Your customers don't buy your product.
They hire it to do a job.

That one sentence changed how I think about OnlyMonster.

There's a framework called Jobs-to-be-Done.
The idea is simple:
people don't want your features.
They want a specific outcome.
And if you don't know what outcome -
you're building blind.

Classic example:
people don't buy a drill.
they buy a hole in the wall.
they don't even want the hole -
they want the shelf up.
they don't want the shelf -
they want the room to feel like home.

Every level deeper = new product decisions.

I have a business coach.
Not on my team - external.
He built and ran a Unicorn.
300+ people under management.

His advice: before you plan the next year -
map your market properly.
SWOT. JTBD. Full competitor picture.

So last month I sat down with my new CMO
and we did exactly that. Together.
Almost a month of work.
10+ iterations. Google Sheets with detailed analysis
on every competitor(10 of them), every channel, every gap.

What we found:

The competition in our space is strong.
But it's concentrated in completely different places
than we thought.

Entire segments of the market -
nobody is building for them.
Entire channels - nobody is using them.

I now know exactly where to aim for the next 12 months.
Not a feeling. Not intuition.
A document with data behind every decision.

If you run a business and haven't done this -
you're making strategy on assumptions.
That's an expensive way to learn.