There Are Jobs To Be Done

Hey, what's up everyone? It's been 4 days, 5, 4 days since my last video, and it— and so I got you some flowers to apologize. I was kidding, these are for my wife because she's had a rough couple of days at work. But I'm really excited to be able to share this next video with you. I wanted for these videos to have a little bit more meat than the ones that I was pushing out day to day. Successful flower delivery. What's up? Just arrived. Gonna post up at my favorite local coffee shop for about an hour and then go pick up Kanan. So do a little bit more video and get some work done also. Hey, what's up? So Hope you like my lovely patio outside of this Starbucks. It's really cold and that's totally fine. I don't even know how well the audio is going to be on this and that's also fine. I wanted to get this video out and I wanted to talk about this thing because with ConvertKit we're having— I'm trying to think of it in terms of this framework, this theory called the Jobs to Be Done. Jobs to be done, you basically think of your products or your services as solving a problem, as doing a specific job for your customers. And so in the way that I know best, I'm going to show you a sketch of this. And I might have to actually flip this video. So what happens is, you know, someone comes up, they're like, "Hey there, I have a problem." Think of it like a job to do. Now, the thing is that products and services change, but the job itself doesn't really. And I'll give you an example that I've seen before. I couldn't tell you specifically where. I'll link to it in the description if it comes to mind. But think of it like someone has a job to do of, "I have to get a box from A to B." And so that's the job. I have to get this box from A to B. All right, so way back in the day, you could do this with a horse. The horse and a rider could take care of that job for you. Okay, these days you can do that much easier with UPS, with FedEx. Same job, different products, different services. Okay, the job is still the same. You're still getting a box from A to B, right? So that's what I'm trying to think about with ConvertKit. You know, what is our job? What do people hire us for? And that's what I've been jumbling around in my brain a lot. The way that we've been going about this is some internal discussions, message board posts, and Basecamp, and also lots of conversations with customers.

Customers.

And so getting on, you know, whether it's a Skype call or a Zoom call and just talking with them saying like, hey, you know, what do you want ConvertKit to do for you? Like what— not specifically asking like, hey, give us a job, hire us to do this. That's, that's not necessarily the thing. But there are ways of asking these questions that will get to the bottom of like, what's the purpose that this person hired ConvertKit for. It's also really helped us get clear on our own role in the job, like what kind of people, what kind of customers or bosses do we want hiring us. My thing just flew away, that's fine. And get, you know, clear on our roadmap and like getting clarity on what that job is. And I put this here for a reason because I don't feel like it's that far away to get to this point, but I still have a feeling that it's going to take— it's not necessarily like just taking a, taking a hard left and making it up there. There's still some process. There's going to be a lot of learning that goes into this, but I feel like it's a lot closer than it may end up being. Look, I can see my breath.

It is chilly.

Not as chilly as other people on the East Coast right now. Hope you're all staying safe and warm-ish. All right everyone, thanks for watching this. I'm gonna have some more thoughts on this as the day goes along, as the week goes along, so I'm gonna keep sharing them with you. Thanks for watching, and I'll get back to you soon. Bummer, the 4Runner won't start.

Moment of truth.

My flowers from earlier. Thank God they were in here. Started, but we're not in good shape overall.

Jeez.

Yeah, made it. Morning Nashville! Happy to see you again, you big beautiful city. Morning! Back in Nashville for the day. Drove up from Chattanooga this morning. Have some things to do with the house and just checking in at the office, having lunch with some some of my ConvertKit teammates. So happy to be back here. It's always nice to be in Nashville. So show you around a little bit while I'm here. Hey, what's up?

Thinking more about jobs to be done today and how we can put this into place with ConvertKit. So we've been talking a little bit about, you know, what is our job? Like, what people are hiring us for. And I brought that up a little bit the other day, and I have more sketch slides for you. So, like, if people are coming up and they're saying, like, "Hi." Basic. "Hi, the job is I want to do more with email." And that's still kind of a vague job. So maybe they're using something and they're not taking advantage of automations. Maybe they feel like they're hacking things together. That's a common kind of pain point that comes up. You feel like you're hacking something together. And so something isn't as automated as it could be, or the automations that are present in a tool are just totally overwhelming and they don't make sense. So that's what I'm thinking about a lot is I'm like, great, But, you know, what job is it that people are hiring us for? Is it like as straightforward as, I want to make more money with my email list, I want to make more money with my blog? Or is it something maybe a little bit harder to define and more specific to a person, which is, I want to be, I want to feel more successful? And that's a little bit more difficult to measure, and it's different for every person. So some people just might want a lot more engagement. They might just want to grow their blog and that is, you know, grow their subscribers. Maybe they want their blog to like lead to another job for them. It could be a lot of different things. Like making money is a really specific job. Feeling being more successful would be something that is a little bit more difficult for us to track. And so the way that, you know, we think about it, how do we go about it, is, is the point is the power of ConvertKit that you do have like more power than some other tools, but the simplicity makes it a better fit for even some tools that are more powerful than ConvertKit. So is it this mix of simplicity and power, the design and the UX, the UI, how it all fits together? Is it the people? Yeah, people like me or like Nicole or Violetta or Nubill or our engineers, um, you know, Grant and Mark. And now I'm gonna have to list everybody in the company. Everyone in the company is great, you know. Darryl, Danny, Barrett. Now I really feel like I have to list everyone in the company. I love you all if you watch this. Everyone— I feel silly. But yeah, everyone who interacts with customers or builds the thing on the back of ConvertKit, those are the people. Charlie and Alexis and Stephen, everyone. Nathan. You know him, the founder. Is it the people?

And I do think it's, it's a mix of all of these things.

And so what has come up in my mind a lot lately is that we want to build the best email tool that helps you achieve your definition of success. And that is not the easiest thing to track and customize for.

But I do think it's a really powerful thing that people can resonate with.

So understanding people's why, understanding what their definition of success is, and helping them get to it. Because I think there are a lot of— I could have done another sketch about this. I think there are a lot of, you know, side roads and distractions and detours that you can take to get to that place. With ConvertKit, we want to build the best email tool to help you get there in as little time as it's going to take with the best, you know, support and product that we can make behind that. So as I was doing this, I realized that I was going to starting with jobs to be done and it ended up almost feeling like a marketing video. But if this is something that sounds, you know, interesting and compelling and it resonates with you with where you are in your business or your email, or whatever it might be, you know, I hope you join us. So make a comment below, you can email me, I'll drop that in, you can hit me up on Twitter or Instagram, wherever that might be. I can give you an invite to our Slack community. Whatever that is, I'd love to connect with you on, you know, what— just what I can do to help you if you're thinking about, you know, seeing, you know, what you can do to make some more money or be more successful, or, you know, find out, you know, what it is that you want to do more with on email or just in general, just connect with me. I'd love to, I'd love to hear more about your story and the kind of things that are resonating with you. So it's not just, you know, join us, but join me. I'd love to hear from you. And I'll see you on the next video. Bye. Have you ever felt that was decently cool? Oh.