How Would You Beat?

How Would You Beat Twitter Using Jobs-to-be-Done?

May 02, 2022 thrv Season 2 Episode 8
How Would You Beat?
How Would You Beat Twitter Using Jobs-to-be-Done?
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

In this episode, we will look at how you could beat Twitter using Jobs-to-be-Done. Twitter, of course, has been in the news because Elon Musk has entered an agreement to buy the company and possibly transform it into something else. But what we want to ask is, regardless of what happens with Elon Musk, what would you do to beat Twitter? What is Twitter's real function in the world? Why are people hiring Twitter? If you took the perspective that Twitter was actually a competitor, and you wanted to compete with them and create a different service, how would you go about doing it and could Jobs-to-be-Done give you insights in beating Twitter even after Elon Musk buys the platform? Or it could be a way that Twitter itself could improve?

✅ Download our Executive White Paper: "How to Use JTBD To Grow Faster" 👉 https://www.thrv.com/jobs-to-be-done-white-paper

Key moments from today's topic on how you would beat Twitter:

00:00 Intro to the current state of Twitter with Elon Musk & what "job" does Twitter get done

06:14 What is the customer value of Twitter as a social media platform and is it a successful business currently?

12:16 They key to compete with Twitter using Jobs-to-be-Done and examples of other media company's competition mistakes

21:37 Jared and Jay talk about getting the courage to focus in on one target group for a business

27:19 Jared talks about possibly using Twitter as a B2B service and how that ties into JTBD 

✅ Download our Executive White Paper: "How to Use JTBD To Grow Faster" 👉 https://www.thrv.com/jobs-to-be-done-white-paper

Learn more about JTBD: https://www.thrv.com/jobs-to-be-done
Youtube: youtube.com/channel/UCEKeVWAeyQeMPzq9HfbUa5w
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/thrv-com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thrvapp
Follow Jay Haynes on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayhaynes/
Follow Jared Ranere on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredranere/

Jay Haynes:

Welcome back to How would you beat where we discuss how you can use jobs to be done innovation methods to beat your competition. Remember to subscribe and like this podcast. In this episode, we will look at how you could be Twitter. Twitter, of course, has been in the news because Alon Musk has entered an agreement to buy the company and possibly transform it into something else. Who, who really knows it's kind of speculation right now. But what we want to ask is, regardless of what happens with Elon Musk, and what people think of him as a personality and a character and an entrepreneur and a business person, what would you do to beat Twitter? What is Twitter's real function in the world? Why are people hiring Twitter? And how would you beat them in this could be obviously Twitter could build its own products and improve them, as you know, a lot of people are calling for. But if you took the perspective that Twitter was actually a competitor, and you wanted to compete with them and create a different service, how would you go about doing it and could jobs to be done give you insights in beating Twitter, you know, even after Elon Musk buys the platform? Or it could be a way that Twitter itself could improve? Even if it does eventually go private? So how would you be Twitter? What is Twitter being hired for? What is a social media company? It's an interesting question. How would you answer that, Jared?

Jared Ranere:

Yeah, that's a that is an interesting question. Like, what is the point of social media? So I think that's like the first thing everybody thinks about when they think about how would you be Twitter? Well, you'd have to create a competing social media platform. And if you've heard us talk about any of these competitor threats, or competitor opportunities before, you know that we would always say don't look at what the product is, think about what the underlying job is. So what are people hiring Twitter to do? And how could you do that better? And I think in Twitter's case, it's a lot of different customers getting a lot of different jobs done. And I think that, you know, the thing that they market in their brand is, is what's happening. So, so the question would be then, okay, so are people want to find out what's happening? It's kind of a general job for consumers. And my question with that is always, is that underserved? And how important? Is it? And are people willing to pay for that? What do you think?

Jay Haynes:

Yeah, I think it's a great way to frame it. And I think you're right, social media is a product. So you know, we always talk about the wake up in the morning test, does anybody wake up in the morning and say, I need social media? Well, people use social media, but social media is the product, it's not the underlying customer need or problem, as we would call it today, it's not an underlying job to be done. Social media is the platform and the product. And I think you're right, if you just took it as what's happening, you know, obviously, consumers need to stay informed about a subject. And so you know, obviously, there's a news component, just what's happening in in the world and in my local community in real time. You know, there's even local service providers who have Twitter accounts, whether it's the you know, the sheriff, or the fire department, you know, in California, when we were in fire season, of course, Twitter was actually a very, very good way to stay informed of what was happening and fires you get almost, you know, near real time information, if you followed, you know, Cal Fire and local fire fire authorities, which is extremely valuable, to stay informed about events unfolding nearly in real time. But of course, social media platforms are not just used for that. They're used by investors to find out information about companies. And they're used by journalists, of course, to inform the public to try and monetize audiences and drive traffic. It's used by musicians, actors, artists to stay in touch with their fans. It's used by politicians influence votes and companies to talk about, you know, customer support and get a pulse on what's happening about people talking about their companies, if they've got issues or problems. It's used by brands trying to create awareness. You know, there's there's an enormous number of jobs that this platform has enabled. And I think one of the reasons Twitter has struggled to be a really successful business just in terms of revenue and profitability. It's obviously got a big market cap. I mean, you know, Lon, Musk has proposed$44 billion for the company. So it's, you know, that's a that's a very, very successful company. And it's got significant revenue from its advertising side, but it's never really come together as just a juggernaut of profitability. The way you You would expect with the number of users and engagement that it has. And I think that's probably because it is trying to be a platform that's getting all these jobs done. And it doesn't do a great job of any of them individually. And that if you were looking at it as a competitor, you're right. I agree, you wouldn't, you wouldn't say, oh, I need to create a social media platform, or or even can we use, you know, blockchain to create a social graph? I mean, maybe the answer with that is okay, you know, if you were to create this kind of identity online for people, it would still have to get jobs done, it would still have to help them. Stay informed about a subject to learn about a subject to connect with others, you know, all the jobs. And when we say those jobs, those are very, very complex goals that people have. It's not just a vague, you know, statement, you would have to really dissect that and figure out what are all the needs in the job? Who's the segment that's really underserved, that is either willing to pay or willing to use it on a very frequent basis? And yes, also it gets into the competing on the advertising side?

Jared Ranere:

Yeah. And I think that, you know, talking about Twitter is not a successful business is or like not a juggernaut of revenue and profitability, I think is a good way to put it. I think the way it's been in the news is it's it's not realizing its potential. Right. So shareholders have been, it's widely known that shareholders are upset with how you know, they call it the most important media company in the world with the most influence on the world stage is is worth what it is, they think it should be worth a whole lot more, and people will call it the town square. Right? That's analogy. We've heard a lot in the past few weeks, we've got the town square, and everybody's there. And that's where you find out what's going on. And it is you need free speech in that town square. And then that raises a whole host of questions about how to moderate a social media platform, what is the right way to do it? And I think it moves the conversation away from the value conversation. So I think that the question has been posed that says, Well, if we clean up the way people talk on Twitter, we take the toxicity out, automatically, it will be more valuable to everybody. And I think that yeah, it'd be a nicer experience. But will that actually just drive more value inherently? If we just get rid of that? My hypothesis would be no, that is not the only thing. The key is like, how do you help people unlock value in their own lives in a way that they're trying to do? And I think that those examples that you brought up, Jay are really salient examples. Because there are people who, if they work hard enough, are getting a lot of value. So you know, I have investor friends that are saying, the information I get on Twitter, I can't get anywhere else, it happens fastest, and I can use it to get an edge to grow the return on my portfolio. That is incredibly valuable to people. But has Twitter ever built a feature to help investors do that faster and more accurately than they can today? And the answer is no. And the reason they haven't is because of the way they think about what they're doing. Right? The if they think of themselves, the town squares, they think about, like the only job is to find out what's happening for everybody, then they're not going to build these more specific features that unlock customer value, that they could ultimately charge for it and prove their revenue model, because they're not winning, on advertising. They're not winning on brand awareness. There are other places that brands can go to have more successful advertising.

Jay Haynes:

Yeah, and I think that the the problem for Twitter, I think, is generally this platform problem. It's, and a lot of this is driven by, you know, just generally the kind of venture world is, it seems great to be a platform. And of course, like huge, the big companies in the world are platforms. I mean, Google's a platform, Apple, obviously, with iOS and macOS, they're huge platforms where you can get multiple jobs done. And that's certainly true. And of course, this is how Microsoft became, you know, one of the most valuable companies in world the PC was a platform that didn't enormous amounts of got enormous amounts of jobs done. The problem was social media as a platform is exactly what you're saying. It's kind of doing all these things in a partially interesting way. And it's got some benefits clearly, you know, just reading the New York Times is not going to give that investor the edge that they want or it's not going to help you know, consumers. Stay informed about subjects that also can be very hyperlocal like ease or fire in your neighborhood. So having experienced that, so it's it's not it's not really doing the any of those as well as it could, right. So Twitter itself could take this approach, they would have different teams focused around these customer jobs. So they would have a team that's focused on investors that journalists, you know, creative people, politicians, you know, consumers, all all those you would take those different jobs and Clay Christensen wrote about this, of course, you know, organize your company around your customers job, not around your product. Very, very few companies do that, of course, today, but they should. And I think the other problem is, their customer is the advertiser. And the reason they're not as valuable as Facebook and Google, they don't have as many users as Facebook, but Facebook has done a better job for all the criticisms, you can level at Facebook, they have done a better job of helping advertisers acquire customers. And of course, Google is is just done an extraordinary job of changing the advertising industry, because you can track every dollar, you know, we've gotten from the famous, you know, advertising cliche that 50% of advertising works, you just don't know which 50% That is entirely untrue. With Google, you know, exactly to the dollar, how much you're going to spend to acquire a customer. And Twitter doesn't, has not done a good job on that. So their revenue side of the equation. While they do have a lot of revenue, they have not created the customer value for advertisers. So should they be in that business? Should it move to a subscription service? And the answer is they should focus on the users job and where there's opportunities to get those users to pay for the premium Twitter investor service? For example, they should they should do that, because investors obviously have a willingness to pay for investor information. It's incredibly valuable to them

Jared Ranere:

if they're paying for Bloomberg companies. Yeah, listen, super profitable. That's

Jay Haynes:

right. And, and in some cases, like with consumers, and politicians, they might have a free ad driven model. But still, on top of that, you have to make it so that they can, that on top of those markets, the advertisers can really acquire customers and track it better than they can, you know, in other mediums, the I think the key to competing with Twitter, if you were to use jobs to be done to compete with Twitter is to break it apart into these different customers. And a good example of where companies have done this very successful is with is with Craigslist, right? Craigslist, obviously, you know, performed a role and made it free to become this big marketplace. And, and you could do things like find a room to rent in someone's house, you could buy and sell used cars, you could find people to date, and all of those markets, because the true market is not an online marketplace, the market is to find accommodations the market is to buy and sell used cars, the market is to find someone to go on a date with so those jobs have been broken out into really big, big companies. Of course, Airbnb, which we've talked about before, is $100 billion company that really does a better job than Craigslist and helping you find accommodations. So that that initially why you'd say well, oh, if I'm gonna if I'm going to approach Craigslist as a competitor, I must be this generalizable marketplace as well. That's untrue. Yeah. And the reason that's untrue is because you have to get the job done better. And we talked about these jobs, like finding accommodations. But if people want to learn more about how complex jobs are just that statement, find accommodations, you know, has 16 different steps and 100 or so different needs. These are really, really complicated goals that customers are trying to achieve. So you can look at those and break them down. And that's exactly why Airbnb became such a successful company because it took this one job. And it said, we're going to focus on all the elements of that job. And, and compete with someone who can do it for free on on Craigslist. And that's true of Twitter, you each of these, the investor market, you're right. I mean, your Twitter, in a way is competing with Bloomberg, you wouldn't necessarily you wouldn't say that if you if you thought the market was social media, you would say Twitter is competing with Facebook, but it's not right. For investors. It's competing with Bloomberg. Right? Yeah, so

Jared Ranere:

yeah. And in every single one of these jobs we talked about, there are great competitors, right. So, you know, if you look at performers, you know, actors, musicians, artists, authors, athletes, who are trying to build a monetize a fan base, they've got there are competitors there, right? There's Patreon. There's substack. There's Gumroad. There are traditional sources like SoundCloud, right? Like, you know, publicists help you do that there. There are a lot of competitors really large industries and large businesses, just in that one niche of Twitter, Instagram is making a lot of money out of this. And so, I think that, you know, it's very interesting. Um, you know, I, when I started my career in tech, it was circa 2006. And there at the time, there was a sort of mantra out there, which was just like, get a lot of users, and money will follow. And I think what happened then is you had companies like Twitter, like Tumblr, like Facebook, but Facebook, kind of figured out their advertising play. But Twitter and Tumblr are a great example of companies that got a lot of users, you know, like Tumblr sold for a billion dollars to Yahoo. And they just said, like, well, we'll throw advertising on at some point. And then that's where the money will come from. But they didn't have a clear view of what customer value they were delivering to whom they kind of ran like a media business, as opposed to a functional software application. And as a result of that, you end up doing a lot of jobs sort of, well, for a lot of people, but not nailing any of them. Because the idea was, how do we get people to visit more not, let's be very focused about the value we're delivering and make sure we're delivering that and figuring out what people are willing to pay for. And so now you get these media companies like Twitter with a bunch of pockets of potential giant value, but they think that they're supposed to serve everybody. And so it's hard to change the company culture, to focus on one of those segments. Now, to Twitter's credit, they have started some bets in some more narrower market. So they are building products for what they call creators, right? What I just called performers, or you can break it down more specifically to actors, musicians, authors, they're creating some products for creators to help them build a monetize a fan base, they have a tip jar, where somebody who likes somebody's tweets on a regular basis can just give them some money. So it's kind of like Patreon, right? They're kind of copying Patreon, really. And then they've got a newsletter product where you can, you know, push out your Twitter content to a select group of people who pay for it. So that's essentially a substack copy, they have this product or this feature set coming up called Super follows, where people can pay to be a different tier of a follower to you. And then they get specialized content that you create specifically for them, which is a lot like medium premium content or a lot like substack. And I think that's a good start, right? This is along the lines of what we're talking about, like pick a customer base that's trying to get a job done. They're trying to build a monetize a fan base, where I would take it, if I wanted to be better than those products is to go more specific, you know, so what if we just chose actors? What would they have? That's different if they want to build a monetize a fan base, then somebody who's writing a newsletter than an author would?

Jay Haynes:

How would you? Yeah, that's great. I think that's that's exactly, you know, how you would approach it. And I would say that if Twitter wanted to do this, of course, the most important thing for Twitter would be how they organize their company, and there's teams and what process are they using to innovate? And we've said this, you know, a lot of times people often love to try and copy Apple's products, they rarely copy Apple's process. And Apple's process. We know Phil Schiller said this, the grand unified theory of Apple is asking what Job is the watch being hired to do what Job is the iPhone being hired to do and they think about their customers using the product to get jobs done. And you know, we should put a link to this. But the iPad two ad, will were always is one of the greatest ads of all time, because when they launched that, they talked about how you know, you're always going to root for your favorite team, you're always going to cook a good meal, you're always getting lost in a book, good book, you're always gonna make home movies, but how you do it is never gonna be the same. And basically, it was a list of jobs to be done. And they were showing that they had a platform to get each one of those done, you know, faster and more accurately, or as we always say, and so you can see Apple internally has this focus on the customer. You know, even Steve Jobs said this, he said, You have to focus on the customer experience, and then work backwards to the product. You can't start with the product idea. And so here we've got you know, Twitter's culture is like we're a social media company. What can we do with social media companies to keep users more engaged with social media? You know, that's, that's a mistake. But what they could do is organize around these customers and say, Okay, what are we doing for investors? What are we doing for journalists? What are we doing for performers, let's say this, this this creative one On is a is a great example, today's world in music, for example, is not the old world of record companies, you know, funding a lot of money to get your record recorded. And then you got to fund a lot of inventory through their distribution to put CDs into stores, you know, everything is streaming. So if you are a musician today, to generate revenue from a fan base, that is a that is a job to acquire customers, essentially, as a musician, doing it through social media is an amazing way to do it. So if Twitter had a team that was just entirely focused on how musicians generate more fans to generate more streams to get more subscription, revenue, etc, that would be an an inmate a huge opportunity, by the way, because the music industry Finally, after a couple decades, is now back up to its peak in 1999. So the music industry is growing a lot, and there are a lot more musicians because you can make a living as a musician, you know, you don't have to have these huge record companies financing and all that. So that's a great opportunity where they could just say, Okay, how are we helping musicians acquire fans, acquire paying fans, you know, revenue generating fans? And and that alone, that's so big and complex that this is how jobs to be done can be very helpful it could you need to break that job down, that is a very, very complex jobs with hundreds of needs. And you need to figure out where it musicians are underserved and what your product can do. And just being a social media network is not enough to really capitalize on that

Jared Ranere:

opportunity. One, yeah, you made me think of something, which is that a lot of times in business, you're taught thought to taught to think big, right? You you present an idea, and somebody says think bigger. And you end up saying let's target everyone, and have them do everything, right. And it almost takes courage to say, let's target a smaller group of people and go all the way for them. And I think that courage to go all the way can unlock value. So rather than saying, let's help all different types of creators, improve their audience and monetization a little bit, why not say let's help musicians, for example, who are trying to build their fan base and increase their, their revenue deeply, and do the whole thing for them and really knock it out of the park. And I think that kind of takes a little bit of courage to go narrow, and it's hard to do.

Jay Haynes:

Well, it also it takes courage to want to build a repeatable process. This is what I think, you know, we live in a world where the past few decades have just seen this unbelievably huge wave of things moving online and being converted to software. So we're, we are in this incredible age of extraordinary growth, because software plus the internet really does get jobs done, you know, way better, then, then other solutions. And that's because what humans need to accomplish the goals they need to accomplish in their lives, now known as job's done, take information inputs, and decision making, and getting the outputs to achieve the goal. Just broadly, whether you're trying to get a baby to sleep tonight, get to a destination on time, you know, maintain an aircraft or you know, restore artery blood flow, it doesn't matter, all those goals, take information inputs, and decision making outputs. And that's the basis of the theory. And that's what software and the internet are just extraordinarily good at doing. And what's happened in a lot of cases. Twitter is a great example of this, just being in that world where people are just massively moving online, you can occasionally win the lottery. And, you know, Twitter, of course, you know, famously was okay, let's make kind of an open text system, where instead of being in these private, you know, chat messaging people could, you know, publicly do it. And

Jared Ranere:

yeah, I started a podcasting company. Yeah.

Jay Haynes:

Yeah, that's right. So, but then what happened was, that was interesting, of course, because then you could also follow people so you could see the text of whatever star you are interested in or famous person or intriguing person and you could follow they're essentially what previously would have been private text. So they grew incredibly fast, you know, once they figured out some, you know, basic metrics about how many people you need to follow and all that. And that's, that's great. But that's really a kind of wave phenomenon. The next phase is really focusing on the jobs, the goals, the people who are using that platform to become something that's in credibly valuable. And it's exactly analogous to Craigslist. So, of course, Craigslist was doing a better job than classified ads. Remember, you had, I'm definitely old enough, you know, you had to open the newspaper, you know, bad, tiny prints and, you know, try and find an apartment to rent, you would circle them. And then, you know, crazy, type it into a web browser

Jared Ranere:

to try to find a summer job. My parents were like, get the pencil circle things.

Jay Haynes:

Yeah, I lived in New York when summers and we go to the Village Voice, and then you gotta go, you know, it was it was, you didn't get to see pictures of it. You know, I didn't think about Airbnb. Now. It's just like, such a beautiful experience is like, Oh, that looks like a wonderful house to rent in Italy, you know. So, so, so these opportunities are really, really big underneath social media, but you have to get out of the mode of thinking like, oh, to compete with Twitter, you would have to compete, you'd have to create a competitive social media company, that would just lead you to the Microsoft Zune mistake, which is, you know, likely not going to end well. So there are really meaningful opportunities to help people with these jobs, which you know, whether you're a musician, a brand, a consumer, a politician, a journalist, you know, investor, those are just enormous markets. But you have to remember the market, you have to define it from the customer's perspective and their goal, and break it down. And then even as Jared, you're saying, starting smaller, even with the invest in within the investor market, you could segment that market or even within the musician market, you could segment that market, and you'd want to find that segment that really is pounding their head against the table struggling to get the job done, and, and more likely to adopt and buy your solution. And then And then, of course, we talked about on the advertising side, if they wanted to continue in advertising model, they really have to figure out how to help advertisers acquire customers faster, more accurately and cheaper. It can't just be I mean, brand advertising is is part of the advertising market, obviously, just awareness. But companies are smart, they will stop spending on just brand awareness if their revenue doesn't grow. Right, you know, yeah.

Jared Ranere:

Or just helping them increase awareness. Yeah. And I'd be remiss to not raise an interesting idea from Ben Thompson at St. Tacori. Love his blog, by the way, if stir tacori.com. And it's related to this, how do you organize the company? And if you have all these competitors going after more specific jobs, it's difficult to organize Twitter around that, how might you organize it to take advantage of the platform aspects of Twitter? And he had this interesting notion, which is you can and I don't think he's, I've think I've heard this elsewhere, too. I'm not sure he's the first person to say it. But he articulated it extremely well, the idea being that you could take the platform part of Twitter, the API, essentially, and turn that into a b2b service, where you provide the information that's floating around on Twitter and the social graph to other companies, you license that to them and make them pay a fee for it. And then in the current Twitter experience that we're everybody consumes today, all the users consume today, the mobile app and the website where you have the feed and all the different features. And it's an advertising model. That would be one of the companies that licenses the API from the Twitter service company. And so he calls it Twitter service code and Twitter aapko. And Twitter aapko would have the same sort of privileges on the API as every other company that buys into it does. And so what happens there is for the platform gets a different customer, it gets other businesses becomes a b2b. And they have to think through how you know, what is that job that those businesses are trying to get done. And they would have to design the platform to help serve that very well. And then the Twitter app, the client that we're used to using today, with that experience, would essentially be competing with all of these other applications that would might try to get more specific jobs done, and might have different moderation policies. And the market would say, you know, what is the best thing for each job. And Twitter would make money in all scenarios. So rather than losing to a competitor, that that fought, takes a more narrow approach and gets a specific job done all the way and generates revenue out of that. They win on that too, because they get paid for the platform usage.

Jay Haynes:

Yeah, yeah. And that that is essentially a the technical solution to targeting different jobs and different customers using the Twitter API. And one thing that's interesting about there's there are different approaches, you know, the business model that could be Twitter does that internally and creates these different groups. And they say, Okay, you all have access to the Twitter API. And this group is targeting politicians. This group is targeting journalists, this group is targeting artists, this group is targeting, you know, consumers, you know, etc, and have them compete. And you could also open, if you did open up that API, you would create a competitive marketplace, where hopefully, entrepreneurs would come up with ideas that would take advantage of the API and then do a much better job. It's almost like if Craigslist had had that kind of API, and then Airbnb utilized it, actually, they did kind of famously do that they hacked Craigslist postings. I can't remember the exact details of it. But they've helped move people into Airbnb, and then you know, and but then eventually, Craigslist lost out. And Airbnb obviously became, you know, much more successful in that market. But that could be a way that Twitter could then eventually acquire those companies, they could say, Okay, we're looking at this, and you know, these people, this, this company here is doing a great job with politicians, and that's growing with the Twitter API, and then they acquire that or, or they could fund it internally. And you know, when we talk to companies, a company itself is essentially a venture capital firm. Because what it's doing is it's allocating its capital, to different projects that are hopefully going to generate more growth. And sometimes you just have such a good product that it generates almost all your revenue and profitability. And that's exactly what happened with Google, right? Google just happened to have a product in search and AdWords that is worth$3 trillion. Now, Google's venture capital function of allocating capital to new products has been absolutely terrible. We went through this before the Google graveyard is, is very large. And that's true of most venture investing, almost most of it fails to even return the capital. So but this is a way that companies should think about those allocating those resources, whether you create a corporate venture arm, or whether you just create different groups to start targeting these customers in this way. It's a way of mitigating the risk that that investment in building something for investors or journalists, or artists, or politicians or brands or whoever, doesn't help get them get their job done.

Jared Ranere:

Yeah, I think that's great. And, and I think that, you know, we haven't we talked about the apple and their processes a lot. They there's a model that could be adopted here, too, when you think about, what is the App Store help with, you know, developer, what job is that being hired to do? While developers are trying to grow a successful business, essentially, a successful application, and the App Store, you know, provides developer tools to make it a little bit easier to build your app, but it also provides distribution for your application. It's a lot, it's, you know, it's a lot easier to get distributed to a lot of different phones, if you go through the App Store, then try to build something that people install on their own. The thing that the apps, the Apple does not provide to the app store his data for your application. And that is something that Twitter service API, you know, and Ben Thompson's world Twitter service CO, could help get that job done. That is currently very underserved, right, if you're, if you're a startup trying to build an application, and you want to, you know, use machine learning, if you want to train for a very specific problem, you don't have the data to do it, you're getting dominated by these big companies. And Twitter has a lot of data, which people could do a lot of interesting things with. So there's an unmet need in the developer market, who are trying to build new successful businesses, to get the data they need to populate their platforms and make them more successful and satisfy needs for their users. So you can see how you know jobs to be done applies to each customer that you might target, you can then you can think about how are your competitors leaving opportunities on the table to get the job done better?

Jay Haynes:

Yeah, I think that's great. And if if you It's like how would Twitter compete with Apple two, which is interesting question. And what I would say what's interesting about Apple is Apple also does not release a product until it's good enough. You know, we've talked about this before, but Steve Jobs famously said he was proud of the things they said no to as he was about the things they said yes to. And I think that's incredibly important for Twitter. And any company wants to compete is really you need to understand the customer's job completely. Jobs are very, very complex. They have a lot of steps they have a lot of needs, you know, and let's just take musicians trying to profitably acquire fans right generate revenue from fans, however you wanted to find the job. That job is very Very, very complex, and it has a lot of steps 100 and needs, you know, etc. And what they've done now is kind of, okay, we have a tip jar. That's not really helping to get the whole job done. And that's one element of it. And it sure there might be some like, you know, people who tip but if you're really going to compete, and you're really going to create, essentially like a multibillion dollar opportunity out of serving musicians, which there there is clearly an opportunity there maybe music, it's it's an enormous business, it's growing, you know, it's, it's gonna be around forever, people are going to make music people are going to buy and pay for music and in various different ways and business models, you know, it's a huge market on its own. If they wanted to really do that, well, it would be way more than a tip jar, right? Apple wouldn't launch just here's a tip jar, you know, throw in for an artist, they would they would wait and figure out, okay, how is this going to be different? I mean, Apple hasn't been 100% percent successful with everything, obviously. But they have an enormously high success rate. And I think this is because they take this mentality that like, if we're going to do this, or we're going to help get the job done better, we really, we really have to do it better. And jobs are very, very complex. what customers are hiring a product to do is not just a simple one word, you know, three word for word statement like, oh, yeah, let's just help musicians, you know, acquire fans with a tip jar. That's that's not good enough approach, you have to understand the need, you have to segment you have to size the segment, you really have to understand the willingness to pay. You have to measure speed and accuracy against the current products and the current competitions. This is what product teams are responsible for doing and it is a lot of work. It is not a simple thing. But if you as you know, leadership at Twitter or leadership of any company is going to compete you you've got to set your team up for success by focusing on the right goal. And that's really the the process implementation part of it that I think if you wanted to compete with Twitter, that's how you would do it.

Jared Ranere:

It's great. That's probably a good place to wrap up there on that note about how to how to compete with Twitter, and

Jay Haynes:

Twitter. Yeah, great, interesting discussion. And you know, if people want to continue the discussion, feel free to reach out to us. Thanks for listening, listening. Remember to subscribe and like to the podcast. If you want to learn more about jobs done animation methods, visit us@thrv.com

Intro to the current state of Twitter with Elon Musk & what "job" does Twitter get done
What is the customer value of Twitter as a social media platform and is it a successful business currently?
They key to compete with Twitter using Jobs-to-be-Done and examples of other media company's competition mistakes
Jared and Jay talk about getting the courage to focus in on one target group for a business
Jared talks about possibly using Twitter as a B2B service and how that ties into JTBD