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MARKETING-FOR-STARTUPS5 MIN READ

Message the Job, Not the Persona Costume

Translate startup customer research into a Jobs-to-Be-Done message that names the trigger, struggle, and desired progress.

Personas describe the buyer; Jobs-to-Be-Done explains the buying motion. The job is progress in a circumstance JTBD asks what progress a customer is trying to make in a specific situation. In startup marketing, this matters because early buyers do not change tools for abstract benefits. They change when a concrete struggle interrupts work: a board meeting, a new compliance deadline, a broken manual process, an expensive hire they cannot make, or a customer promise they can no longer keep. Good messaging names the trigger and the tradeoff A useful job statement contains the circumstance, the current workaround, the desired progress,…

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