[Bootstrapped] Ep.110 - The First 100 with Bob Moesta, the co-creator of the Jobs To Be Done framework

Today I’m joined by Bob Moesta, the co-creator of the Jobs To Be Done framework, a concept he developed alongside the late Clayton Christensen. Bob's expertise spans a wide range of accomplishments, including the successful launch of over 3,500 new products, services, and businesses. He's also the CEO and founder of the Re-Wired Group, as well as the brains behind several other startup ventures. He is also the author of multiple books including the famous Demand Selling 101.

Where to find Bob Moesta:

• Website: The Re-Wired Group | Innovation & Design Consulting (therewiredgroup.com)
• LinkedIn Bob Moesta | LinkedIn
• Book: Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress (Audio Download): Bob Moesta, Greg Engle - contributor, Lauren Anthony, Lioncrest Publishing - Bob Moesta: Amazon.co.uk: Books

Where to find Hadi Radwan:

• Newsletter: Principles Friday | Hadi Radwan | Substack
• LinkedIn: Hadi Radwan | LinkedIn

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Transcript

Let's do it. Broadcasting from around the world. You're listening to the first 100. A podcast on how founders acquired their first 100 paying customers. Here's your host, Hadi Radwan. to have you on the show Bob how are you doing today? Thanks for having me on. Thank you for stopping by this is something we've been planning for a while I want to introduce you quickly to my listeners so you're the co-creator of the jobs to be done framework which is a concept developed alongside the late Clayton Christensen and Bob your expertise is wide you've helped so many companies launch their products more than 3,500 product services and businesses and you're also the CEO and founder of Rewire the Group. You're also a multiple author for books such as The Demand Selling 101. So thank you very much for stopping by. I'm also an entrepreneur. I've basically done seven startups. So I've not only helped companies, but I've built my own several times over. I've always been about building things and I love to do it, and I love to help other people do it as well. Amazing, we'll go into a bit of. those startups and see how they've reflected on your current experience. But before we dive into that, I've been following you. I don't know you personally before this meeting, but the principles around the job-to-be-done framework is so popular, especially how you frame problems, that we've started to use them in practical context. And before we go into how we can use them in the first 100 contexts, tell us. How did you co-create it with the late Clay Kristelsen? Yeah, so a lot of it started because I'm dyslexic and I can't read and I can't write, or it's very, very difficult for me to read and write. And so one of the things is as I built product, I started out building product for myself. And then when I started to build product for other people, I'd ask people what they wanted, but ultimately I'd literally go off and build what they wanted and they say, no, that's not what I wanted. And I did it several times over where it got to the point where like, okay. What am I missing? They're telling me what they want, but it's like, by the time I get it done, it's not what they want anymore. The Jobs We Done framework came out of that frustration of not being able to kind of like use surveys and just take the voice of the customer and understand it, because people lie. And so it's the aspect of, I went and actually learned criminal and intelligence interrogation to kind of develop a method to understand what motivates people to really change. I was using it as a workaround since the late 80s, early 90s. But once I introduced it to Clay, the concept of it, it was really just a tool for me. But Clay turned it into a theory. And he basically said it had more universal principles. And so he put his magic brain against it and basically came back with, you know, kind of a way to see it as a theory. And together we basically collaborated to kind of create that theory. And so for the most part, I would say Clay's the theorist and I'm the practitioner of it. Amazing. I've read the story that you've met a Clay in a way where you went there, you knocked on his door and you wanted to be of use to experiment. Tell us these values that you have. How did they come across the curiosity, the resourcefulness, the determination? So this is where I go back again to my dyslexia and saying that I think of it as the greatest gift I ever got that I would never wish upon my children. It's that double-edged sword of like, people ask me all the time, so when did you decide you wanted to be an entrepreneur? And at least for me, when I started my first business in 1993, I think it really got to the point where it's because I couldn't get a job. It wasn't a choice to become an entrepreneur. It was because I couldn't get in through the front door or through kind of the traditional channels. And so it was easier for people to hire me to do a project or as a contractor than it was to do other things. So my first business was really a consulting business. And then from there, I built product businesses after that, but it really started with being knowing that I couldn't learn the traditional way and I had to learn a different way. I've always had to be curious and as my mom would say, I always had to work 10 times harder than everybody else because I couldn't think the way that everybody else did. And so that's really where I came from. Amazing. Clay is a great mentor to you, but you also met Dr. Edwards Deming, Dr. Genishi Taguchi. Tell us a little bit first, how much impressed- This is my office and on the screen where we can see each other, but these are my four mentors and I wrote a book called, Learning to Build, which is- If you think about it, I was told when I was in high school, or primary school, basically that I should be a construction worker or a baggage handler at the airport. And ultimately having worked on over 3,500 different products and done seven startups and done all the teaching and being a professor now, like those four people. mentored me and poured their knowledge into me to enable me to be kind of who I am today. And so for the most part, like I feel like the traditional education system gave up on me. And these mentors literally poured all their knowledge about how to create and do things. And so it was Dr. Deming I met when I was 18. I bet Dr. Taguchi when I was 20. I had Dr. Willie Moore when I was 19 or 20. And then I met Clay when I was like 25, 26. If you were to recall one great lesson from each one of them that has stayed with you, can you share these three or four lessons? What's so funny is Deming was very hard of hearing and it was one of those things where he would yell at me all the time and as an 18, 19 year old I didn't realize like he wasn't yelling at me, he was yelling because he couldn't hear and so I have all these little quotes in my head wrapped around it but like one thing that Deming would always say is never confuse correlation with causation. And so it really helped me understand that everything is caused. Even things that we think are random are still caused that we call it random because we don't know why it's caused. And so ultimately the, or we can't place it in space and time. And so you start to realize that we should really always seek to try to get to causation. And so that's one of my underlying principles that I use all the time. Dr. Taguchi taught me the difference between what I call prototyping to verify versus prototyping to learn. And this plays back to the curiosity is that the way I was raised is I was always taught never ask a question that you don't know the answer to, right? But if you're curious, I have lots of questions and no answers. And so ultimately Taguchi actually highlighted the fact that questions are actually way more important than answers. And that to learn how to prototype, to learn and to make the product fail and push it to its limits, you're going to learn way more about how the product works than just trying to make it work once and verify that it works. And so prototyping to learn is one of those things that I've, it's a principle I use daily at this point on everything that I do is I always need two, three, four options to use contrast to create meaning, right? Clay, there's so many things that Clay taught me. What's the big one? That's a good question. There's so many things that he taught me. The one that comes to mind right now is this difference between what he calls modularity and interdependence What you realize is that if you want to create great customer experiences, you need to have basically interdependence. It's very hard to create modular, great experiences with modular things, but modular things create great scale. And so learning the balance between modularity and interdependence. So think of the Mac operating system as basically exclusive to Mac. And ultimately, they have tied the processor and all the other hardware wrapped around it to each other, and that it's one cohesive system. that has a great experience, as opposed to, if you think of the Windows, it's very modular. It's modular that it can fit on multiple different kind of computers, it can go on different kinds of things, and that allows more people to have access, but it doesn't actually create great experiences. And so he taught me this notion of being able to understand to be very intentional about what I'm doing, and am I trying to create things that have scale, or am I trying to create things that have great experiences, and ultimately they have two very different approaches to it. And then the last one is Dr. Willie Moore, who was the first African-American woman to graduate from the University of Michigan with a PhD in particle physics. And she taught me empathetic perspective, how to see things from many different ways. So, for example, we were working on a problem where she taught me how to almost become the molecule and say, what happens to me as a molecule of, I was a rear view mirror and we were having problems with it. But it was like, how does it come to be the rear view mirror? And If I'm a molecule, what things do I have to go through in order to be transformed into that mirror? And ultimately, we were able to solve the problem by having this really unique perspective on it. And so I never forgot the fact of being able to see things from all these different views helps me see the problem way better. And so those are just some of the many, many things that they taught me and to help me become a really good innovator and entrepreneur. These are all great and amazing lessons we definitely will make note of. You are big on what we call problem aware first. Can you expand on this? Yeah. So what's interesting is, so when I was in school, I went to engineering school and one of the things that they, the greatest lie they told me was build it and they will come, they almost taught us a level of arrogance that if you understand the science and you understand how something works, people will want it. And so just make it better. And if you make it better, more people will want it. Well, it turns out that that's a lie. Cause if once I make something, then I gotta go find of the 8 billion people in the world who need it. And so to me, it's a very hard thing to come up with an idea and then literally go find people who need it. I've learned this actually reversed that process is go find problems that people can't solve, become problem aware. Where do the, I always say the struggling moment is the seed for all innovation. It's where the customer has to innovate. It's where we have to innovate. It's where everybody has to figure out how to innovate and do something new or do something different. And so to me, being problem aware is very, very important. And ultimately it's the beginning of the journey of how the customer decides to stop doing what they're doing and do something new. So the customer has to innovate as much as we have to innovate because otherwise we're all creatures of habit. We'd rather just keep doing the same thing we've been doing over and over again. But it's that struggling moment that becomes Domino that seed that literally kind of causes us to say we can do better or that there has to be a better way that Then causes to look and so being problem aware from the what I call the demand side It's way more important than being able to come up with a great idea That leaves me to segue into your book demand selling. Can you tell our audience? What is demand selling and why it's important for early founders to be aware of it? Just taking that whole premise of being problem aware and understanding how people buy. So what really the book came about for two reasons. One was, is I've done a lot of studying in different schools and different places and engineering and business and design, etc. And one of the things that I realized is like, when you go to business school, they teach you marketing, they teach you finance, they teach you HR, they teach you, you know, leadership, all these, but they don't teach you sales. If you ask anybody like, who is your sales professor? There's no sales professors. Why are there no sales professors? And so ultimately it turns out that the in the 70s and 80s or the 60s in the 70s, there were sales professors to teach the process of sales. But ultimately sales got weeded out because there was no theory behind sales. And so I decided that how do we actually get a way in which to try to teach sales to business people so they understand? Because it's actually the hardest thing that I've had to do as an entrepreneur over and over and over again, to be honest, engineering is easier than sales. And so. The whole premise is that instead of selling is really a supply side concept, is how we want to sell you. But ultimately what we want to do is understand how do they want to buy or how do they make progress. And so demand side sales is really the book is demand side sales 101, stop selling and help your customers make progress. And what this is really about is focusing on the problems your customers have and understand how do they become problem aware? How do they become solution aware? How do they actually identify the progress they want to make and how do they make the trade-offs along the way? And so it's literally outlining the process they use to buy and then use that as the foundation by which we build our sales processes. I love the jobs to be done frameworkers because it's a theory of how people buy but then you brought in your demand selling book which is the method to popularize how to link sales into it. And one of your quotes in the book is, people convince themselves, we convince them of nothing. So how were you able to link those together? Because the framework is very theoretical at the beginning. How were you able to bring in that sales element into it? So what's interesting is that it really started back with a quote from Peter Drucker that said, the reasons why people buy their product is very different than what companies think they're selling their customers. And ultimately, as I did more and more interviews, so I went and learned criminal and intelligence interrogation methods to figure out and to study what causes people to change. Because ultimately, new products is about change and understanding where people want to change or need to change, and then ultimately, how do they go about changing is what I've been studying for the last 30 plus years. And so I'm an expert in understanding where and when and why do people change, and then being able to find technological solutions to put into those moments. And so that's ultimately that focus. And to be honest, it's the notion of helping people buy and understand when are they triggered to do something different and how do they go about making those choices is really what the whole book is about. Yeah, I loved a lot the way you've outlined the purchasing timeline because it tells your customer at what stage they are and how you can actually convince them to set. Can you walk us through these six different timelines? There's six phases of how people buy and I lay them out in a linear way, but people move forward and backwards in this timeline depending on where they are and what's going on. And so you start to realize one is what we call first thought. First thought is one of those places where Clay said it best. He says, questions create spaces in the brain for solutions to fall into. And to me, again, I'm gonna say it again because it rocked me when I heard it the first time. Questions create spaces in the brain for solutions to fall into and so most the people can't even hear about your product If they don't have a struggling moment and the struggling moment creates the space in the brain and the question is so like How is your day that leads to people going like it was a crappy day boy? I need a new job And so if you start to realize that questions are those really powerful things that enable people to make progress That you start that it's actually Again, questions are more important than the answers in some cases because the better the questions, the easier the answer. And typically when you have a hard time getting the answer, typically you are asking the wrong question. And so part of that is what I learned very early on from Dr. Taguchi was that how do you frame the right way to look at it. So step one is really first thought. And then once you have that space, there's this phase people go through where they go what I call passive looking. And this is where people learn about the problem. It's where they... Like the first thought is where they become problem aware, but ultimately passive looking is where they decide that this is a problem that's big enough and something they need to do something about. And they move from problem aware to the beginning of solution aware. And it's a very surface level of solution, but passive looking is they're not investing time. It's like they're going through their life, but now because they have the space, they see things they couldn't see before. I always say people don't really notice cars until their lease is up or they have a really big repair on their car. And once they have that, it's like, oh, okay, I got to get a new car. Then they start to passively look and then they go through the whole process. The next part is then what happens is they once they decide that it's a big enough problem that there's some inevitable change they have to make, they move into active looking. And active looking is where they start to communicate with other people. They start to put time aside and invest. They start to look at options. They still don't really know what they want, but they're looking at many, many different things. And so I always call active looking like a kid in a candy store. It's like, oh, I want this. Oh, I want this. They're not actually putting it all together. They're just saying, I want this feature. Boy, do you have that feature? Boy, it'd be really great if you had this. But they haven't kind of pieced it all together. That gets to the next phase, which is phase four, which is deciding. And deciding turns out that it's not about building the best product in the world. It's about actually designing a product that matches their value code of the trade-offs they're willing to make because there is no perfect product. People don't want to spend more money. People sometimes do want to spend more money. Why do they want to spend more money? Save time, be faster, better performance. Ultimately, being able to understand what people are willing to pay for and how they're willing to pay for it gets back to the trade-offs they're willing to make. And so you start to realize that it's not about putting the best product, but it's actually putting yourself against a set of products that make your product look as the best thing to help them make progress. And then there's stage five, which is the first use. First use is where at the deciding point, when they finally decide, that's where the expectations for satisfaction are locked in. Everything prior to that might go into it, but ultimately when they make the decision of what they're gonna do, they'll actually only have two or three or four things that they're really looking forward to. And so ultimately understanding how that first use happens and how they actually know that they're making progress and that they're being satisfied is stage five. And then stage six is actually building it into a new habit. How do you turn it into a new habit so they actually don't have to think about it anymore and it just becomes something they do every day? And then ultimately they have a new struggling moment that makes them go all the way back to the beginning. And so it's studying how do people change and why do people come to you and why do people leave you. And ultimately by studying those things, you have way better idea of how to satisfy and how to actually, what feature sets you need to build, what products you need to build. And to be honest, it's where to start if you have zero, if you don't have anything. I always advise people to say, go find a struggling moment and a place where people wanna make progress, but they can't. I call that non-consumption. Where do people wanna do something, but they can't? So one of the people I helped was... Paul LeBlanc at Southern New Hampshire University here in the United States. And he basically, he looked at it and said, how many people want to go back to school but can't either afford it? They can't take the time. They can't get to the classroom. And so he ended up building a virtual university off of a Southern New Hampshire that allowed people to do it remotely and that they could actually learn. This is in 2010 where he had what we call 50 people doing this. And it was very much an anomaly. And out of that, we actually learned what caused people to say, today's the day I'm going to go back to school. And out of that, we actually then started to actually realize what were the right courses to offer, what were the right degrees to offer, what were the right kind of training to offer. And now he has over 200,000 students in his university. He's the largest university in the world because he literally took away the space and time. Because if you think about how many people want to go back to school but can't. That was way more than a thousand or 10,000. It happened to be millions of people want to do that. I love how you weave both frameworks together because it essentially takes an honest and empathetic approach to helping customers get to where they need to be. And if they're failing, at least they understand the why behind it and then they can fix it. Empathy is so important. And to be honest, it's talked about, but it's not really taught. You know, the best place to learn empathy is in the theater. And most engineers don't like to be on stage. They're mostly introverts like myself. And so what you learn though, is that you have to be able to improvise and to improvise, you have to empathize. You know, there's rules and empathy that actually help you become a very good improvisational actor by learning those skills and then bringing them back to the product side is a really, really important piece. You've done more than 3,500. product services and help those businesses. So you have now a scalable, repeatable process, but if you were to identify challenges or blind spots for someone new reading your material, what could those be so that they eliminate them? So the first thing I would say is, this is not really my idea, Ash Baori says it is, he talks about the fact of fall in love with the problem, don't fall in love with the product. I have four children and they're in the early stages of trying to be entrepreneurs in different ways and one of the things is they come up with an idea and they love the idea and then I'm like, okay, well, who is this for? And they're like, well, I don't know, we got to go find it. I'm like, well, here's the thing is you need to go love the problem and the people you want to go help because that makes it easier for you to change the product. But if you love the product, you literally have to go through 8 billion people to find the people who really want it and you end up spending way more time trying to sell than actually trying to figure out how to help people. And so starting with this is where problem aware versus solution aware is very, very important. That's the single greatest piece of advice I can give you is go find a problem that has to be solved or needs to be solved and intersects with your interests and your passion. Amazing advice, thank you for sharing this. Is there a company that comes to mind that have implemented your frameworks pretty well and they've become successful? Yeah. There's a set that I can talk about a set that I can't talk about. So the people I can talk about are like Basecamp. I don't know if you're familiar with Basecamp and Jason Fried and Ryan Singer and David Hannah, my hands. So they've been using jobs since 2000, I want to say eight, nine, somewhere in that timeframe. And they've used it to kind of help build hay and all the different products that they have, they've applied jobs to, and they've been very, very successful doing it and they've, to be honest, they've built a very good supply side methodology of called shape up that is a kind of a counterpart that really kind of helps take jobs and make it very actionable in terms of the product side of it. Another one is Intercom. I don't know if you're familiar with Intercom. So Intercom, Des Trainer and Owen McCabe, at their very origin of them starting the business, they did jobs and they became very big proponents of it and they've grown to over a billion dollars in six years in terms of their valuation, they're very big proponents of it. And they've actually written a book about it. So they got it. Trying to think, QuickBooks would be another one. If you think about QuickBooks started with the whole premise of people using it. So I always say, I love to study anomalies. I think that anomaly, in anomalies, most people look at an anomaly and they throw it out because it's different than the rest. But I believe that embedded in an anomaly of today is the DNA of the future. An example there is that people were using Quicken, which was Intuit's self-finance product, to run their small little business. And so Scott Cook really was very understood that, like, why would they be doing this? This seems very strange. And so he said, well, how do we go build something for the small business? And one of the things he realized is that it didn't have to be the best software. It actually just had to be easy enough that I didn't have to hire somebody to run it. because at some point in time the struggling moment was, I can't send an invoice or I've sent an invoice but it's not getting paid or I'm missing paying people and so all of a sudden, how do I actually make this easier so I can just do my accounting, the basic accounting? And from that, they were able to say, how do we make it easier? So it's like half the features of most big accounting packages and twice the price of Quicken. And so you start to realize that it's almost a $9 billion business at this point. And to be honest, all they've done over time is say, what is the next set of struggling moments? And so that's when they added payroll and that's when they added credit card processing and that's when they added, you know, and then they bought Mailchimp because at some point they saw if I want to help small business and what's the big thing they're struggling with, it turns out that this is one of those big things that they're struggling with, which is marketing. Thank you for these great examples. I've interviewed David from Basecamp on episode 32. Great mindset, great philosophies as well. David, we butted heads a couple of times, but he's a very good leader. He's very determined and intentional, but also very responsive. Stoic. Will change on a dime if you have the right data and you can make your case. So that's where I think that's why he's such a good product person. Amazing. What's a principle that you live by that has served you well in your career? So The one principle I would say is that I don't really have to know that much. I just have to be able to learn really fast. And so I have this, I don't know if it's confidence or I have this ability to say like, I might not know, but I know I can figure it out. And so the confidence that I have doesn't come from traditional schooling of, I know the answer. But the confidence comes from my ability to basically jump into 3500 different situations and be able to say, here's how I can help. And so I think it's more having confidence in my abilities than having confidence in my knowledge. What would you like to be remembered for? To be honest, the phrase that I've been saying for a long time is I would I'd love to be known as the greatest footnote in history. Meaning Lots and lots of people have used this and applied it. And it's somewhere in some case, like there's a footnote that says, oh yeah, Bob Mesta helped me with this. I don't have the desire to be famous like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or anybody like that, but I have more to be somebody who actually helped many people do a lot of different things. You know, Richard Feynman, the extraordinary physicist, has a famous saying. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you're the easiest person to fool. Have you ever fooled yourself? Oh yes. So in seven startups, I fooled myself a lot. So for example, when I first took over, I'll say my second startup, I took on the role of sales and marketing, but I was an engineer and I took it on with the mentality of, you know, it's a process and we got to be able to just kind of follow the process. I thought of it like an engineer and I didn't have any empathy in it. And so ultimately it's like, how hard can this be? Selling is just a process. And ultimately I had to learn a whole bunch of different things along the way. But at the same time, I realized like at some point, like I have to have a view of where to go. We plan when we're the stupidest, right? And then somehow management holds us accountable to that stupid guess we made that if we would have known six weeks later, I'd be so much smarter to adjust the plan, but I'm not allowed to adjust the plan. And so what I've learned is that It's way more really innovative things are very emergent and you have to have more guardrails and boundaries than you have to have exact plans of what to do. It's more about budgets and betting than it is about timing and dates. If you were to write a book about your life, what would be the title of the book? So I'm actually working on, I got several different versions of it, but one of them is the five lies I tell myself to be ridiculously productive. So for example, I have a lie I tell myself that I have 1500 today, I have 1551 days left in my life. The reason why I do that is it forces me to be very intentional with the time and where I want to spend my time. And so to me, it's that aspect of what are these empowering things that you start to believe that enable you to be better? And so that's one aspect. I think the other one is about helping people navigate the unknown. I feel like my whole life I've been navigating the unknown and most people are afraid of the unknown and they need to actually be curious and empowered by the unknown. And that Toguchi said it very well. He said, there's way more unknown than there is known forever. Don't ever forget it. And so that's the whole thing is whatever I might have known yesterday. could be rendered obsolete tomorrow by some technological change. You know, again, the greatest theory for medicine in the 1800s was leaching and bloodletting. Right? And they thought that was the greatest thing at the time. Then we figured out bacteria. And so you start to realize that new theories help us evolve. And that's really what I like to always be thinking about what's next. What's next for Bob? Well, so I'm teaching more. So I became a professor in the last couple of years. And so I'm teaching at the Northwestern, at the Kellogg School of Business at the Northwestern University in Chicago at Evanston. And then I'm painting more. So all the paintings you see around here are all paintings that I've done. And so I'm doing a little bit more painting. I'm 60 and so I'm backing out of doing full-time projects, but I'm advising and I'm... spending more time with people who really want to apply this and go deeper. And so that's where I'm spending my time and what I'm doing. Bob, this is an amazing episode we could continue on, but I want to be respectful of your time. How can people reach you? Best places LinkedIn. I also have a podcast called the circuit breaker that I do with my partner. It's about it's literally him and I, I have no idea what the topic is. He looks through all the questions we get and all the different things and he literally just says, Hey, Bob, I said, Hey, Greg, and we started talking about some topic. And so it's a 20 minute kind of podcast of us just kind of unpacking a lot of the concepts that I talked about here in the 30 minutes we've been on. Amazing, Bob. Thank you for stopping by. This was an amazing episode. Have a great day. Thank you so much for listening to the first 100. We hope it inspired you in your journey. If you're enjoying the podcast, please subscribe to our podcast on Apple iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or Spotify, and share it with a friend starting their entrepreneurship journey. Leave us a five-star review. Your support will help spread our podcast to more viewers.