Jobs-to-be-Done: Customer Interviews That Drive Growth – with Bob Moesta [423]

This is a machine-generated transcript.

[00:00:00] Omer: Bob, welcome to the show.

[00:00:01] Bob: Hey, Omer, thank you for having me. Excited to, excited to be here.

[00:00:04] Omer: My pleasure. So let's stop by talking about what you're doing right now. So you're the founder, president, and CEO of The Re-Wired Group. What does, what does your company do? Who do you help? What's the main problem that you're trying to solve?

[00:00:16] Bob: I. So I've been building product for over 40 years. I've worked on over 3,500 different products and, and I've done seven startups, or actually eight now. But the one that I'm working in the most right now is called the Rewire Group. And it really what we do is we help people basically bring products to market, and we do everything from help.

[00:00:33] Large corporations do re revamp their entire innovation process to helping startups figure out what opportunities to go after to bring a technology to market, to helping move. Helping them pivot. And so we do, whether it's, it's a small, it used to be bigger. I've taken it to make it smaller so I can stay connected to the work.

[00:00:51] And so there's five of us and we do about 20 projects a year.

[00:00:54] Omer: So today we're gonna talk about, obviously Jobs-to-Be-Done. And really, you know, I think the, the, the goal for me was to try and, and figure out how we can. Help early stage SaaS founders to use the Jobs-to-Be-Done framework to figure out what are the underlying reasons why customers are buying my product or not buying my product or buying my competitor's product instead.

[00:01:23] And you know, the default thing always is. They have this feature, I don't have this feature, but there's so much more. And whether it's whether it is a feature issue or whether it's about some other sort of differentiation or pricing or messaging or anything else, ultimately it goes back to understanding.

[00:01:44] The mindset of the customer and what they are trying to do.

[00:01:49] Bob: Yeah. It's more, it's more about what they're trying to do or to be honest, what they can't do today, but they wanna do tomorrow. And ultimately it's the fact of, of studying what I call the past to learn how to predict the future. And so part of this is, is a lot of the, the, the framework of jobs we've done came about because as a dyslexic, I could never read the marketing research reports.

[00:02:11] And they, they'd give me all this information about the customer and they'd tell me who they were, and they'd give me a persona and they'd gimme all this stuff, but I'm like, I don't get it. And so I'd ask 'em if I could just go talk to a few people who have the product or, you know, are, are thinking about the product.

[00:02:24] And literally I would go, talk to them, right? And then I started to realize that they were lying to me. They weren't lying to me, they were lying to themselves about what was going on. And so I, I actually turned to criminal and intelligence interrogation methods to literally figure out how to tease outta them what they're really doing and why they're really doing what they're doing.

[00:02:41] I. So one of the things that came out of it is the notion is that like you'd talk to customers and there'd just be this irrational moment where you'd go like, this makes no sense. Why? Why are they doing that? And what I realized is that context makes the irrational rational. Once I actually understand the context they think they're in, all of a sudden their behavior becomes very predictable.

[00:03:02] And so what I learned from that, all that was that the more I can understand where they're coming from, not only the mindset, but what are the struggling moments they have? What are the outcomes that they're seeking? What are the anxieties that they have? What are the habits they have to give up? How do I understand their world in terms of buying a new product is really a form of transformation to them from going from.

[00:03:21] From the, the product they were using to the new product that, that, that your product that they're using. And ultimately, I've been studying that for almost 40 years. What causes people to say, today's the day I'm gonna stop doing this and I'm gonna start doing that. And what you start to realize is, number one is it's not random.

[00:03:37] I. Like everybody wants to say, it's like, oh, if I get a hundred people, I can get 30 proposals and 30 proposals will get me to the, like, they're treating it as, as if it's probability theory. But the reality is, is it's not. It's causal theory. What causes people to say, today's the day that they need your product.

[00:03:53] And most people can't answer that and because they can't answer it in a complete way. And so this is about studying what causes people like. So what we do is for. To be honest, what I do for a living is I go talk to PE 10 people who bought your product, and then from that I can deduce what, what actually, what are the reasons why people, what are the struggling moments they have?

[00:04:12] What are the the outcomes they want? And ultimately what are the different pathways to get to? Your product. And so you start to realize that there's not one answer, but usually there's three to five answers of why they buy your product and they're distinctly different. And what happens is you end up kind of mashing them all together and building a product that tries to do everything for everybody and it ends up doing nothing for nobody.

[00:04:36] Omer: Right? Yeah.

[00:04:36] Bob: Right. So the the crazy part to me as a founder. Is that I was told a very big lie in college and it, I think it, it stems from engineering school and that the, the, the way they try to make you feel so smart and they basically say build it and they will come. And it's just a lie. It's just a bright blatant lie.

[00:04:56] And, and the fact is, if it has happened, it's, it's the anomaly that that is one in a million. But for the most part, the, the, in my very early years, the stuff I built, nobody came. And so I had to start with understanding what are the problems, what are, we can talk about pain points, but it's more than pain points.

[00:05:12] It's the context that makes them ready to buy. What's the situation that they're in that says, today's the day I gotta do something different. And ultimately, what are the things that they want? To happen. And so ultimately what they're doing is they're, because we speak most, most marketing and salespeople speak in features.

[00:05:29] They associate the feature with the outcome. But the reality is, is the outcome can be actually achieved through different sets of features. But ultimately, sometimes you don't need the feature. So people keep trying to match each other in features and then they actually outpace the customer. So my favorite example of this is when you, when you talk to, look at the camera industry. The camera industry literally just looked at each other. Nikon looked at canon, Canon looked at Habla. Somebody looked at Fuji, and they just had a race to the top of most features. But the reality is the person who owns the, the, the camera market is Apple. They produce more photos than anybody else in the world, anybody else?

[00:06:08] And the reality is, is that it's because they forgot. The very simple fact of the best camera is the camera with you. And it started with a really bad camera. And that bad camera of that bad picture was better than no picture at all. And, and if you look at the industry, the camera industry is, they literally match features of we can go this fast, we can get this biggest sensor, we can do this kinda lens, we can do this kind of thing.

[00:06:29] And they literally outpace the market to the point where they're off 90% in units in 10 years. They literally, all they did was look at basically Apple and laugh at them and say, that's not a camera. That's not a camera. And the reality is, is like, and now they're not a camera company anymore.

[00:06:46] Omer: Right. So maybe we can, we can kind of help, help our listeners sort of clarify the difference between.

[00:06:53] Product features and the jobs that customers are, are trying to do. So for, for maybe a SaaS founder who's listening to this and has maybe been spending a little bit too much time thinking about features, can you, can you help us understand the, the difference in that context of Yeah. Yeah. So a, a good example, so I, I worked with Basecamp for almost the last, I wanna say 15 years or so. And one of the things that came up was that people kept asking for a calendar, I need a calendar, I need a cal, we need a calendar feature. And they kept going like, God, I don't wanna build, Google's got a great calendar, we don't need to build another calendar. It's like, but I need a calendar.

[00:07:31] Bob: And so they finally broke down and said, all right, like, alright, we're gonna build a calendar. Let's talk to people. But we started by actually saying like, why do you need a calendar? What is going on that this calendar? Like you already have a calendar. Why do you need another calendar? It turns out that what happens is in Basecamp, the way that it sets up is like it, when you start to put tasks in, you start to put kind of the pro, the information in it populates with all the things you have in it, but it doesn't tell you, it doesn't give you a calendar.

[00:07:57] It just says, Hey, this is due on Tuesday at two o'clock. This is, this is here for next Thursday. Here's a meeting you're gonna have. But it, it doesn't, it, it doesn't actually have the calendar feature. And one of the things they realized is what they were people were really struggling with is the fact that they wanted.

[00:08:12] They wanted to actually know what, what time slots were available. It's like, I need a calendar because I don't know what's available and I don't wanna over override something if that's not available. And it was like a resource, like a conference room piece, right? So we need a calendar to do that. And ultimately what we realized is we didn't have to build a calendar.

[00:08:30] We just had to actually show them what was available. So what happened is, is they just literally took the calendar almost like the, the Apple calendar that has the dots on it and basically said, all right, let me show you where things are are free, where there's nothing. And so we just showed the inverse of what was booked, right?

[00:08:47] And ultimately everybody, and they, they implemented it and everybody goes, oh my God, thank you for the calendar. And it wasn't a calendar at all. It was just a way to see resources. And so part of it is, is. Customers don't know what features they really need. They, they, they, they, they, you need to actually dig past the feature and say, what could you do with this feature that you couldn't do yesterday if you had the feature?

[00:09:08] Because ultimately you'll find three or four ways to get there. And like this case, it was, instead of being a six month or a 12 a nine month project to build a calendar, it was literally a, a six week cycle. That was actually very, very easy to do.

[00:09:20] Omer: Yeah, I remember. And it was basically like a. A a month view of a calendar as an example where you could see either a day was completely blank or it had some dots and you were like, oh, there's something there.

[00:09:31] Bob: Yeah. What is it? You can see exactly. It's, and but, but the notion is, was it didn't have to be a fully functioning calendar with editing and all this other stuff. It was literally about. The whole reason for the feature was, I wanna see what's a avail. Like the thing that just kept coming back is I wanna see what's available.

[00:09:45] And so you start to realize, well, how many other ways can we see that? And it turns out we don't need to build a full calendar. We just need to build a view that actually shows 'em what's available. I. And so this is the example of like, a lot of times what, like what happens is when people say they want a feature, my question is always very simple.

[00:10:02] It's like, so what would, what could, what do you think that feature is gonna help you do that you can't do today? Because ultimately that's what I want, the outcome that they want. I don't want the feature they want, because nine times outta 10, they, they don't even know what's possible. Right. They don't know the technology stack.

[00:10:18] They don't know everything that's around it. And we might be able to do it way easier or way differently than the, than they prescribe. Customers really don't know what they want, but they know the outcomes they want.

[00:10:28] Omer: That's a great example. I love that. I, I wanna unpack the, the sort of the elements of, of a job a little bit.

[00:10:35] So may, maybe could you walk us through like the, the different aspects? Like,

[00:10:39] Bob: so, so here's the thing is, is a job to be, the basic premise of Jobs-to-Be-Done is this, is that people don't buy products, they hire them to do a jo job in their life and make progress. And so ultimately it's the fact of being able to say, if people are switching from A to B.

[00:10:54] The first thing to say is like, at some point there has to be a struggling moment. My belief is that in my, my, again, 40 years of experience, if people aren't struggling, they're not actually looking for anything new. We are creatures of habit and we'd rather do the same thing over and over again than try something new unless we have a struggling moment.

[00:11:11] So it's trying to actually, and it's not a. Problem per se. It could be a potential problem. So this is why I call it struggling moment. But the other half of it is they have to actually not only have a struggling moment, but if they don't have an idea of what's the next way, this is where people bitch, but they don't switch, right?

[00:11:27] Complaining, complaining complaint. But the moment that they can see the other side, now they actually have a wait reason to change. And so you're trying to go like, what's wrong now? What's the conditions that say you're ready for something different? And then what are you hoping for on the other side?

[00:11:41] And if I can frame the the market that way, right? I have this notion of this is, these are the, this is the struggling moments. This is the things that are pushing them to change and these are the things that they're pulling for to make progress. If this is a river, I can now start to think of how many different ways can I get across that river?

[00:11:58] I can build a bridge, I can dig a tunnel, I can get a boat, I can do a ferry. I can teach 'em to swim. I can get a road like there's just infinite number of solutions. But now, depending on how severe the struggling moment is and how much they wanna get to the other side, the reality is that helps me then decide the value proposition of what's possible for them and what I should go build.

[00:12:19] What happens is, is nine times outta 10, I can actually end up, if I frame the job to be done right, I can actually make the solution way easier than if I tried to do it on my own without actually talking to customers at all. And so the way we think about this is this aspect of what we call the supply side of the world and the demand side of the world.

[00:12:37] Right. And ultimately the supply side of the world is where we have a business system with a product and features and benefits, but we look at customers and we literally look at this wall that divides the two worlds. And typically we ju we climb to the top of that wall, which is I, I think of as 10 feet thick and a hundred feet high.

[00:12:54] And we look down on the market. But if you actually flip over on the other side of that wall and you say, what causes people to buy a new product, it turns out that they have some current product. Or they're doing something and some cases doing nothing, is doing something. But there's some context that.

[00:13:10] Happens in their life that causes them to have a struggling moment. The moment they have that struggling moment, they're like, should I do something about this or not? If I am, well, what do I want? And then they start to think about candidates and they have higher and fire criteria and trade-offs, and they look over this wall and they see brands and products.

[00:13:25] And so ultimately the fact is, is what we wanna be able to do is understand how do we understand this side of the world First to understand the requirements before I go build something. Because nine times outta 10 I build something and then I gotta go find people who need it. And ultimately that makes my job 10 times harder.

[00:13:41] But if I actually have a group of people that have a problem, I actually know how to actually go build something for them, and it's actually easier to build. And so that's how I've been able to do so many products is that it's not that I'm trying to build the best product in the world, I'm just trying to build the product.

[00:13:55] Product that'll help people make progress in a very specific moment.

[00:13:59] Omer: So you talked about this struggling moment and about, and also this phrase of like, they bitch, but they don't switch, which I love by the way. What, what do you think is the trigger that, okay, I've got this struggling moment, I've got this struggling moment, I'm kind of living with it, I'm whatever, and then something happens that just pushes them.

[00:14:22] Too far.

[00:14:23] Bob: So, so there's, there's several different things, but the way I think about it is most people think about buying a product as a game of dice. And I think of, I think of buying a product as like a game of dominoes. What dominoes have to fall in their life to make them ready to buy your product? I.

[00:14:38] Right. And so it's a very different kind of mindset of like, it's not just a trigger, a trigger, like, so think of it as there has to be some energy that's built up that literally is like, I gotta get out of this. And if there's not enough energy, they can't actually make it to the other side. At the same time, if they don't know what they're actually fighting for, they don't know where to go.

[00:14:56] The fact is, is they have all this energy and they, they, they, they don't know how to dispel it. This is why they bitch all the time. And so you have to realize that. Part of this is providing them a pathway in order to make the progress. But you need to understand their outcomes because their outcomes are not features.

[00:15:10] Features are the things that help them make the progress, but the outcomes are the, are the definition of satisfaction.

[00:15:16] Omer: So let, let's, let's talk a little bit about you know, how a founder could go about like, identifying. Some of these, these motivations, understanding customers better, what, you know, what's a good way for, for somebody to get started?

[00:15:30] You know, if they're gonna do, like, if they're gonna go out and talk to customers like, like you do on behalf of clients, how, how should they, or how could they structure an interview, for example? Yeah. So, so the first thing is, is I never talk to people who want my product ever. What I'm doing is I'm actually making them think about the future.

[00:15:50] Bob: And none of us can predict the future. If you, if you can, you're amazing. But the reality is, is the world would say we're really bad at predicting the future. So the way we start is by actually uncovering the past and saying, what are the dominoes that have to fall for somebody buying my products? So I would go say like, let me go talk to 10 people who recently bought your product.

[00:16:10] And ultimately the fact is, is as I talk to those customers saying like, what happened? What was going on? What were you using before? Why now, what? Like what's the, it's, I call it the who, the when, the where, and the why, right? To help me understand the, the what, the how, and the how much. Ultimately, I'm trying to actually interview people about what was the struggling moment, what were they hoping for, what, what happened, what was, what was the journey they went through so I can actually de decipher what I call the the forces of progress.

[00:16:39] Omer: I think going back to your, your Domino's analogy, I think that's great because often we're like, we talk about why did you buy this product? And they might give you one answer, which might be the final domino. But if you talk about the journey, you might discover, well, actually, I. These other things needed to happen first before they got to that point.

[00:16:59] Bob: That's right. So this is, we're trying to make sense of what they're talking about. And so what happens is, is as they're at this old way, there's gotta be a push of the situation has nothing to do with that solution, but actually has to do with like, why is this so, is this so hard? This is, this is too slow, this is too it takes too many resources.

[00:17:17] It's just too, too much. Whatever it is. The reality is there's gotta be a push and it's typically. Described as when I am, and it's written in the form of the customer of what they would say to say like, when I'm losing sales, when when the system keeps going down on a regular basis, when my team is confused.

[00:17:36] When, when, you know when we have, when we have to have, when we gotta cut cost by 20%, like. There's something that goes on that pushes people to change, right? And if the push isn't big enough, there's no way they're gonna change. So part of this is, it's not just pain, but it's context, right? The second part is they can't actually see the idea unless they have a push.

[00:17:57] So the way Clay talks about it is questions create spaces in the brain for solutions to fall into. And so the question is, is like, why is this so slow? What else could we do? Those create the space for them to see this new idea. And Mo, the moment they see this new idea, it creates pull to the solution. Oh my God, that would be great if it could do that.

[00:18:17] Oh my God, that would be wonderful. It could have this. And so we talk about the two green arrows as more or less the fuel for the change. But the reality is, is that there's also friction in the change, which is as they see the new idea, there's anxiety of the, of this new solution. Like, how much is it?

[00:18:33] What am I gonna do with the old thing? It's the, it's the aspect of like, how do I handle my data? How much, you know, what, what's the ongoing cost for it? How do I convince the rest of the organization? Like, there's all this anxiety that comes up and then there's the habit of the present, which is what are the things you need to stop doing in order to actually put this in place?

[00:18:51] It's like, you know, you need to stop using this program, or you gotta, you, you've gotta create a new process, a new set of behaviors. And so they gotta. Stop doing this old behavior. And so what we have to do is not only understand the push and the pull that help people get to your product, but we also have to understand the anxiety and habit to know how to actually reduce the friction.

[00:19:10] And so what I always say is this, this, this lower right corner is really the, the, the goldmine, the anxiety of the new solution. So like one of the things I did was I built houses here in Detroit. One of the things that I realized that was the fuel was basically, I, I, I built for basically first time home buyers down downsizers like your parents, and thirdly divorced family with kids, right?

[00:19:32] So what causes a downsize, you know, your parents to say, today's the day we're gonna sell our house, right? There's a whole bunch of pushes. Things like, you know, when I, when I'm sick of shoveling snow, when the kids have moved away. When the house is paid off and I got all this money tied up in the house, right?

[00:19:47] Like there's just a whole bunch of things that say like, we need to do something else. They see my condo and they go like, oh my God. First floor, first floor laundry. I don't have to do any of the maintenance. Or like, there's a whole bunch of stuff that pulls 'em towards it. But then there's this anxiety about.

[00:20:01] How am I gonna take two, you know, 2,500 square feet worth of my stuff and put it into 1500 square feet? I haven't moved in 40 years. I got so much stuff. Like, I don't know how to do that. And so what happened is, is as I would have people buy my condo and six weeks later call come back and say, yeah, to be honest, it's just too hard to move.

[00:20:19] Like we've tried to, we've tried to, we've got 13 closets, it's in the last three weeks we've taken, gotten rid of one closet, three boxes of Kleenex, and it's impossible. We have to cancel. And so I literally said, fine. I went and said, I'm gonna actually include moving in two years of storage and a place in the, in the clubhouse for you to sort your stuff when your kids come to visit.

[00:20:38] Increase my sales 22%. I didn't, it had nothing to do with my, as a builder to add anything to my condo. It was more about the fact of being able to understand their context and the problem that was around it. And so all I did was partner with a bill with a mover and say like, here's what you're gonna do.

[00:20:53] Here's how this is gonna work. Raise account. I literally not only made more money, I actually, I sold more houses at the same time. Right? And so part of it is being able to understand. So the first thing is to, for, for founders to literally go talk to people who have already bought. Right, and, and understand and listen carefully to what was going on in the business that made this the right time to get this solution.

[00:21:17] And then ultimately, when they got the solution, what you wanna ask for is, what were they hoping for? What was the outcome that they thought this was gonna bring to the table? Not the features. Not the benefits, it's. Ultimately, what are the outcomes that they, they thought were gonna happen along the way?

[00:21:32] And then ultimately, what were they worried about and what did they have to give up? And once you actually do 10 of these interviews, you don't need a lot of them. But we end up doing about 10 to 12 of them, and you start to see these patterns and you start to see three to five patterns of how people.

[00:21:46] You know, decide today's the day I need a new CRM. It's like, it's not one reason. It's literally three different sets of reasons. And, but, but there's only three. There's not a hundred. And so you start to realize these patterns are the things that then give you the scale to not only fix the product, but to talk about sales, to talk about marketing, to talk about partnerships, to work, work at m and a.

[00:22:05] So it's this foundational research that actually kind of has tentacles into the whole organization.

[00:22:10] Omer: I love this idea of the anxiety of the new solution. What kind of questions would you ask them to sort of dig deeper there?

[00:22:19] Bob: So as we were, as we were at the table, what were you worried about? I. What were your concerns?

[00:22:25] And it, here's the thing is like everybody talks about ghosting, like in the sales process, oh my God, they ghosted me. What happens is you ask them a question, you create an anxiety that is on their front, like what's the contract look like with the other vendor? What are we gonna do with this data? It has nothing to do with you, has everything to do with them and they disappear.

[00:22:44] And then. Four months later, they come back and go like, yeah, we're ready to buy. And you think like, wait a second. What's going on? And it's because they don't see that as your problem. They see it as it's their problem and they need to resolve it. And the reality is, is if you can understand it, you can actually head it off at the past because everybody has the same set of patterns.

[00:23:01] That's the clue of this, is that once I know the patterns, for every person who's made it, there's 10, a hundred, a thousand, a million people behind them wanting to make it, but they don't know how. And so you're trying to teach them how to do this and your product is just part of the solution. Again, my condo is just part of the solution, but moving was something I had to add.

[00:23:19] I had to add mortgages. I had these other things to be a complete solution to help people move from their, from the house you grew up in to the new condo that they live in now. And so part of this is to look at what is the complete solution from their perspective as opposed to us being the complete solution.

[00:23:35] Omer: I'm interested in this number you came up with, like in, you interviewed 10. To 12 people who've bought your product. I've often heard some people say, you know, 10, talking to 10 people is not statistically significant. I've, I've heard other people, founders go and say, well, we interviewed like a hundred founders or a hundred potential customers.

[00:23:56] But what, why do you think that, why do you think that that number 10 to 12 feels like the sweet spot for you? And you've proven this over many decades? I think

[00:24:03] Bob: so. Here's the thing is that, that if I'm doing a random sample, I gotta have 40 to 60 people. But I'm not doing a random sample. I'm actually handpicking.

[00:24:13] I'm looking at your market and I'm saying, all right, let's say, let's say we go from let's say we're selling software SaaS to for marketing, let's say HubSpot, right? The reality is like, I wanna be able to understand the markets and how you have 'em defined. So it's like I need to know, like if, if, if I go from, you know, people with a million a r, I've got founders who have nothing.

[00:24:32] I have people who have a million in ARR and I have big corporations. It's like, okay, I wanna understand like I'm gonna. Talk to three, three founders. I'm gonna talk to three big corporations. I'll talk to four people in the middle market. Then I'll, and then it'll be like, so for example, if it's, if it's consum, like consumer stuff, right?

[00:24:48] It'd be like, okay, I need so many people under 30, so many people between 30 and 50, and so many people over 50. I need, I need people in this income bracket, and I need people. I need so many males and so many females, and ultimately I'm designing an experiment to make sure that I'm covering the space. I'm not randomly covering the space.

[00:25:06] I'm purposely covering the space so I can see the patterns in 10. The fact is, is that I can, I, I've, as a, as a builder, one of my things is, is that I would go the ask to do research and I'd go to research and they would take six months to do the research. They go out and ask everybody else what questions they wanted.

[00:25:26] They build a survey. The survey was actually questions we wanted to ask and answers we wanted to hear, not the answers they wanted to say. Right? And I always say that I'm not smart enough to even know the answers they're gonna give. And so ultimately, I have to do this as hypothesis building research.

[00:25:42] I'm not doing research to prove a hypothesis. Right. It's very, very different kind of research. And so ultimately once you, once you have the 10, you actually start to see the patterns. You can go back and do quant afterwards, but the reality is, is at some point in time those patterns are very, very solid and they, they start repeating after about six or seven.

[00:26:02] By the time you get to 10, like there's not anything new. If you go to 12, you've literally heard it all. And if you go to, like, I have people who say like, they wanna do 50, and I'm like this was early in, in the. I'll say in my, in, in this business, and I did 20 and I begged them to stop. I just like, I couldn't do, like, we're not gonna, we're, this is, again, this is not a statistical exercise.

[00:26:24] But it is a math exercise. How close are these stories? How many different patterns do we have in the story? So we use math to help us with the 10, but it's not statistics because this is not a statistics problem. This is not a probability problem. This is a causation problem. Very different.

[00:26:39] Omer: Yeah. Great answer.

[00:26:40] Bob: Sorry, I'm, I'm getting excited. I apologize. But this like, it's a, it's a big, it's a big thing where most I, people argue with me all the time about it. I'm like, look, we'll do 10 and if you think we need to do more, we'll do more. What happens if we do two more and they're like, yeah, we don't need to do anymore.

[00:26:56] I would much rather do 10 people who came and 10 people who churned and do two versions at 20. If I'm doing 20 interviews, I'd rather do 10 and 10 than do 20 of the same thing. I don't get any more information after about 10 or 12. Yeah. Yeah. I wanna answer your one other question about when people do a hundred.

[00:27:14] When they do a hundred, they don't go deep enough. They're just getting plum words. They're getting words that have no meaning or very broad meaning. And so what happens is they, they comment back to the theme of, oh, it's gotta be fun, it's gotta be fast, it's gotta be healthy. And you end up being like, what does that even mean?

[00:27:31] And so you don't know. And so what happens when people do a lot of interviews and they see a lot of differences in the interview, they haven't gone. Deep enough, but when you go deep, you end up realizing the causation is, you know, this had to happen and this had to happen and that had to happen. You start to see the common themes of the elements of what had to happen for people to be ready to buy your product.

[00:27:50] Omer: Do you, do you have like a mental checklist when you interview a customer to know, okay, I've gone deep enough. So when you, when you walk away and you say, like you just said, okay, I understand the, the steps they had to go through. I understand the. The main anxieties they had. Right?

[00:28:05] Bob: Yeah. So I don't have a checklist, but like if you, if you look like I have interviews that are online you can listen to, but like what happens is, is I play back the stories I.

[00:28:15] And the reality is what I'm doing is when I play back the story, I'm, I'm trying to make sure when I get to the design table, I represent them at the table, not my preferences, their preferences, who they are. So I look at this exercise as more like an understudy role. I'm studying this customer enough that I actually understand what makes them think and can make sense of it.

[00:28:36] And so ultimately now I can actually figure out kind of what to do next. And so the thing is, is I'm trying to actually empathetically understand where they're coming from, what they mean, and what is their intention behind everything, as opposed to just listening to the surface level words.

[00:28:50] Omer: What if a founder is listening and they don't have 10 customers?

[00:28:55] They're like, super early stage. What, what could they do? Could they go and interview? 10 customers who bought their competitors product.

[00:29:03] Bob: Yes. So what I would tell you is, so I did this with Facebook and one of the things we found is we found people selling things on, on Facebook Messenger. I.

[00:29:12] We're like, this is kind of weird. And so what we did is we kind of realized, could this be a platform for selling things like they, they hadn't thought of that, right? And so what we did is we went and studied Etsy, Craigslist and eBay and said, what causes people to start an account on eBay? What causes certain people to start, you know, to go buy something on eBay?

[00:29:29] And out of it, they basically learned everything they needed to do to basically build Facebook marketplace. And if you look at it, it's a blending of, of, it's like it's a little bit better than Craigslist. It's not quite to where eBay is, and it's nowhere where Etsy needs to be. But the reality is like they were able to learn kind of like how, how it was gonna work.

[00:29:46] It's six or 7 billion at this point. And they started from nothing. Right? It was literally an anomaly that they basically saw and said like, what is this? And can we do, so are there more people who wanna do this? And then we basically said, all right, well, let's go look at these other things and see what we can learn.

[00:30:01] Omer: And, and did you or did they actually like talk to like Etsy customers and, and go through a similar exercise?

[00:30:07] Bob: Yeah, you just, you just go, there's, there's places you can go and just say like, I'm just looking. We didn't say who we were. We just basically said like, look, like, tell me like why in the, like, I want you sold something on Etsy.

[00:30:17] Tell me about the first time you sold something on Etsy. Why now? What was going on? Why Etsy? Why not somewhere else? What was the choice? You know, what were you hoping for? What happened? How did it work? All of that came out that give us all the insights we need to be able to go build Facebook marketplace.

[00:30:31] Omer: So when founders are talking to customers, are there specific signs or phrases that they should, you know, be look on the lookout for, to try and understand the job that you know?

[00:30:43] Bob: So I talk about the layers of language and that most people talk in three different layers. And the first layer is like what I call the plum layer.

[00:30:51] This is where people talk, like, how do I say? They don't talk with much precision. So for example, I would go home and ask my wife, how was your day? Standard answer? Good. What? What? What does that mean? I. Was it, was it really good or was it not good? And, and then so what you have to realize is the moment you say, well, like what happened, that takes you down to the next level, which is, I call it the fantasy nightmare layer.

[00:31:13] This is where people exaggerate what actually happened. Say, oh my God, I had these meetings and they were just running long and this happened and that, and I'm like, okay. Yeah. Then you get to the next layer down, which is the causal layer. What actually happened. It's like, oh, this meeting land ran late.

[00:31:27] This actually happened, this meeting got canceled. That ha, oh, okay, now I understand. And that made it a good day. It's like, no, it really wasn't a good day. So you lied to me. This is how I agree with interrogation is because most people don't know how to actually answer half the questions we ask them.

[00:31:42] Omer: You, you've mentioned interrogations a a few times, and when we were talking earlier, before we started recording, you mentioned never split the difference, right?

[00:31:51] Bob: Yeah, yeah. That's, so that's the greatest book in the world. Like, so for the example is when I'm interviewing, I'm actually working to, to have people tell me no. The moment they say yes, like so you know, was this, did you like this? And they'll say, yes. There's nothing more to ask. You could say, well, what did you like?

[00:32:08] But if you said, no, I didn't, it's like, oh, what is it? And so when I, so for example, I'll play back things incorrectly. Because they'll actually then tell me, no, no, no, that's not how it happened. And they're actually prioritizing stuff for me. So the whole notion of trying to get people to say no is actually way more important than getting them to say yes.

[00:32:26] Omer: Can you gimme an example of that? That's a really smart strategy there, just to play back things incorrectly.

[00:32:32] Bob: You know, again, it's that aspect of being able to, to realize that, that people can expound on the word no, but the word yes becomes more plum. So if you ask them about like, why they like something, like, it's kind of like they'll say, I want it to be easy.

[00:32:49] Well, what's easy? Like I, it just needs to be easier. And then you say, well, what's hard about it? Oh my God, too many steps. I gotta remember too many things. I gotta be able to go, like all of a sudden it starts to move from one, one frame of like, I don't have any language to like, all of a sudden I have a ton of language.

[00:33:03] And so it's that aspect of being able to go between those two levels and two areas to basically get them to be articulate. Here's the thing is most people don't choose. Most people eliminate. And what I mean by that, if I give you three choices. The first thing you do is you pick the one that you don't want the least, and you eliminate it.

[00:33:22] You put it to the side and then you got two left. And the most rational thing to do would be compare those two things. But the reality is, is that thing you eliminated gave you confidence because you made a decision about it. So you compare those two things to the thing that was out. What happens is then you actually eliminate the next thing and you say, oh, I'll take B.

[00:33:40] And the fact is, is what the Ray VG picked B is because they eliminated A and C, so they really didn't actually pick it. They eliminated to get to it. Here's the thing, and I want to say these conversations are. Th 30 to 45 minutes, sometimes up to 90 minutes long. If you do it in 10 minutes, you're, you're, you're at the P level.

[00:33:58] If you do it at the 20 minute level, you're gonna be probably at the, at the fantasy level. But when you get to 30, 45, 60 minutes, you're now at the causal level. 'cause it's like, what are we talking about? And it's like, now you're unpacking all that language. Right. The other thing we do is that for every hour of interview, we do an hour of debrief for the team.

[00:34:19] What we have is a cross-functional team to listen to these interviews as we do them. They don't know that they're all in the room. We might only have two people talking, but the thing is there might be five to seven people in the room. So when we hang up that phone or turn off the Zoom, the reality is, is let now we argue about what we heard.

[00:34:37] Now we're building language about when what does easy mean? And the engineer says, well, easy means this. And the sales person says, no. Easy means that. And then you say, well, which did they mean? And then we have to make sense of it, and we realize there's, there's easy to buy, and then there's easy to install, which are two completely different versions of easy.

[00:34:52] But the, but it's not easy. It's easy. To install or easy to learn, right? And you start to realize you have to actually do those things. And so the interviews is, this is where it, it, you go slow. So for 10 interviews it's gonna take you 20 hours of work. But now what you have is you have a database of terms and languages and stories that are all completely independent.

[00:35:14] You're not, you're not like. You're not modifying one interview based on the previous interviews. Every interview is exactly the same. And then what we do is we throw all the interviews on the table and we keep the stories complete and we say what two stories are most alike? And we put that in one corner and then we say, what story is most different from that one?

[00:35:31] We put that on the other side of the table and then we literally start to look at each, each story and say, how many different stories do we really have here? And you start to realize there's not 10 different stories and there's not seven different stories. There's usually three, four, maybe five stories.

[00:35:45] And that covers 90% of the market. It's crazy. Like I never, like, this is, this is where I, like, I didn't believe it when I did it, but now I've been doing it for years and years and years. It's like 10 interviews helps me understand 80% of the 90% of the market, and I can, I can actually action it. Right? So, so I just did we did some work with a company called Nvidia and, and they're, they're they basically help you edit videos very quickly so you can post them on Instagram, TikTok, et cetera. Right. And what they had is they actually had two, we, we ended up doing Jobs-to-Be-Done for them, and they had, they had three different jobs that, we have, three different patterns we found out. One is somebody who had never done videos before.

[00:36:23] The second job was like, I have a business that I need to actually learn how to do video for my business. And then there's a third one, it's like I'm an expert at video. And to be honest, I use this because it's, it just saves me time. And so the fact is, is what happens is if they listen to tho those three sets of customers, the people at the high end are literally wanting it to be more and more complicated.

[00:36:42] More and more like take more and more work on where the people at the at Job one want it to be simpler and easier so they can actually make money. And so you start to realize that you, you, you literally, you'd create a feature and half the people would like it and the other half would scream about it.

[00:36:57] And you realize that that's the problem, is that we are actually have too many, we don't have this segmented the right way. And so they basically decide to say, we're gonna abandon the high end of the market, the people who are the experts, 'cause they're only gonna complain and they really aren't gonna pay us the money that we need to have.

[00:37:12] So we're gonna focus on making it simplest and easy as possible to build a video. And within six months they went from zero to 25 million in in revenue. Just by focusing on that one place. Wow.

[00:37:25] Omer: Great example.

[00:37:26] Bob: But, but they had been working for three years with this bipolar nature of like, oh, we're doing this, we're doing this.

[00:37:31] And they're segmenting more. And they're, they end up having so much complexity. They, they literally couldn't figure out a new feature which they wouldn't get pummeled on.

[00:37:38] Omer: Right, right. 'cause it was like the, the polar opposites and you're trying to make, make everybody happy. Yeah.

[00:37:43] Bob: I'm trying to, like, in the same segment, I've got too many people who are telling me different things, which means I can't do anything.

[00:37:49] And, and they just started to die slower and slower and slower. So they literally said we're gonna restart and we're gonna launch this lower end product. And it didn't exist at all. And they just stripped it down. And like in, for example, in video, the big thing was you had to have a timeline. Well, if you've never done video before, you don't need timelines.

[00:38:06] Right. And so all of a sudden they're making it easier and easier and the people at the high end of the market are laughing at this going, this is joke. We don't need to do it. Meanwhile, they're literally got 20 million users using it all day.

[00:38:16] Omer: I wanna talk about this idea of you, you've got these insights and we've talked about how you can apply them to the product and the features you're building and getting more focused.

[00:38:23] But, but founders also have to think about marketing and sales. They have to think about their messaging. And so how, how can they apply these insights to, to that part of their business?

[00:38:32] Bob: I wrote a, I wrote a book called Demand Side Sales, which is how do we apply, like, so the first thing I realized is there, there are no sales professors at.

[00:38:42] And business school. Why? Why are there no like having done seven star or eight startups the hardest part of anything I've ever had to do with selling? And why is there no, why is there not teaching? And what they would do is they would teach me the sales process. They teach me psychology. But the reality is, is what I realize is what we really need to teach is how do people buy.

[00:39:00] And so that's all we've really been studying is how do people buy, and ultimately we wanna have the sales process map the way they buy. Most people think the sales process is the way we should force them to buy. Like, and here's the, here's the, really the craziest question is. I teach the salespeople to ask the question, how do you want to buy versus how do we want to sell?

[00:39:23] And most salespeople think of that as the same thing. But the reality is like, so I ask people, where are you in your, in your buying process? And they'll go, oh yeah, we're just starting. But if I ask them where are they in the sales process? They don't have a sales process 'cause they're not selling, they're buying.

[00:39:36] And so you can't ask him that question. And so what you start to realize is that when you start to understand the job to be done, now you actually have to realize that, for example, where there's a, there's, there's something called the timeline that really helps in this thing. So in the timeline, we basically say the way that people end up buying is there's a first thought.

[00:39:54] This is where the, like clay would say questions create spaces in the brain for, for solutions to fall into. So a lot of times what you wanna do is ask people a question but not answer it. So like, I worked with Casper and one of the things we basically said is, you just asked the question, how'd you sleep last night?

[00:40:09] You don't say anything else because if they didn't sleep well, they're thinking, God, I didn't sleep well. What am I gonna do about it? How am I gonna, but if you say, didn't sleep well last night, need a mattress, the answer is always, almost no. Right? And once they actually realize they're not sleeping well, they start to passive looking.

[00:40:24] Like, what else could I do? I could go to bed earlier, I could do this, I could do that. Right? And then they start to actively Look, what's interesting is most people try a thousand other things before they realize it's the mattress, right? And then ultimately it's, it's into deciding. And what, so one of the things we did in advertising, it was we realized that our competitor wasn't other mattress companies.

[00:40:43] Our competitor was Quil, which is a sleep aid. So we basically ran the ad of how many bottles of quil do you need to take before you realize you need a new mattress? 37% increase in sales. Crazy. And so part of it is we start to look at this as each phase of this is about a system of what they need to learn to move to the next system, which is, if you think of first thought, it's about making space in the brain and passive looking is about learning the problem and seeing if it's big enough.

[00:41:12] And then it's basically a seeing possibilities as active, like what's, what could I do with this thing? And deciding is actually about making trade-offs. Because they can't have it all. And ultimately that's where things lock in to, to make the progress. And then you can build it into a habit. But ultimately, it's about helping people manage their way through this process.

[00:41:30] And it's not a funnel, it's a, it's because at some point I could be in the middle of deciding and the pandemic hits, so I moved back to passive looking. I can go backwards in this thing because all of a sudden I see something that didn't make sense anymore. And so you have to realize that we, and people can't go from passive looking to buying right away.

[00:41:48] And so like when somebody asks for a demo, where are they? If I'm, if they're a demo and they're in passive looking, it's kinda like I'm trying to see the problem, tell me more stories about how it works versus if I'm down here and deciding and as, and you ask for a demo. The demo is like, how do I make sure it's not gonna fail?

[00:42:05] Totally different demo. So I helped, I helped a company basically realize that they didn't need one demo, but they needed three demos and it cut their sales process in half or the time to time to close in half.

[00:42:16] Omer: Is it, is it more like the left side of this is more about marketing and educating and getting people to kind of move to the, the stages on the right where you can start to have more of a sales conversation?

[00:42:28] Is that.

[00:42:29] Bob: I need marketing at first. Use as much as I need marketing up here. Marketing has its own role in all of this. Sales has its own role in this. Customer success has its role, but there you can say they're biased. But the thing that I realized is the handoff between marketing and sales is the problem because it goes from marketing to sales is one handoff and sales to customer success is the other hand of, and so much gets lost that they are actually one team.

[00:42:52] They're not three. That's the problem. And so this is where I say I need all three of, I need sales, marketing, and customer success to be part of making like first thought. My thing is, is customer success has to be part of that as well, because at some point if we open the space in the wrong way that that then their expectations are all wrong moving forward.

[00:43:13] Right. And so this is where like what we end up doing is connecting them as opposed to trying to actually make them more independent. And so this is where like I'm a big, big believer that sales, marketing customers should have one lead, 1, 1, 1 executive, not three. Because if you look at the friction.

[00:43:30] Between sales, marketing, and customer success, they spend more energy fighting with each other than actually fighting competition.

[00:43:37] Omer: And, and that's starting to happen. I think, you know, many, many companies are, are kind of having this CRO chief revenue officer type role where marketing, sales and, and CS folks to sort of, you know,

[00:43:49] Bob: but to have the market, if it's a chief revenue officer, then the fact is they should be connecting, basically marketing, sales, and customer success into one group.

[00:43:57] Teams.

[00:43:58] Omer: Yeah. I don't see that happening that much.

[00:44:00] Bob: Yeah. Yeah. That, that, well, there, there, it's happening. I, I'm doing it with, I probably have a dozen or so to two dozen clients that have done in the last three years around that for sure. So it's happening, but it's, it's very rare. And it's, it's the fact that it's usually a power struggle, like the chief revenue officer wants more on the brand, you know, the, the, the CMO wants more power.

[00:44:19] And you start to realize, like, like, look, the, the whole thing is we gotta focus on the customer. And the reality is the brand is in effect, it's not a cause. When people come to you, they don't know who you are. You. Your product causes them to have a brand awareness or a brand image because they have a struggling moment and it fits in the struggling moment.

[00:44:36] If you don't realize that, if you think your brand is better than anything El like in terms of it doesn't need a struggling moment, you're wrong. Because at some point, if they didn't have a struggling moment, they wouldn't know they need your brand. Right,

[00:44:47] Omer: right. Let's give founders an actionable takeaway here.

[00:44:51] So for founders who are just getting started with Jobs-to-Be-Done, what's, what's one small step they could take?

[00:44:57] Bob: So, I would tell you to go, like, if your product doesn't exist and you're, and, and you're in the midst of kind of framing it out, I would literally go and say that I, I, the advice I'd give them is go, if, if your product, your vision for your product is successful, what will people stop using if you are great.

[00:45:15] And those are the people I would go interview. So they'll stop using Etsy, they'll stop using Craigslist. They'll stop using that. Like we're gonna go interview them and then we can build a better product, right? If you have customers, I would tell you, talk to the last 10 customers. Or I would pick, like, if you have, let's say a hundred customers, I would pick 10 out of that last customer and say what caused them to say today's the day that they needed to have your product, and what did they give up to get it?

[00:45:41] And part of it is to realize that like most things compete, this is, this is the crazy and SaaS, most things compete with Excel Word or the intern. Yeah. And so you start to realize, like they're thinking, it's like, oh, we're competing with you know, HubSpot, or we're competing with the Zendesk, or we're competing with, and the reality is like, no, we just did it in Excel.

[00:46:01] This just seems bad. And you start to realize like you're overthinking the entire thing when you realize like half of the people who are switching to you are moving from Excel. It's like you don't need to talk about anything else. You're, you're, you're actually making it way too complicated.

[00:46:13] Omer: Now. Before, before we before you go, we should talk about your new book.

[00:46:16] This is your, is your fifth book, is that

[00:46:19] Bob: right? Yeah. So first of all, I'm dyslexic, so it's, it's kind of like, I feel like a little bit of a fraud 'cause I don't really write the books. I have people help me write the books and so I, I do a lot of research around stuff and then I, I literally package it up and then go find people that would wanna write a book with me.

[00:46:33] And so my next book is called Job Moves. And one of the things I've been doing is talking to founders for probably almost 15 years and asking like, what is the biggest pain in your ass? Like the, if you could wave a magic wand and and, and fix it, what would you fix? And literally, talent has always been on that list.

[00:46:53] I. And and HR in that space. And to be honest, it's one of those things where like, I didn't really wanna go there, but the reality is like, it's where people pointed me. And so I studied what causes somebody to say, today's the day I wanna leave this company and I'm gonna go to this other company. It's not random.

[00:47:09] It's just not random. And the exit interviews we do are garbage. Like get the real story of why it was. Part of it is, is like I turned 30 and I wanted to be a founder and it was time for me to go because if I didn't do it now, I could never do it. It had nothing to do with the company. Right. And so part of this is to realize like at some point in time what causes people to leave is, is, is fairly complicated.

[00:47:30] But the reality is, is if you get it down to the causal layer, it's these, to be honest, there's I think 25, there's like 12 pushes and 13 poles that some combination of them actually cause you to say, today's the day I'm gonna leave this company and go to that company. So I can predict it, but I also can start to predict when people are gonna leave.

[00:47:49] So we just did our HBR article off of this of why people quit. And so if you actually understand what pushes them and you eliminate the pushes, nobody's actually ever looking. And so a secret way in which they actually create loyalty by actually understanding the progress they want as opposed to the progress I want as the owner.

[00:48:08] And the more you can actually help people make progress, the longer they'll stay.

[00:48:11] Omer: I would never have thought about applying. Jobs-to-Be-Done to career, but it's, it kind of makes sense when you describe it like that.

[00:48:19] Bob: Yeah. Yeah. Well, the, the funny part is it's jobs of jobs and it's like, it's the meta part.

[00:48:24] 'cause I use Jobs-to-Be-Done as the frame around product and I'm like, well, maybe we should apply this to, to careers. And it turns out it's very useful there too.

[00:48:32] Omer: Awesome. Bob, thank you so much for joining me. It's been, it is been a pleasure. Really enjoyed our conversation.

[00:48:38] Bob: I hope your audience loved it, and if they have any comments, you can find me on, the rewire group.com.

[00:48:44] LinkedIn is the best way to reach a hold of me. If you, if you like the podcast, you wanna follow me, just find me on LinkedIn. All my, all my stuff goes out there. And if you wanna send me a comment just connect with me and I'm more than happy to connect.

[00:48:55] Omer: Great. We'll include a link to your website, LinkedIn profile, and I think your.

[00:49:00] Several of your books, I think.

[00:49:02] Bob: Yeah. Yeah. So I have learning to build, which is a, like a homage to the, the people who basically help me like as a dyslexic, illiterate teenager, I was told to be a baggage handler or a carpenter, right? Or a, a construction worker. My mom said, no, I have a, I have a math ability, but I've had three close head brain injuries that limit my ability to kind of read words.

[00:49:23] And so ultimately the fact is, is like I have these amazing mentors of Clay Christensen. Dr. W. Edwards Deming, Dr. Genichi Taguchi and Dr. Willie Hobbs Moore. They, they literally poured all their knowledge into me and enabled me to basically work on, like I said, over 3,500 different products and services and companies, and.

[00:49:42] Like I, I, I'm, I'm just a vessel of their knowledge. And that's, that was learning to build demand side sales. There's one called Choosing College, which is about how do we actually think about going to school? What not where do we wanna go, but why do we want to go? And then this one around careers. And then I have a, a Jobs-to-Be-Done handbook as well.

[00:50:00] Of course.

[00:50:01] Omer: You've gotta have that one. It's like, yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much, Bobby. It's been a pleasure. And I wish you the best of success.

[00:50:07] Bob: Thank you. Thank you, Omer.

[00:50:08] Omer: Cheers.