Everyone is selling the same dream.
Work from anywhere. Make money while you sleep. Build something that scales. These are the messages that flood every SaaS landing page, every info product sales page, every B2B marketing deck. And the reason they’re everywhere is simple: they work. People do want those things.
The problem is that everybody wants the same things. We all want to survive and thrive. We all want more money, more time, more respect. And when you lead with the big dream, you end up sounding exactly like the person you’re trying to beat.
The sale doesn’t happen at the level of aspiration. It happens at the level of the job.
The job is not the dream. The job is the specific progress someone is trying to make in a very specific circumstance. And if you can name it better than anyone else, you win.
Here’s what I mean. When I was building a newsletter about buyer psychology, I could have sold the dream: understand your customers, grow your business, become a smarter marketer. Those statements are all true. But they’re also indistinguishable from a hundred other things in someone’s inbox.
Instead, I kept asking myself: what is the actual job someone is hiring this newsletter to do? And the answer, once I got clear on it, was this. They want to understand why their customers make buying decisions, so they can get more of them. That’s the job. Not “customer research.” Not “psychology.” The job.
When your message is aimed at the job, it clicks in a way that aspiration never does. Because aspiration is generic. The job is specific. Specific wins.
The reason most founders get this wrong
Most of us start with what we want to sell, then search for a market to sell it to. The motivation is personal. We want to build something we love, something that scales, something that gives us freedom. That’s fine. But those motivations have nothing to do with the decision your buyer is about to make.
The shift is to stop thinking about what you want to sell and start thinking about what people want to buy. That sounds obvious. It almost never gets done.
Here is what “wanting to buy” actually looks like. Something happened in your buyer’s life before they ever found you. A trigger event. Their team grew too fast. They lost a deal they should have won. They launched a product nobody used. That event made them aware of a job they now urgently need to get done. Your message landed in that window, or it didn’t.
If your message is selling the dream, it slips past them. If your message names the specific job they’re currently trying to do, it stops them.
How to find the job
The technique I use is what I call pain storming. For each potential segment you could serve, map four kinds of problems: the functional ones (what specifically breaks down when they try to get this done?), the emotional ones (how does it make them feel when it doesn’t work?), the social ones (how do they worry about being perceived while they’re struggling?), and the perceived risks (what are they afraid will happen if they try to fix it and fail?).
When you lay those out, patterns emerge. And inside those patterns is where your differentiated message lives. Not in “we help you grow faster.” In “we help first-time founders who just ran their first product launch and are staring at conversion numbers that don’t make sense.”
For founders with ten customers or fewer
You already have the data. Your first ten customers each went through a trigger event before they found you. They each had a specific job. They each had functional, emotional, and social problems layered underneath it.
Talk to them. Ask why they started looking. Ask what else they considered. Ask what would have happened if they hadn’t found you.
The answers will tell you the job. The job will tell you the message. And the message that sells the job, rather than the dream, is the one that actually converts.
Everyone else is selling the dream. Leave it to them.