High Value Customer Jobs

When someone is thinking about starting a business, they ask themselves:

“Is there an opportunity here?”
“Is there a gap in the market?”
“Can I build something unique here?”

These feel like good questions, but they’re missing a few important words:
“Is there an opportunity for a good business here?”
“Is there a gap in the market with a deep supply of good customers?”
“Can I build something unique here that will be valued?”

You might think “Well yes of course, that goes without saying”, but it’s one of the top killers of new businesses – they solved a problem that wasn’t important to a market.
It happens all the time and it’s painful to watch, because the founders have probably done a technically impressive job in crafting their solution.
They solved a low value customer job, and so they didn’t get the respect and appreciation they deserved.
They’ll find it hard to win sales, customers won’t tell their friends, people won’t come back for more, and the business will struggle to gain momentum.

For this reason, one of the best uses of a founder’s attention is to analyse their audience and identify “High Value Customer Jobs”.
If we can address a High Value Customer Job, we’ll likely be able to generate a fair margin, customers will become our ambassadors, and we’ll start to gain traction in the market.
It’s our best shot at creating a sustainable business.

What Is A Customer Job?

A Customer Job is something that a person cares about.
These are impulses, desires and obligations that suggest we take an action, fix a problem, or try something new.
Sometimes these are functional, sometimes they are social and sometimes emotional, or a combination of all three.
You’ll have a lot of these on your mind at the moment; they might be things on your To-Do list, your Christmas wish list, your aspirations for your career, your plans for improving your home, your ways of caring for friends and family, your desire for something new and exciting, etc.

Ash Maurya, one of the early advocates for Customer Jobs has a great example:

“All jobs start with a trigger.
We encounter triggering events throughout the day, which means we encounter jobs to be done throughout the day.
It’s 12:36 pm, and my stomach is grumbling. I need to eat.
It’s 7:36 pm, my stomach is grumbling, and it’s my wife’s birthday. I want to take her to a fancy restaurant.
Triggers are what define the context that shapes the job to be done.
Notes: Progress doesn’t have to be game-changing or aspirational. It could simply be taking me from being hungry to being fed.

Habits define what we do most of the time.
Having to find new solutions for every trigger we encounter would generate too much cognitive load, so we rely on existing alternatives most of the time (like where to eat lunch).

Until we encounter a switching trigger
A switching trigger is a special trigger that comes with an expectation violation. That’s when we realize that our existing alternative(s) isn’t good enough to get the job done. That’s also when we seek new and different solutions.

In the lunch example above, what could cause us to seek out a new restaurant:
•       a change in circumstance, e.g., first day on a new job,
•       a bad experience, e.g., food poisoning from the usual lunch spot,
•       an awareness event, e.g., hearing the new restaurant finally open.”

There are two big ideas here:
Firstly, Ash highlights that “food” is not a customer job, it’s usually attached to another constraint, e.g. quick food, cheap food, healthy food, Keto food, or it’s part of a broader customer job like a date night or a work lunch with a client.
Secondly, Ash gives us some helpful language around habits and switching triggers – something needs to knock a customer out of a routine for them to be genuinely interested in trying/buying something different.
Otherwise, people will stay with what’s working for them.

Customer Jobs vs Products & Services

Customer Jobs describe the why and when of a decision: “I want (benefit/resolution) and in the next (timeframe)”.
The what and how are up for grabs, and there are often many ways of addressing a customer job – they don’t automatically have products and services attached to them.

For example, a customer’s job in early February might be “to do something nice on Valentine’s Day for a special someone”.
There are cliches, but no set rules on what you should do on Valentine’s Day – it depends on your context and the person you care about.
They don’t have to be expensive or materialistic, the job might be to do something significant, meaningful and observant.
An entrepreneur can spot many different types of products or service that might delight different customers.
If you’ve read The Five Love Languages, you might see strong possibilities for each category:

Words of Affirmation: cards, letters, messages, audio recordings, artwork
Quality Time: sharing a meal, taking a class together, travelling
Gifts: jewellery, flowers, perfumes, video games, clothes, chocolates
Acts of Service: cooking for them, repairing something that had been bugging them, taking ownership of something they’d been dreading
Physical Touch: going dancing, massages, day spas, movie tickets, concerts

So if someone was looking for ideas for Valentines Day, and we talked with them about all of their options, we could see which of these seemed exciting and boring.
Their responses and actions are going to tell us something about the true nature of their Customer Job – what does it need to involve?
What are the parameters?
What are the dealbreakers?
What is essential?
What would be extra special?
Is this based on what their romantic interest appreciates, or their own biases and stories?

By listening and observing their thoughts and behaviours, we can gain a level of insight into customers that they might not have been able (or happy) to put into words.
That insight gives you an advantage when designing things they’d love to buy.

The businesses that sell these products and services aren’t usually in competition with each other, but in this scenario they are vying for the same customer.
Once a customer has picked 1-2 of these solutions, they’re probably satisfied and will stop shopping.
That’s not to say that romance is limited to February, but rather that a customer stops hunting once they’ve found something they think will do the job.

Old Problems, New Solutions

Most innovation comes from resolving an old-fashioned need in a novel or compelling way.
For example, new parents always have the same sorts of Customers Jobs:
·      More sleep
·      More energy
·      Less crying
·      Baby's health is tracking well
·      In-laws aren’t questioning their competence
·      Still being able to see your friends/keep old hobbies

However, how you can fulfill these wishes has changed dramatically in the last 50 years:
·      Apps for tracking sleeping and feeding
·      More convenient baby formula
·      Hygienic bottle cleaners
·      Disposable nappies that are easy to take on/off (no more safety pins)
·      Night lights & smart lights
·      Self-rocking cots
·      Safer/more engaging baby toys
·      Lighter/smaller prams

This product innovation is likely to continue, and the customer jobs are likely to remain similar for the next 50 years.
That’s usually the basis for a good business – it’s built on a customer need that will remain strong for a decade or more.

Creating Demand vs Channelling Demand

It is almost impossible for a business to create demand.
You are unlikely to walk up to disinterested people, tell them your pitch and have them part with their money unless they were already interested in doing something different.
Luckily for us, people often make decisions for two reasons: the good one and the real one.
If we study our customers, we’ll identify the real reasons and motivations that drive them.
These are usually a form of self-interest, even though we find that idea distasteful.

Demand can build up over time, or it can happen suddenly.
You might have dinner with friends, hear about something they’ve bought or done, and leave the meal ready to buy something similar for yourself – it doesn’t need to be a lengthy process.
Sometimes it’s both – you need a gradual interest to develop, then you hit the trigger point Ash Maurya described and can make a final decision within a day.
Your role is to understand your industry – is this the type of thing that people deliberate about for months, or are they making an impulse purchase?

A High Bar

Not all of these Customer Jobs or trains of thought end in a purchase – we’d quickly run out of money if we acted on every idea.
This is actually a core skill in personal finance, training yourself to be patient and objective, discerning which needs and wants are worth resolving.
It’s not all about money either; trying something new and making a decision takes research, shopping, evaluation, weighing up opportunity costs, let alone the risks of getting it wrong.
An impulse has to be sufficiently strong to trigger a purchase, so that we care enough to take action.
These are called High Value Customer Jobs, the ones that compel customers to do something, the ones unlikely to be ignored.
Strategyzer describe four key qualities of these High Value Jobs:

· They are Tangible, customers know they have this need/want, it’s staring them in the face, they can’t easily forget about it.

· They are Important, in that the rewards of getting it right are exciting and the costs of getting it wrong are painful.

· They are Unsatisfied, in that the customer doesn’t have a good enough solution in place that they are content with keeping.

· They are Lucrative, and worth spending a decent amount of money on resolving, or where there is a huge market of customers to serve.

Tangible, Important, Unsatisfied and Lucrative

That’s a lot to consider, but if any of those four are missing, the business becomes harder to run.

· If customers can ignore their problem, they are likely to be flaky during the sales process.

· If customers don’t see an issue as important, they will go for the cheapest option or stall on making a choice.

· If customers are content with what they have, they will be hard to entice or persuade.

· If customers don’t want to spend much/any money, they will complain, haggle or hold out for a free version of what you’re offering. If there are lots of competitors in the market, or a small number of customers, we’ll struggle to create a loyal audience.

High Value Jobs do not need to be significant purchases, they don’t need to be essentials, and they don’t necessarily need to be expensive.
High Value Jobs make customers determined to choose a solution of some sort, and at a price point that allows a business owner to make a margin on the transaction.

This can frustrate social entrepreneurs, who so desperately want customers to change their behaviour.
You see this with startups creating alternatives to plastic straws.
Plastic straws are bad for the environment, but very few plastic straw users have a High Value Job that will motivate them to either buy their own biodegradable straws, carry around a metal one, or lobby local businesses to pay a lot more for ethical alternatives.
Would you pay extra for a straw?
It’s a noble cause, but it doesn’t truly bother a lot of users into taking an action.
They are users, not customers.

By contrast, morning caffeine is a High Value Job for a staggering number of customers.
They don’t want to go without it, they’re happy to make an effort and spend money, and if they forego it they’ll get withdrawal headaches.
So for the social entrepreneur, there are more opportunities for change by working with caffeine than with straws – in 20 years’ time people will still be searching for caffeine to start their day.

Founders Remove Friction

It’s not just about creating great products/services, it’s also about making it easy for customers to shop with us.
The less friction we have between customers and our products/services, the more likely we are to make sales and build an audience.
They say the job of a marketer to make new things feel familiar, and make familiar things feel new.
People don’t want everything to be different, and so we need to learn about which elements should be innovative, and which should be comfortable and well understood.

For example, you might be in an industry with a well-established set of products and services, so your innovation can come from well-tailored branding, or by finding better ways of serving your customer.
e.g. Nespresso is not particularly novel coffee, but their pods and machines are a new way of buying coffee for your home or office.
Audiobooks have been around for decades, but Audible’s memberships and marketplace have brought in millions of customers who would never have bought an audiobook on CD.

Or you might take new technologies and find ways of making them intuitive and convenient.
This can frustrate a lot of smart people in the tech world, who see startups succeed by rebadging existing solutions and winning lots of customers.
e.g. the iPod was by no means the first or best MP3 player, but it did the best job of catching the public’s attention.
Tesla is attempting to do this for electric vehicles and home batteries.
There is a gap in the market for someone to do this for cryptocurrencies, with no well-known business having made their usage convenient at the time of writing.

What doesn’t work so well is trying to create revolutionary new products and services, then selling them via a totally new business model, let alone with an unfamiliar pricing structure.
Customers become overwhelmed by all of that uncertainty, and will likely choose a worse option that they can at least understand.

Searching For Gold

Startups are looking for gold: a deep pool of customers with High Value Jobs.
We aren’t creating gold, it’s already there; we’re looking to find it and mine it.
There are two ways of hunting for gold-rich soil.
The first is to identify areas that are geologically likely to contain gold, they have the necessary pre-conditions for gold to form.
In entrepreneurship, this is about understanding the trends and demands that lead to customers with High Value Jobs.
e.g. more people suddenly working from home, tech company layoffs, a renewed interest in taking climate action, new leaps in generative AI, couples who have just become engaged, Millennials feeling like their careers are stuck, brands struggling to keep up with social media changes, etc.
All of these feel like they might contain gold, but it’s not apparent as to how much there might be, or how easy it will be to mine.

These don’t have to be new either, they can be what Bill Bernbach called “simple, timeless, human truths”.
Isaac’s grandfather’s advice was “people will always need something to eat, always need something to wear, and they like to be entertained. There’ll always be ways to make money in those three industries”.

The second way is to get out your metal detector, to see if there’s anything beneath the surface in one specific area, and probably an area near you.
In entrepreneurship, this means talking to real customers about real problems, to understand how they think and how they behave.
These are people with strong desires or strong complaints, who have looked for solutions and are ready to take action.
This might be you scratching your own itch, addressing a problem you have in your work or life.
It might be a friend or family member, or something that has come up in your workplace.
e.g. your boss is afraid of AI, your freelancer friends hate making their own websites, you have choice paralysis with streaming services, several of your friends are now starting to have back pain.
As Yee Tong said “Whenever you hear yourself bitching, you’re identifying a market need”.

Both of these approaches are useful for founders, in understanding broad trends and in understanding the weirdness of individual customers.
Each angle provides valuable perspective, so that we see what’s going on in an industry, as well as how shoppers naturally behave.

Commitment and Advancement

These discovery processes are full of words – you’ll have no shortage of opinions, research and stories to sift through.
Just as how gold is surrounded by other rocks and dirt, we need a way of separating High Value Jobs from empty customer claims.
In this case, the two best indicators are commitment and advancement.
Rob Fitzpatrick describes these in the excellent book The Mom Test:

Commitment — they are showing they’re serious by giving up something they value such as time, reputation, or money.

Advancement — They are moving to the next step of your real-world funnel and getting closer [to] purchasing.

The more they’re giving up, the more seriously you can take what they’re saying.

For example, if you hear complaints or excitement in your conversations, but they don’t go on to take any action, then this might not be a High Value Job to that person.
That’s ok, but it means we’ll discount what they’ve said.
It’s useful but can also be a bit misleading – they can give us a false positive or false negative.
On the other hand, people who take action, follow up on your suggestions, ask for a second conversation or introduce you to someone else are giving clear indication that this is important to them.

Here’s the counter-intuitive part, and you might not like it at first:
If you go through discovery process and find that your hunches don’t match High Value Jobs, you’ve done really well and have a lot to be proud of.
You’ve saved yourself from throwing months of energy and tens of thousands of dollars at something the market wouldn’t have appreciated.
That’s a win, and it may also reveal some adjacent opportunities that contain more gold.

What To Do Next

The challenge is that it feels murky and vague, but that’s because discovering great business opportunities is a notoriously murky and vague process.
It is unpredictable, but these key steps (observing customer, identifying high value jobs, talking to people, learning how they like to buy things, looking for signs of commitment and advancement) are all within your control,
They don’t cost a lot of money, they don’t have a tight deadline, and let you spiral in on a good market.
Skipping these steps is one of the riskiest things you can do - investing in the development of a company without checking if there’s a deep pool of motivated customers.

But aside from the risk component, there’s also another reason why this is important.
Your work matters.
Starting a business is going to take a lot of effort, a lot of emotional labour, and a lot of yourself.
Don’t pour that into something that customers aren’t going to appreciate.
Not when there are so many unmet needs, so many people who would love something made for them, so many opportunities to do good work.
The sales process can be hard at times, but it shouldn’t be THAT hard.
If you have to twist arms to get people’s attention or appreciation, then they’re unlikely to be a market that appreciates the work you’re putting in.