How to "nail" your customers’ real jobs-to-be-done

People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!

If you're building your online business on Sherpo, whether you're selling an investing course, a template, or something else, you should always try to keep that quote in your mind.

In simple terms, your audience doesn’t care about your product. They care about what it does for them. It's not enough to build a beautiful course, write incredible blogs, or launch a sleek digital download. If you want sales, loyalty, and word-of-mouth, you need to nail the job-to-be-done (JTBD). That's where the theory comes in.

It’s one of the most powerful frameworks to help you make things people will actually pay for. Let’s dig into what that actually means, and how to apply it to build "insanely great products", as Steve Jobs used to say.

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What is a "job to be done"?

According to the theory's father, Clayton M. Christensen, JTBD is “a lens that reveals the circumstances—or forces—that drive people and organizations toward and away from decisions.” In other words: it helps you understand the real reasons people buy.

When someone buys a product, they’re hiring it to do a job in their life. If the product gets the job done well, they come back. If not, they fire it and move on. Often, the job it’s obvious: “Help me learn more about X". But, at times, it’s deeper: "Help me stop feeling lost about money", “Help me prove I’m capable”, “Help me finally take control of my future.”

That’s the real job. Not the course, not the video, not the file. The progress they’re trying to make towards their desired objective.

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Sherpo’s own job to be done

Let’s turn the lens on ourselves for a second. Sherpo isn’t just “a platform for selling digital content.” Our customers are hiring us for jobs like: “help me turn my knowledge into income," “help me launch fast without needing tech skills,” “help me look professional and build trust," and even "help me save money and consolidate in a single tool."

(Psst, if you disagree with any of these or want to add other reasons, always feel free to shoot us a message!)

That’s why we built Sherpo the way we did: free to start, easy to use, customizable, with built-in payments, the ability to scale without code, and with a UI that is as slick as it can possibly get. Because we should not forget that an insane product is usually also a great-looking one, and that people do judge a book by its cover.

Our example serves as a guide to what it is that you need to do for your own customers: understand the real outcome they are pursuing, and build your content to get them there.

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A Sherpo example: the investing course creator

Let’s say you’re a finance creator on Sherpo. You’ve launched a course called “Investing 101: From Zero to Portfolio.” At first glance, it might seem like people are buying it to “learn about investing.”

But if you talk to your customers (and really listen), you might find that one person wants to stop feeling stupid during money conversations Another wants to start investing so she can leave her job in 5 years. A third is a new dad who wants to be a provider.

The course content doesn’t need to change drastically, but your positioning should. Instead of saying “Learn to invest in ETFs on your own,” you could say: "Feel confident managing your own money. Even if you’ve never opened a brokerage account", or “Start building real wealth in 60 minutes a week, no Wall Street background required”, or “Stop guessing. Start investing.”

You’re not selling lesson, and you're not just teaching investing. You’re selling an outcome. As Clayton Christensen put it in Harvard Business Review (Sept. 2016): “When we buy a product, we essentially ‘hire’ it to help us do a job. If it does the job well, we tend to hire it again. If it does a crummy job, we ‘fire’ it and look for an alternative.”

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How to find the job your product is hired to do

Here are 5 questions to uncover your audience’s true “job”:

1. What are people trying to fix, avoid, or achieve when they buy your product? Think pain points, dreams, or moments of frustration.

2. What would they do if your product didn’t exist? This reveals your true competition—it might be procrastination, not another course.

3. What workarounds are they using now? Are they piecing together info from TikTok? Reading Reddit threads? That’s a signal.

4. What’s holding them back? Emotional blockers (shame, confusion, fear) are jobs in disguise. Solve them.

5. What happens in their life before and after using your product? Your best testimonials usually say: “I was X, now I’m Y.” That’s the job.

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“Nail” the job, and the rest follows

Sherpo gives you the tools to build, manage, and distribute all digital content, in a single platform. But your job as a creator is to go beyond the features and solve the transformation your audience is craving.

Stop describing what your product is. Start showing what your product does, for real people, in real situations.

Because remember: nobody wants a drill. They want a hole. And if you’re ready to nail it → get started with Sherpo.