Stand The F*ck Out: The No-Nonsense Guide to Positioning Your Business, Finding Your People, and Building a Durable Brand

This means understanding how you address customer challenges that others might overlook.

gather only insights from folks who have already invested resources in making progress.

Then I like to start the “real” interview without mentioning it. I just get started with small and easy questions to build people’s confidence before getting to more complex ones: “In which department do you work? How long have you been working there? Is French the sexiest accent?” This is when I like to dig deep to understand the story—their story

Irrational struggles are the emotional and often subconscious problems that prevent a certain group of people from getting a job done.

‘How do we make it different from the others so it is remarkable?’”

Exclusively learn from people who have recently invested resources—such as time, money, and/or effort—to address the problem you’re interested in solving (as shown in Figure 1.1).

Open-ended questions like this invite detailed responses and uncover the “why” behind people’s actions.

There are six core insights to uncover: Job. What did they try to accomplish? Alternatives. What other solutions have they used or considered in the process? Struggles. What problems were they trying to solve? Segment. What customer information is relevant to the story? Category. What other things belong in the same group as this product or service

And finally, phrase the job using the customer’s language, starting with an action verb (like “stand the f*ck out” or “plan family vacation”).

Join communities, online forums, or real-life conferences where customers already congregate. Then pay attention to the posts with the most views and comments to understand what resonates with them.