Demand you didn't create
The previous lesson, Don't Start in a Tarpit, made sure you were standing on real ground — that the idea you're chasing isn't one that generates enthusiasm without ever producing a durable business. Standing on that ground, the next question is where demand for your product actually comes from.
The instinct is to think a launch creates demand: ship the thing, tell people about it, and interest follows. Bob Moesta's Jobs to Be Done framework says the causality runs the other way. Demand is created by a struggling moment — a specific context and a desired outcome that together cause someone to say 'today's the day I have to do something different.' Struggling moments exist before any product is built. They are durable: most existed ten years ago and will still exist in twenty; only the technology that answers them changes. A product aimed at the wrong struggling moment will not be hired, however well it is executed, because the people it's meant for won't recognise it as the answer to their problem.
The practical consequence is where you look for evidence. Not a satisfaction survey, but a causal interview with people who have recently switched — bought something new, or dropped something old. Moesta's shorthand: 'bitchin' ain't switchin''. Complaints don't predict behaviour change; only past behaviour does.
The four forces
Moesta models every switch as a contest between four forces. Push is the current situation becoming untenable — the only reason anyone leaves what they have. Pull is the attraction of the new outcome. Against those sit Anxiety — uncertainty about whether the new thing will actually work — and Habit, the inertia of giving up a familiar routine. A switch happens only when Push and Pull together exceed Anxiety and Habit.
The counterintuitive part is what happens when you add features to win the switch. More features raise Pull — but they also raise Anxiety ('can it really do all that?'). Piling on capability can cancel out its own effect. Often the cheaper, faster lever is the other side of the equation: reduce the friction of switching itself, rather than add more product to pull people across.
- Condo with storage included. Removing the inertia of dealing with one's possessions when moving — a form of Habit — produced a 30% sales increase, with no change to the home itself.
- Dining table space, sacrificed from a second bedroom. Removing the emotional attachment to the family table — again, Habit, not Pull — produced a 22% sales increase.
Neither result came from a better product. Both came from removing a force working against the switch.
Compared to what?
April Dunford's Product Positioning framework asks a sibling question, one step earlier than 'do users love this product?' — what do they compare it to? Positioning starts from competitive alternatives, not from the product's own features.
In B2B, the alternative on the table is almost always the status quo: the spreadsheet, the email thread, the intern doing it manually. Around 40% of B2B deals are lost not to a competitor but to 'no decision' — which really means lost to the status quo, because the buyer was never shown why staying put was the costlier choice. Companies that discount the status quo as a competitor systematically underperform, because they never address the real switching cost standing in the way.
Positioning matters because it decides the criteria you're judged on. Choose the wrong competitive alternative, and the buyer evaluates you against the wrong yardstick — and you lose deals you could have won on the right one.
Put together, Moesta and Dunford share a prior that comes before either camp's measurement: you cannot measure your way to product-market fit if you haven't first understood the causal structure of demand — why someone switches, and what they're switching away from.
The honest limit
Jobs to Be Done is causal and qualitative. It explains why people switch — it does not tell you how many will, and it cannot size a market or tell you when you've crossed a threshold of fit. That's a different, quantitative question, and it's where the next lesson goes: Part 4 turns to measurement — the Sean Ellis Score — for counting what this lesson has only explained.
Go deeper
The single best source on the struggling moment and the four forces is Bob Moesta on Lenny's Podcast — watch it here, or read the episode.