3 resources from Inside Intercom we point founders to, and the questions each answers.
🎧 Podcast
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Bob Moesta helped build the JTBD method alongside Christensen, and here he is specific about how to catch the non-functional job in a live interview: listen for the energy, the anticipation, the reward, and the social part, not just the task someone says they were doing. This is the practical companion to the book, showing you what to actually probe for when a customer explains a purchase. Treat his questions as prompts to adapt, not a script to recite.
Do not accept the surface reason: dig into what the person was doing, the energy behind it, and the reward they were chasing to surface the emotional and social job.
Talk to people who just bought and people who just quit, because the switch moment exposes the push and pull forces functional questions miss.
Emotion and hesitation in an interview are signals, so follow them rather than smoothing past them.
Hansen runs interviews for her own bootstrapped products and talks candidly about the emotional side founders underrate: staying quiet through silence and not rescuing an interviewee from an awkward pause. Practical for solo founders doing their own calls without a research team behind them.
Steli Efti explains how Close.io picked startups and small businesses doing inside sales as their ICP because it was a market the founding team understood from the inside, and just as importantly, wrote down a non ideal customer profile to name who they would turn away. That second half, defining who not to serve, is the part most ICP advice skips and the part that saves the most time later. Listen for the story about turning down large enterprise deals that did not fit.
