What's New: Don't build things no one wants

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Don't build a product that no one wants:

• Last week, we covered the first part of a series on determining why people buy what they buy. Below, we dive further into what drives people to make purchases, and how you can use this to craft your development roadmap.
• Struggling to create effective, engaging Facebook or TikTok ads? This guide can help you kick your creativity into gear, and structure an ad campaign that lands.
• Founder Vince Canger built CoverLetterGPT, and hit 200 users in 5 days. Here's how he came up with idea, how he built quickly, and why he decided on a donation-based model.

Want to share something with nearly 115,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🙅‍♀️ Don't Build Things No One Wants

from the Growth & Founder Opportunities newsletter by Darko

In part one of this series, we focused on defining a "need," and how to get a glimpse into what people want by using situational segments.

However, to get the real scoop on why people buy what they buy, we need to talk more about jobs-to-be-done (JTBD).

If you're familiar with the JTBD framework, you probably know that there are multiple sub-frameworks that show you how to identify what your users are really trying to accomplish.

I've combined all of these sub-frameworks to come up with a more scientific way to help identify why people buy your product!

JTBD examples

Get a job. Find qualified workers. Discipline a child. Establish financial security.

What do all of these things have in common? They’re all JTBD that people are trying to accomplish. Your product is just the current thing that they've “hired” to get that done.

Here’s a good JTBD template:

The “action verb” refers to the action that people are trying to accomplish. Are they trying to discover something? Achieve something? Learn, remember, confirm, or maintain something?

Notice that these are all action verbs. You can check out a more comprehensive list of action verbs here.

The second part is "object of action." What is the person trying to manage? For example, personal finances would be the object of action. The contextual clarifier describes the circumstances and conditions under which the job needs to be done.

If you've read my post on trigger events, you're already aware of some context clarifiers. People need to manage their personal finances at home, for example. "At home" is the context clarifier.

JTBD should be worth solving

After you've identified the JTBD that your product solves, you need to dig deeper to determine whether those jobs are worth solving in the first place. I've used some questions from a JTBD framework called outcome-driven innovation for a clearer picture, so let's break this down.

Let’s say you’re a reputation management software, and the JTBD you have is to “detect when a competitor says something bad about my company online.”

• "Detect" = Action verb.
• "A competitor said something bad about my company" = Action verb.
• "Online" = Context clarifier.

Ask five people the following questions, asking them to rate their answers from one (not important at all) to five (extremely important):

1. How important is this to you?
2. How satisfied are you with the ability to get this done?

You could also specify what two, three, and four mean (i.e. two is "somewhat important").

Most founders will focus on the importance of something, while overlooking satisfaction. Some goals are important, but can be easily satisfied by a simple Google search. For instance, finding out the current weather.

Once you ask a few people and get several ratings, calculate the opportunity score for that goal using this formula:

Opportunity score = Importance + (Importance - Satisfaction).

The opportunity score formula will tell you which JTBD are worth focusing on. The higher the score, the better. If get low opportunity scores, it might be a good idea to find new JTBD that your product could satisfy. How can you find this out? Interviews.

Using interviews to discover new JTBD

Pro tip: Interviewing is just one way to find JTBD. You can also observe people, use focus groups, or immerse yourself in the communities where your audience hangs out. The method you use for gathering data is not as important as the type of information you’re looking for.

Back to interviewing: Stay away from asking questions related to a product or solution; instead, focus on the job that people are hoping to get done. The goal is to learn about their purchasing process, including any internal and external influences, not whether your product or service has fulfilled their need.

Using tax management software as an example, here are some questions you can ask:

• What are you trying to achieve when managing your taxes?

• What do you hope to accomplish by using our software?

• What problems are you trying to resolve or prevent?

• What are you trying to determine or decide?

• What would the ideal product or service help you to accomplish?

• When was the last time you used [your product or your competitor's product]? Get them to talk about the circumstances around the purchase.

Here are some useful interview tips:

• The focus of the whole interview should be on what the customer is trying to accomplish, not what they’re currently doing with a product. Valid JTBD step: Place an order. Invalid JTBD step: Call a supplier to place an order.

• Focus on recent behavior, not anticipated behavior. For example, don't ask what they plan to buy. Ask what product they bought in the past month.

• There is always a sequence of actions that lead to the event of purchasing a product. You need to rewind time to understand those actions. The questions above will help you do that.

• To uncover several JTBDs from a single customer, ask: If you'd had the product or service at a different time, how would the current circumstances be different?

• If people start talking about specific services and what they’re currently doing, redirect their attention to focus on their goals and what they’re hoping to accomplish.

• Look for inconsistencies between what people say, and what they actually do. If they planned to buy product X, but ended up with Y, dig into that.

• Get people to describe things as concretely as possible. Different people have different definitions of words like "easy to use," "reliable," "comfortable," "high-quality," etc. Always ask people exactly what they mean when they mention some of these words. Press them to explain more: “What makes it easy to use?” “Easy to use compared to what?”

After you finish with the interviews, formulate their goals using the JTBD template above.

Are you talking to the wrong people?

According to JTBD strategists, it’s important that you talk to your average users, not the ones who use your product the most frequently. Also, make sure you are talking to the job executor, the person who will actually be using your product.

In B2B, there are often two different people involved in a product purchase: One is responsible for buying, while another person (or team) may be actually using it. Talk to both of them. They use different metrics to evaluate your product, and have different JTBD.

Prioritize these categories of customers:

• People who recently bought your product or your competitor's product.

• People who recently quit using your product or your competitor's product. Ask: “What did you think you were buying?”

• People who recently changed to a competitor, or who came from a competitor to you.

• People who use both yours and your competitor's product (different products in the same category). They will provide useful insights on how they’re using similar products for different purposes.

Do you know the JTBD behind your product? Share in the comments!

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Growth & Founder Opportunities for more.

📰 In the News

from the Growth Trends newsletter by Darko

💻 Instagram is disabling its NFT features.

📖 A B2B SaaS marketing guide for founders.

🏛 TikTok is reportedly considering breaking off from ByteDance if the bans continue.

🤖 Why the ChatGPT buzz may be over sooner than you think.

👕 People love swag from failed companies.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

📈 Lessons From an Expert Growth Marketer

from the Hustle Newsletter by Ethan Brooks

Founder Shaan Puri's crypto newsletter, The Milk Road, was recently acquired for several million dollars less than a year after launching.

Fun fact: The guy who helped grow the newsletter to 250K subscribers also used to work here at The Hustle. His name is Matt McGarry, and we caught up with him to hear how he did it!

Campaign structure

Of ~250K subscribers, ~80% came from paid marketing, with the bulk coming from Facebook and TikTok ads.

Here's how Matt structured Facebook campaigns:

• Ran "Conversion Campaigns," where Facebook measures ad effectiveness based on how many people fill out a form. (Conversion Campaigns were recently updated to "Leads" Campaigns).

• Broad audience: Targeted people ages 21-45, leaning on Facebook's algorithm to do most of the filtering and matching.

• Celebrities and publications: Targeted the audience of crypto-related tech and business influencers, and popular publications.

Traffic was funneled straight to the company's standard Beehiiv landing page. Matt says:

The entire time, we just used that landing page. We made some changes with the copy, but we didn't build a lot of fancy landing pages or do A/B testing. That worked very well.

Ad creative

Here are four types of ad creatives that Matt leans into:

1\. Memes: More art than science, you can find meme templates on imgFlip to use for your own brand.

2\. TikTok or UGC-style videos: Pay micro-influencers and creators on Upwork for 20-30 second vertical videos, with a hook in the first five seconds. These typically cost $80-$100 per video.

Matt's basic rules for great videos:

• Include a hook in the first five seconds.
• Show how the product solves a specific problem that the user has.
• Show social proof.
• Include a strong call-to-action.
• If the product is free, say that.

You can see all of the current ads here, but check out how simple this can be. This is one of the company's longest-running, most effective video ads:

For more on video ads, check out our pieces on nailing TikTok ads, creating viral TikTok content, and advice from Gary Vee's TikTok team.

3\. Informal banners: The point is just to create something that doesn't look like a typical ad, something that will grab attention through its informality. Matt says:

Literally just write some good copy in your iPhone Notes app, take a screenshot of that, and use it as an ad!

Here's an example:

You can also:

• Use Notion.
• Put text on a black or white background in Canva.
• Write it on a legal pad.

4\. Testimonials: The team would ask readers to tweet about the newsletter, then screenshot those tweets and use them as ad creative.

Bonus: Check out how this ad combines the meme format with the text from the testimonial above, for a double dose of social proof:

Budget

Finally, a word on budget: You don't need much. Matt says that $30 per day is enough to get you started.

All Facebook ads go through something called a "learning phase," where the algorithm tests and optimizes the audience to see who is best to target.

To graduate from the learning phase, your ads need ~50 conversions per week. If you budget $3-$4 per conversion, that's ~$150-$200 in ad spend.

So, $30 per day, seven days a week will bring in your 50 required conversions!

Are you running paid ads? Share your experience below!

Subscribe to the Hustle Newsletter for more.

🚀 The Spector Report

by Josh Spector

I'm sharing growth tips for creative founders! Here's this week's:

Define your niche by transformation, not topic.

For example, my niche isn't just "creators."

It's that I help creators produce, promote, and profit from their creations.

This makes your niche actionable and valuable, and helps you avoid the trap of just talking about things, without any action behind it.

Subscribe to Josh's For The Interested newsletter or I Want To Know podcast for more.

📄 Vince Canger Hit 200 Users for CoverLetterGPT

by Vince Canger

Hey, indie hackers! I'm Vince Canger, and I launched CoverLetterGPT last week. It's already passed 200 users! It's free to use, but I'm accepting (and getting!) donations at the moment.

AMA!

How long did it take you to build?

The UI itself took about one day. The whole app took about four days from start to launch.

What you see now is basically how I deployed it!

What's your tech stack?

My goal was always to open source the code, as the app isn't anything groundbreaking. I've put up a link to the GitHub repo here.

I used the PERN stack: Postgres, Express, React, and Node, via a full-stack framework called Wasp. This allowed me to build super quickly, thanks to its great DX. Wasp allowed me to write Typescript with way less boilerplate than I'd get if I used NextJS to implement API routes and everything. NextJS is great, but Wasp has better DX (in my opinion).

I tackled the UI with Chakra UI, and integrated the Stripe API for payments. Then, of course, I use OpenAI's API to generate the cover letters. The server and Postgres instances are hosted on Railway, which is my favorite way to spin up databases quickly.

All of the configurations and setups are explained in the README file on GitHub!

Why did you decide to go the donations route?

I want to keep it open to encourage early adoption. That way, I can also see what percentage of users are willing to pay for it, and how much.

The current average donation is $5, but since I'm at the beginning, there's still lots of new data rolling in. If this continues to grow, I'll share that information in another post.

How did you acquire users?

Most of my initial users came from posting on Reddit, where I have good karma and don't spam, and on LinkedIn.

Very few, if any, came from Twitter.

How did you come up with the idea?

To paraphrase David Lynch: "Good ideas are like fish."

I just caught it as it was swimming by!

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?

Forward it to a friend, and let them know they can subscribe here.

Also, you can submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter.

Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Darko, Ethan Brooks, Josh Spector, and Vince Canger for contributing posts. —Channing