You’ve mapped out the competitive landscape. You know exactly how your UI is faster than “Incumbent X” and how your pricing beats “Startup Y.” You’re convinced that because your solution is technically superior, the market will naturally gravitate toward you.
Then you talk to a potential customer, and you find out they aren’t using your competitors at all. They’re using a manual Excel sheet, a series of Slack reminders, or worse—they’re just living with the problem.
This is the background anxiety of the entrepreneurial builder: the realization that your real competition isn’t another product, but the “consideration set” of workarounds and the choice to do nothing. You aren’t just fighting for market share; you’re fighting the inertia of a “good enough” status quo.
The Diagnosis: The Myopia of Feature-Building
Builders often define their market around the technology they are building. If you’re building a project management tool, you look at other project management tools. But your customer doesn’t think in “product categories”. They think in “progress”.
Email is often the biggest competitor to project management software because people “hire” email dozens of times a day to keep colleagues in the loop. If your tool makes the user jump through “meaningless steps”—like downloading a CSV just to email it to a manager—you haven’t solved the job; you’ve just added to the noise.
When you focus on features instead of the “struggling moment,” you fall into the “innovator’s bias”. You build a “vitamin” when the market is looking for a “painkiller”.
Reframing: Designing for the “New Me”
To move from uncertainty to clarity, you must stop viewing your product as a collection of features and start viewing it as a mechanism for transformation. A Job-to-be-Done is the process a person goes through to transform their existing life-situation into a preferred one.
In Advanced JTBD (AJTBD), we look at the Job Graph—the sequence of goals the brain automatically generates to satisfy a latent need. Your product is hired to help the user become a “New Me”.
Instead of asking users what features they want, you need to understand the causality of the “Switch”:
- The First Thought: What event triggered them to realize their current workaround was no longer working?
- The Consideration Set: What other “non-product” solutions did they try (e.g., hiring a freelancer, using a paper notebook)?
- The Anxiety: What are they afraid will happen if they stop using their messy-but-reliable spreadsheet?
Practical Application: Finding the High-Leverage Jobs
If you want to beat the “Same Old,” you have to identify the “High-Leverage Jobs”—the specific points where a small improvement in the process creates a cascading benefit for the user.
- Audit for Compensatory Behavior: Look for users who have built their own “hacks.” One nurse, for example, created a custom grid on a worksheet because the hospital’s software didn’t help her track patient beds during a handoff. These hacks are your roadmap.
- Write Job Stories, Not Personas: Personas focus on attributes like age and job title, which don’t explain why people buy. A Job Story focuses on the situation: “When I get my handoff and need to remember what to do, I want to assign beds quickly so I don’t get bogged down”.
- Identify the “Push”: If the user isn’t already spending time or money to fix the problem, the “Push” of their current situation isn’t strong enough to overcome the transaction cost of switching.
From Blind Action to Market Clarity
Building based on a feature list is a gamble that usually ends in “bloated software” that nobody hires. The alternative is modeling your market based on the mechanics of customer progress.
When you name the specific struggle the reader is already feeling, the decision to hire a solution becomes obvious. You move from being just another option in a crowded category to being the only solution for a specific “New Me.”
BHAG AI helps you escape the “abyss of the unknown” by using AI to model these Job Graphs and identify the high-leverage struggling moments in your market. We help you find the unmet demand that your competitors—and their messy spreadsheets—are missing.
Stop competing against features. Start competing against the struggle.