You’ve built the MVP. You’ve demoed it to a dozen potential users. They all said the same thing: “This is great,” “I’d definitely use this,” and “Let me know when it’s live.”
Then you launched. You sent the emails. You waited for the sign-ups.
Silence.
This is the background anxiety of the entrepreneurial builder. You have a “good idea,” everyone is being polite, but nobody is actually moving. You’re left wondering if you’re building a bridge to nowhere.
The Diagnosis: Why “Better” Isn’t Enough
Builders usually get one thing wrong: they think they are competing against other products. They aren’t. They are competing against the “Same Old.”
In the Jobs-to-be-Done framework, we call this Inertia. Most people would rather continue struggling with a messy Excel sheet or a broken manual process than endure the “transaction cost” of switching to your new tool.
This is governed by the 9x Effect:
- Users overvalue what they already have by a factor of three. They have “workarounds” and habits that feel safe.
- Builders overvalue their innovation by a factor of three. You see the features; they see the effort of learning something new.
If your product is only “slightly better,” the math says you lose every time. To get someone to switch, your solution doesn’t just need to be better; it needs to overcome the Anxiety of the new and the Habit of the old.
Reframing: From “What They Like” to “Why They Switch”
When a user tells you they “like” your idea, they are giving you an opinion. Opinions don’t pay the bills. Demand is created by a “Struggling Moment.”
Instead of asking if they like your features, you need to understand the Four Forces pushing and pulling them:
- The Push: What is happening right now that they can no longer tolerate? (e.g., “Our current tool is so slow we are losing leads.”)
- The Pull: What does a “better life” look like with your solution? (e.g., “I could finally leave the office at 5 PM.”)
- The Anxiety: What are they afraid will break if they switch? (e.g., “What if the data migration fails?”)
- The Allegiance: What habits keep them locked in? (e.g., “My whole team already knows how to use the old system.”)
If you can’t name the specific “Push” your customer feels, you aren’t building a product—you’re building a hobby.
Practical Application: Testing for Demand, Not Politeness
To move from uncertainty to clarity, stop looking for “validation” and start looking for Causality.
- Audit your feedback: If a user says “This is cool,” ask: “What are you doing today to solve this, and why did you decide not to solve it yesterday?” If they aren’t already spending time or money to fix the problem, the “Push” isn’t strong enough.
- Map the Switch: Don’t ask about the future; ask about the past. Find someone who recently bought a similar tool. Where were they? Who were they with? What was the “first thought” that lead to the purchase?
- Quantify the Anxiety: Ask potential users, “What would be the biggest pain in the neck about moving your data to this new tool?” Their answer tells you exactly what feature you need to build to defeat Inertia.
Moving to Clarity
Building on intuition is a high-stakes gamble. You can spend months in the “abyss of the unknown,” hoping that more features will eventually trigger sales.
The alternative is modeling your market based on the mechanics of customer progress. When you understand the forces that cause a switch, the “good ideas” fall away, and the actual demand becomes obvious.
BHAG AI helps operationalize this by using AI to model these JTBD market dynamics in hours, not months, helping you identify exactly which struggling moments have enough “Push” to overcome the 9x Effect.
Stop building for politeness. Start building for progress.