rather than a customer problem.

The advent of the internet (and arrival of Google and Facebook) means newspaper revenues have been wiped out.

Why run an advert in the Sunday Times when you can much more effectively and cheaply target the same audience online?

So some newspapers introduced paywalls.

You can’t read their news online unless you pay.

They tried to solve the supplier problem of revenue-attrition, but in the process created a customer problem (hard to read, hard to share).

With very few exceptions, paywalls failed epically.

Ask yourself, are you solving a supplier problem or a customer problem?