Katelyn Bourgoin - Stop Selling Courses & Start Selling These

The goal of marketing and business is to focus on being less wrong faster rather than always being right. This involves identifying successful strategies and stopping ineffective ones by gaining insights from customers. Following traditional innovation methods may not be practical for many businesses.

The episode features Caitlin Burgoyne, a creator who has founded successful companies, including an agency, a consulting company, and a professional network venture. She has learned a lot and adopted the customer research philosophy 'jobs to be done', which helps understand why customers buy. This approach is applied to the creator world, traditionally used in software and product industries.

Caitlin discusses her journey from freelance marketing to running an agency and then transitioning into building Vendive, a business network for women entrepreneurs. Despite initial success indicated by media attention, the company faced challenges in user retention, leading Caitlin to shift focus. She then started Customer Camp to help businesses understand their best customers' needs, using the 'jobs to be done' framework to design effective solutions and marketing strategies.

Reflecting on her mistakes, Caitlin realized the importance of understanding customers' real needs rather than assumptions. Despite successful user acquisition through PR and viral features, Vendive initially misidentified its users' needs, thinking they wanted skill swapping instead of networking opportunities. This insight came too late to save the company, but it informed Caitlin's future approaches.

Caitlin emphasizes the importance of 'jobs to be done', a theory that focuses on understanding the progress customers aim to make and their context, rather than their demographic attributes. This method shapes both product innovation and marketing strategies. She advocates for one-on-one interviews with customers to uncover real motivations, struggles, and priorities, thus crafting more compelling marketing messages.

The challenge for marketers is often in interpreting insights from customer interviews and making them actionable. Caitlin developed the "trigger technique" to simplify extracting and applying the most relevant insights from these interviews. This involves identifying trigger events, jobs to be done, and effective marketing messages. She illustrates this using a Barkbox example, showing how such insights can drive targeted and resonant marketing campaigns.

Jobs to be done analysis helps Barkbox identify its customers' triggers and needs, like new pet owners needing to keep dogs entertained. Such insights could inform targeted marketing strategies, focusing on customer circumstances (e.g., parents with new babies). This approach contrasts with traditional feature-focused marketing, illustrating how understanding customer context leads to more effective communication.

Caitlin explains how creators building audience-driven businesses can apply jobs to be done. Using her own business, Customer Camp, as an example, she highlights the significance of aligning products and content with customers' real jobs to be done. This includes creating actionable resources like cheat sheets rather than lengthy courses and leveraging newsletters to attract and engage the right audience.

Caitlin is shifting her business model to better suit marketers' challenges, focusing on delivering insights without requiring formal customer interviews. This approach supports marketers constrained by clients or teams, allowing them to independently gather insights and prove value before seeking buy-in for more comprehensive efforts.

In transitioning from a service-oriented to a product-oriented business model, Caitlin aims for scalable revenue without increasing headcount. She highlighted the challenges of transforming knowledge-based products into tangible outcomes and emphasized the importance of aligning solutions with customer needs, using practical deliverables like checklists to enhance customer engagement and satisfaction.