The Secret Path to JTBD

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One secret entrance to the job to be done is how people hack your product. There’s the way you built a thing – using supply-side innovation to scratch an itch or whatever. But then there is the demand-side innovation of what people really want. This manifests as hacks, like desire paths.

Peloton saw people hack their own social groups on Facebook and then built social tags within the app. 

Instagram saw people hack photos to show white backgrounds with text and build polls. 

Josh Wardle saw people share their Wordle scores and built the feature into the app.

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

There’s a cake icing tool called the “silicone icing spatula”. We bought this set, but any will do. Its “supply side innovation” is to ice baked goods. Its “demand side hack” is to scoop out jars. 

Neither sauce, mayonnaise, nor store-bought icing can resist the sliding edge of this device. Tall container? No problem. Do you buy the peanut butter that separates? The good stuff but hard stuff. It becomes easy with this spatula. 

🎁🎁🎁🎁🎁

Buy a set of these to give away for the holiday. Not only is it a thoughtful gift, but it’s also helpful and the colors stand out among the sea of black kitchen devices in the spatula drawer. 

The only way to get better at a thing is to do a thing. Practice active copywriting, think about business models, and notice the different aspects of jobs to be done in your life. Find ways people hack products. Notice unusual go-to-market strategies. Think about when the customer and consumer are different people. Consider how requests are different from actions. 

Kelly Baked (ham) Copywriting

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This Honey Baked Ham ad ran in December 2022.

The good. (1) Like the Ridge wallet, it shows contrast – but not of the products. We see the finished, polished, and plated, Honey Baked Ham.

Contrasted with the process. It’s not that your turkey, ham, or sides won’t look good but that it takes some serious effort – with tools you use once a year.

And techniques you use even less.

Buy a stick blender instead.

(2) Consumer spending is an example of median and average meanings. We average three thousand dollars a year eating out, but it’s not as simple as that number divided by 12 or 52. We only eat Domino’s Pizza with a deal. Similarly, during the holidays, customers are price insensitive.

Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger noticed this phenomenon in 1972 when they purchased See’s Candy. As Munger said, “I may see Wrigley’s gum alongside Glotz’s gum. I know about Wrigley but I don’t know anything about Glotz’s. If one is $.40 and the other is $.30, am I going to take something I don’t know and put it in my mouth?”

It was the same for See’s and for Honey Baked Ham where the pricing power comes from the holidays, food’s ‘intimacy’, and tradition. They never mention the price and they never should.

(3) Looking the part. When she started Haven’s Kitchen, Alison Cayne thought her cooking business was about food, but she found it was about appearance. Her cooking students (pre-Covid Cayne operated a cooking school in NYC) and sauce customers (the post-Covid pivot) wanted to appear competent.

The ‘job’ of a meal wasn’t filling bellies, it was filling expectations. Todd Snyder said that expectations drive his consumers too. You need to ‘look the part’ at the wedding, the interview, or the party.

Watch the ad. It’s not about the couple’s food, it’s about their appearance.

(4) What does Honey Baked Ham compete with? One part of JTBD is that products in the same category may not be competitors, like Snickers and Milky Way. Pizza, Chinese, and Honey Baked Ham are all Christmas dinner options, but the customers of one don’t consider the others.

Honey Baked’s competition is DIY – which is what this ad addresses!

The Bad. None!

The Interesting.

This ad is polished, like a Honey Baked Ham. At the end of 2022, ‘trending’ recipes were common. Hopefully, the Honey Baked Ham company avoids this and keeps bringing home the bacon with ads like the one above.

Problem Solving Perspective Shift

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A new point of view is worth forty IQ.

The mechanism might be framing. Look at the same situation from a different set of experiences, expertise, or mindset, and the possible solutions shift. 

The not us but them point of view. Peter Attia used to be a very angry man. In his podcast with Andrew Huberman, he doesn’t elaborate on how just that he had a “raging” fire inside. He’d be hardest on himself. 

Try this Attia’s therapist suggested when you make a mistake, record a voice note on your phone about what you would say to a friend if they made that same mistake. Bingo. Peter’s comments softened. He was kinder to a friend than he was to himself. The effects were immediate. What had been a (hurtful) lifelong trait was gone in a few weeks. 

The not us but it point of view. Clayton Christensen wrote, “We are here to explore not what we hope will happen to us but rather what the theories predict will happen to us, as a result of different decisions and actions.”

What does the theory predict? It’s a helpful abstraction in our personal lives because we err toward the fundamental attribution error. We dismiss luck in our successes and credit it in our failures. It’s never us. 

Theory removes that. Our ego stands on the sidelines as the theory moves up and down the playing field. 

The not us but an engineer. The best part about being a good engineer, teaches Mark Rober, is that it makes you a good anything. Engineers are another profession problem-solving example. 

That’s what Katy Milkman found too. As an engineering major, she complained to her fiancé about going to the gym. He suggested she pull a Watney and engineer the shit out of it. Milkman started with the basics, If/Then statements. If I go to the gym, she told herself. Then I get to listen to this audiobook or watch this television show. 

…

Framing works. It works for others. It works for us. 

Framing works. It’s easy. It’s free. 

Framing works because it forces new thoughts. I never thought of things that way.

Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over

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One way to think of the world is not good or bad but underrated or overrated. Switch from binary to fluid. 

Reading like a Bayesian is underrated. Jobs theory is underrated. Books are underrated. 

Think of Over/Underrated as a normal distribution. Only learning from books or never learning from books are bad. Each could “move up the curve”. 

Education, like financial literacy, as a solution is overrated.

Education is a “tight” solution. When my daughter was in elementary school she went to a speech therapist to work on her *th* sound. She had a cast to fix a broken arm. Her volleyball coach helps her with footwork. These are “tight” solutions that fit the larger set. 

Drunk driving advertisements like “drive sober or get pulled over” is another tight solution. 

But it’s wrong. It doesn’t fit the larger set of circumstances. 

A “wider” approach is to think not about drinking but about driving. 

The public could subsidize a ride-share happy hour. If people leave home without their car they can’t return home with it. Or, use the marketing money to pay for random rides. 

Another option is to change where bars are built. If it’s easy to walk or hard to park, people won’t drive.

Gamblers can “self exclude” themselves from casinos. Can insurance companies offer a drink driving equivalent? Let people save 5% while committing their sense of self?

…

Education is overrated because it’s linear, rigid, and two-dimensional. If X is good, do more of it. If X is good, the opposite is bad. 

Not necessarily. 

Related: using ambiguity aversion to hint at punishments.

Addendum: Because overrated and underrated are fluid and because times change, the overrated can become underrated.

Unreasonable Hospitality (book review)

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“How to Treat Other Human Beings” could be the subtitle to Will Guidara’s Unreasonable Hospitality. I loved this mix of stories, lessons, reflections, and mistakes. It felt honest. It read fast. I had a library copy but this is one of those put this on the shelf to page through later books.

Unreasonable Hospitality is going above and beyond to treat other human beings well. Take care of each other. Get out of your own head. Avoid your ego in favor of service.

It felt great to read, I’m still glowing.

And unreasonable hospitality is easy. It’s just three things.

First, a desire to do it. Your motivations may vary.

Second, a 95/5 mindset. Things cost money. It’s impossible to provide service without charging and even harder to be over-the-top. So the business model matters.

Guidara’s 95/5 approach is to watch ninety-five percent of the expenses like a hawk. At Eleven Madison Park this meant things like dishwasher racks to reduce breakage. While he managed the MoMA cafe it meant no fresh food an hour before closing time to reduce waste.

In his experiences at many restaurants, Guidara learned to manage costs. What could get cut? What couldn’t? What were the easy (and wrong) metrics? I pictured him like a wise carpenter. Rather than head to Lowe’s, he ripped a spare sheet of 3/4” plywood that was in the corner.

Now, what about that other five percent?

Third, the job to be done.

It’s about delight. Sometimes Guidara gave away the Tiffany champagne flutes to a newly engaged couple. Sometimes he fed the parking meters.

Sometimes it was complementary theater, sports, or concert tickets. Sometimes he served a classic New York City hot dog for a guest who hadn’t had one yet.

Sometimes it meant complementary cognac after dessert and with the arrival of the check. Sometimes it meant ten 100 Grand bars when a guest, preying on their hospitable reputation, asked for a million bucks. That guest loved it.

Why is this person here? What do they want? How can I serve them? What delights them?

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Nothing about Unreasonable Hospitality is new.

But none of it is common.

The book is a chance to change that. With Guidara as a guide, anyone can put a little more hospitality into the world.

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Note: Part of this book’s impact is its identification. We have plenty of posts about words: words mean competition, the new dictionary series, and words hiding value. Words are important because they identify something. They’re landmarks on our map of life.

In 2008, the story goes. A bunch of NBA players returned to their hotel after a night (and morning) of revelry, only to see Kobe going to the gym while they were headed to bed. Those players saw that and took their careers more seriously. Kobe’s actions were a landmark.

Will’s book is a landmark.

Copywriting Lulz

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“So it’s decided,” goes the commercial, “we’ll park even deeper into parking spaces so people think they’re open.” 

“Surprise.” Lolz.

Good copywriting, a subset of jobs theory, speaks in the customer’s language. And this commercial was not written from a rider’s perspective. It’s a driver’s perspective. 

Insurance is an interesting sale because people hesitate to consider premiums, claims, and losses. We’re ambiguity averse and that’s the whole enchilada with insurance. 

It wasn’t until the birth of the AFLAC duck in 1999, that insurance companies found humor as a path to awareness. Okay, customers thought, it’s not that serious, I can make a phone call. 

But it still had to be kinda serious.

During a rebrand, GEICO found customers saved about 23% and it only took about eight minutes on the phone. However, when they tested that messaging, customers thought it was too good to be true. Instead, “fifteen minutes to save fifteen percent” was born. 

Someone must answer the question: Why is this so cheap? That’s the customer language. 

Insurances sales (all sales!) start with a simple unintimidating prompt. It can’t be too juvenile, even the mayhem man wears a suit. Costs (higher or lower) must be part of a story: Bundle with us and we pass the overhead savings on to you. 

Don’t Bring an Educational Solution to a Design Fight

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Dr. Henri J. Breault of Tecumseh, Ontario is a hero. Working as a pediatrician in a hospital, Brenault’s widow recalls him coming home from work one day and exclaiming I’m sick and tired pumping kids’ stomachs!

So he invented the childproof medicine cap.

At the time, Canada had about 100,000 cases and 100 deaths.

Breault came up with the palm-and-twist bottle. As an aside, how great is YouTube? This short video shows four different child-proof caps. I did not know how the pinch one worked! Breault’s creation is fourth.

Prior to Breault’s 1967 invention was a public education campaign.

We know that education affects behavior much less than systems affect behavior.

And our traditional punching bag is financial education.

“If someone says financial literacy at a party I basically give them a thirty-minute lecture. The idea is that in a perfect world if someone is taught about FICO and its impact on their life, they would take action to improve their FICO score. This is just not what researchers have found – and it’s really robust…the punchline is that environment matters.” – Kristen Berman, All the Hacks, October 2021

So, don’t bring an educational solution to a design fight.

Jurassic Park (book review)

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Jurassic Park (1993) by Michael Crichton is a book about expectations. But first, we have to address the movie.

The movie was great. It was an amazing adaptation (and is connected to the Pixar story btw). But – it defines the characters. Hammond, Malcolm, Ellie, and Grant are the movie version in my version. Oh well.

Ok, back to expectations.

The Jurassic Park story turns when Malcolm tours the facilities and sees this:

See, Hammond says to Malcolm, everything here is normal!

But, Malcolm counters “that is a graph for a normal biological population. Which is precisely what Jurassic Park is not. Jurassic Park is not the real world.”

Normal distributions (and averages) are a specific tool. But they are the wrong tool for distinguishing between Snickers and Milky Way, student loan debt, or Aaron Rodgers touchdown passes. Or, tracking dinosaurs.

Jurassic Park is not the real world. It is a zoo. Cages. Fences. Pens. Controlled feeding. Controlled breeding (oops). Controlled everything.

Malcolm again, “Because the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers. Life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, perhaps even dangerously. But life finds a way.”

Life finds a way.

“Now you see the flaw in your procedures,” Malcolm said. “You only tracked the expected number of dinosaurs. You were worried about losing animals, and your procedures were designed to advise you instantly if you had less than the expected number. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was, you had more than the expected number.”

Hammond expected to run a zoo.

Hammond expected a ‘normal number’

Hammond expected his problem to be ‘fewer’ not ‘more’.

–

Expectations are heavy, they are hard to throw off. I could only picture Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm. Hammond could only picture Jurassic Park one way too.

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This isn’t really a book about dinosaurs, they’re just a stand in. For what?

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Also interesting that Waltrop’s Complexity came out around the same time. Something was bubbling in the early 90s. Something is bubbling now too.

Calendly’s CAC

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Approximately seventy percent of Calendly’s new users come from using a Calendly link. That’s a crazy CAC.

But that’s not all.

Customer acquisition cost requires converting customers which requires building something that offers progress (the JTBD).

At first, Calendly’s users were broad. “What that means,” said Annie Pearl “is that product managers had a really hard time prioritizing.”

What the heck to build?

“We’ve made a clear distinction that while a lot of the feature work – that we’ll do to support our target personas of sales teams, customer success teams, and recruiting teams – will impact folks who are not in those personas. Those are the core ICPs that we’re going after. And so, historically, that would’ve always been a sort of trade-off decision and a question. And now I think we have a lot of rigor around our target market and the persona we’re going after. And so, teams can use that to prioritize and deliver better value for those users.”

A lot of people join, but the product may not be built for them.

Calendly’s actions represent Todd Rose’s three features from The End of Average.

We are jagged creatures. ‘Good’ executives are a collection of leadership, insight, and strategy skills. The average ‘good’ is a collection of jagged parts.

We are contextual creatures. We aren’t ‘jerks’, it’s just when we are driving. We aren’t ‘generous’, it’s just while tipping a server.

We are path dependent. The places we’ve been, affect the places we will go.

If a business serves “the average” they won’t find the jagged, contextual, or path-dependent parts that really matter. Calendly’s decision to build for sales teams, customer success teams, and recruiting teams show how their process embraces Rose’s observations.

Ben & Jerry’s: The Inside Scoop (book review)

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Ben & Jerry’s: The Inside Scoop is an underrated business book. Traveling through the 1980s and 90’s it chronicles the growing pains of America’s favorite ice cream pints. 

It’s a business book with two parts. 

The fun stuff. 

Two hippies create, grow, and scale a super premium ice cream brand from a converted gas station in Vermont! That’s fun. 

On Black Monday 1987 the duo showed up on Wall Street with “That’s Life, vanilla ice cream with pieces of stale apple pie (the stale pieces held up better in the ice cream), and Economic Crunch, which was actually some leftover Nutcracker Suite from the previous winter, renamed for the occasion.”

Ben and Jerry drove around in a Cowmobile promoting the brand. On their one-year anniversary, they hosted a block party, with Ben and Jerry organizing, acting as characters, and offering free ice cream of course.  

The grind. 

“Amateurs talk about strategy,” said Omar Bradley, professionals talk about logistics.” 

Ben & Jerry’s wasn’t the only super-premium ice cream. Häagen Daz was the market leader and a bunch of me-toos. Starting in Vermont, a state with no Baskin Robbins franchise was probably a blessing. 

But the distribution was still a grind, sometimes literally as their beat-up delivery truck broke down delivering the pints. Once they contracted out to distributors it was a game of sharp elbows for shelf space, full of kickbacks, relationships, and lawsuits. 

Even the Beatles had a logistics machine! 

Oh, and the people. 

Every business is built on the foundation of its people. In a podcast with Brent Beshore, Anu Hariharan said she looks to invest in good teams with product-market fit. This is despite her technical and financial backgrounds. To paraphrase: It’s the people, stupid. 

But that’s also the hardest part of a business. 

While Ben & Jerry’s product line, market share, and revenue grew, the team’s expertise did not. They hired slowly. Not because of a great vetting process but because they were overwhelmed. They fired slowly too, a terrible combination. 

Oh, and the finances!

We won’t recount the story here, but in Shoe Dog, Phil Knight writes about taking all of his profits back to the bank to say, see, these things sell, now please give me another, larger loan.  That happened in Vermont too. Inventory. People. Facilities. Raw materials. New facilities. At least they could drown their sorrows in a fresh pint. 

…

Be your own boss with your best friend(s), but work like hell.

Sounds right.