Find the Right Problem to Solve (No VC Required)

A lot of bootstrapped founders waste months building the wrong thing—not because they can’t ship, but because they started with a solution.

When you’re doing US startup marketing without VC, you don’t get to hide behind big ad budgets, “brand campaigns,” or a growth team. Your marketing is your product, your clarity, and your ability to talk to customers in a way that surfaces what they’ll actually pay for. That’s why I keep coming back to Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)—not as a trendy framework, but as a practical way to stop guessing.

Rob Walling’s Startups for the Rest of Us episode with Jim Kalbach (author of The Jobs To Be Done Playbook) nails the part most founders skip: finding the right problem to solve before you write code—or when you’ve hit a growth plateau and don’t know what to build next.

Jobs to Be Done is a “no-BS” way to predict adoption

JTBD helps you describe what customers are trying to accomplish without getting trapped in your product idea. That sounds simple, but it’s the difference between building “a dashboard app” and building “a way for a founder to trust their numbers without chasing spreadsheets.”

Kalbach frames it as a framework for innovation that lets you talk about the market without talking about brands, features, or your solution. Most founders do product-market fit backwards: build something, show it to the market, get a “meh,” iterate, repeat.

JTBD flips the order:

• Start with the problem people are already solving (often poorly).
• Understand the forces behind switching solutions.
• Then design the product (and marketing) around those forces.

One line from the episode is worth taping to your monitor:

“Jobs are stable over time even as technology changes.”

That’s the heart of bootstrapping longevity. Tools change. Budgets change. Platforms change. But the underlying job—the reason people pull out a credit card—tends to stay steady.

Why this matters for marketing without VC

Bootstrapped marketing works when your message is specific and obvious:

• “Stop losing customers at cancellation” beats “subscription retention tools.”
• “Know when you can afford your next hire” beats “financial planning software.”

JTBD gives you the language for that specificity—without spending $20k on positioning consultants.

Pre-product: how to find problems worth paying for

If you don’t have a product yet, your job is to pick a market slice and map the job. Kalbach suggests starting with two scoping decisions:

1. Who do you want to innovate for?
2. What problem area do you want to innovate in?

Founders often avoid committing here because commitment feels like “closing doors.” The reality is the opposite: commitment stops you from shipping random features and calling it strategy.

Step 1: Choose the “who” with a stakeholder map

Answer-first: Make a list of all actors in the domain, then choose who feels the pain most directly.

Example: say you’re interested in home improvement contractors.

• Owner/operator
• Office manager
• Sales rep
• Field crew lead
• Bookkeeper
• End customer (homeowner)

A bootstrapped SaaS often wins by serving the person who:

• feels the pain daily,
• has authority (or strong influence), and
• can justify even a “small” monthly subscription.

That’s not always the CEO. Sometimes it’s the ops manager who can’t keep schedules straight.

Step 2: Choose the “what” and get it down to one job

Answer-first: List all possible problems, then force yourself to narrow to 1–3.

If your “what” is “contractor software,” you’re dead. That’s not a job; it’s a category.

A better “what” might be:

• “Quote and win jobs without forgetting follow-ups”
• “Keep projects on schedule when crews and materials change daily”
• “Collect payment faster and reduce disputes”

This is where bootstrapped founders get an advantage: you’re allowed to be narrow.

Step 3: Interview for process, outcomes, and circumstances

Kalbach’s interview lens is practical and founder-friendly. In pre-product interviews, you’re probing for three things:

1. Process: How do they currently get the job done?
2. Outcomes: What does success look like? Where’s the pain?
3. Circumstances: When does it get harder or easier?

Here are example questions that work well (and don’t require you to pitch anything):

• Process

  • “Walk me through the last time you did this—start to finish.”
  • “What happened right before you started?”
  • “What do you do after it’s ‘done’?”

• Outcomes

  • “What part is most annoying or stressful?”
  • “What’s the cost of getting it wrong?”
  • “How do you measure if it worked?”

• Circumstances

  • “When does this become urgent?”
  • “Does it change when business is busy vs slow?”
  • “What’s different when it’s a bigger client vs a small one?”

A strong signal you’ve found a valuable job: people already built a workaround. Spreadsheets, Zapier chains, email templates, manual copying—those are not “competition,” they’re proof of demand.

Plateaued growth: switch interviews are the cheapest growth strategy you’re not using

Switch interviews help you understand why customers changed behavior—not why they like your UI. If you’re stuck at $3k, $10k, or $30k MRR and growth has flattened, you don’t need more random feature ideas. You need to know what triggered adoption.

The key concept: customers “hire” and “fire” solutions.

• They fired a spreadsheet, a competitor, or a manual process.
• They hired your product to make progress.

Switch interviews reverse-engineer that hiring moment.

What switch interviews actually reveal

Answer-first: They reveal the forces that created a purchase—pushes, pulls, anxiety, and habit.

A simple way to think about it (aligned with classic JTBD switching forces):

• Push: What made the old way unacceptable?
• Pull: What was attractive about the new way?
• Anxiety: What nearly stopped them from switching?
• Habit: What inertia did they have to overcome?

These forces are pure bootstrapped marketing fuel. They become:

• your landing page bullets,
• your onboarding emails,
• your demo script,
• your pricing page objections handling,
• your content topics.

A concrete example: cancel flows (B2B churn reduction)

In the episode, Rob brings up the idea of a product like Churnkey: personalized cancellation flows for subscription businesses.

A switch interview here isn’t “what feature do you want?” It’s:

• “What happened the week you decided you needed a better cancellation flow?”
• “What was the moment you realized churn was costing you real money?”
• “What did you try first?”
• “Why didn’t that work?”

If multiple customers say, “We were getting angry cancellation emails and it started showing up in G2 reviews,” that’s not a feature request. That’s a job trigger and a marketing angle.

The hidden payoff: JTBD makes your positioning obvious

Most bootstrapped startups don’t have a traffic problem. They have a clarity problem.

When you can name the job clearly, three things get easier fast:

1. Your homepage headline stops sounding like everyone else.
2. Your content marketing stops being generic.
3. Your sales calls become tighter because you’re diagnosing, not pitching.

Rob and Jim’s mini roleplay in the episode is a great illustration. Rob didn’t “buy a dashboard.” He switched because he wanted:

• less manual grunt work,
• more accuracy,
• more confidence in the numbers,
• better visibility into trends.

Notice what’s happening there: the job isn’t “view metrics.” It’s closer to “trust the state of our marketing without spending team time on reporting.” That’s a positioning statement you can build an entire product (and content strategy) around.

How to turn interviews into bootstrapped growth assets

Answer-first: Don’t let interviews die in a notes doc—turn them into copy, onboarding, and content.

A simple workflow I’ve found effective:

1. Record calls (with permission).
2. Highlight exact phrases customers use (their words beat yours).
3. Bucket phrases into:
   • triggers (“we hit a wall when…”),
   • desired outcomes (“I just wanted to…”),
   • objections (“I wasn’t sure it would…”),
   • alternatives (“we tried X first”).
4. Ship small changes weekly:
   • headline tweak,
   • email rewrite,
   • new cancellation save offer,
   • one new integration.

Bootstrapped founders win by compounding small improvements, not betting the company on one giant repositioning project.

A practical 14-day plan (no budget required)

You can run JTBD-style discovery in two weeks with nothing but customer calls and a doc.

Days 1–3: Define your scope

• Write your current best guess for:
  • WHO: the primary actor
  • JOB: verb + object (e.g., “forecast cash runway,” “reduce churn,” “schedule crews”)
• List 10 people you can talk to (customers, churned users, prospects, peers).

Days 4–10: Run 6–10 interviews

• Pre-product: focus on process/outcomes/circumstances.
• Existing product: focus on switching moments.

Days 11–14: Create your “job story” and ship one change

• One paragraph that states:
  • situation + trigger,
  • job they’re trying to do,
  • desired outcome,
  • why current options fail.

Then ship one meaningful change based on what you learned.

The point isn’t perfection. It’s momentum with real-world signal.

Where this fits in the “US Startup Marketing Without VC” playbook

Marketing without VC is mostly about making fewer expensive mistakes. JTBD is one of the simplest ways to do that because it forces you to stop arguing about features and start aligning around customer progress.

If you’re bootstrapping, your best growth channel is still the oldest one: talking to customers and letting their real constraints shape your product and messaging. Switch interviews and job mapping formalize that process so it’s repeatable, not vibes-based.

If you’re deciding what to build next, here’s the standard worth holding: your next feature should make the customer’s job meaningfully easier, faster, or less risky. If it doesn’t, it’s probably a distraction.

What’s one “switch” you could interview for this week—and what do you think you’d learn if you asked five customers to walk you through it?