Welcome back to startups for the rest of us. I'm Rob Walling, and this is the podcast that we ship

every week, and we have since 2010. It's more than 11 years. This is a podcast about building real

businesses for real customers who pay us real money, and while we're doing that, we're seeking

freedom, purpose, and relationships. That's what startups for the rest of us is all about. It's a

lens through which we view startups. Thanks so much for joining me again today.

Really interesting conversation today with the author of a book. And as you know, I don't have many

authors on this podcast. It's not a big, you know, interview a guest about the next big concept or whatever.

But this guest, his name's Jim Calback, he wrote a book on jobs to be Done. And if you haven't heard of jobs to be done or you've

heard too much about it and you feel like, you know, I roll. I don't want to learn more about it.

I think this interview might change your mind. I would give it a chance because we dig into some

super practical points specifically. What if I'm pre-product or pre-idea, how can I interview people, ask questions, and figure out

problems that are worth solving? Or, what if I'm at 3K, 5K, 30K a month, and I'm kind of plateauing,

I don't know where the product should go next, I don't know what features to build next,

you can do these things called switch interviews, which are in the jobs to be done, parlance. And we dig into those. And then we actually at the end do a role play. Jim did a

great job. He totally humored me where I talked about a recent switch decision that we had made

with microconf switching from one software to the other. And normally these interviews are 30 to 60

minutes where you dig, dig way, way deep. And we spend about five minutes doing it.

But I think it's a great example if you haven't been exposed to jobs to be done of the things

that you can learn from these frameworks. I mean, I think if you're a founder and you're like

me, you tend to roll your eyes at frameworks, at things that come out of Harvard Business Review,

not that they're not legitimate, not that they're not real,

but just that they often don't keep small startups in mind, right? They expect that you're a middle manager at Procter and Campbell, and you're getting your team on board, and your budget

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