Articles
Here’s a free resource for helping you get into the mind of buyers. These articles are organized by category (you can also list articles by latest to oldest here), and here’s a quick breakdown:
- For some of the foundations of buyer psychology, you’ll want to start with Jobs-To-Be-Done Basics.
- If you’re getting cancellations, surprising kinds of customers, or you’re just starting out in a new niche, check out articles on Churn, Buyer Research and Purchase Interviews.
- With strong empathy for your buyers, you have a base for Validating and Discerning product or feature ideas. Good theory helps predict behaviour.
- To communicate your product to potential buyers, check out articles on Copywriting. You should consider creating Struggle-First Landing Pages for your product or service, especially when buyers don’t have an established mindset about your solution to their problem. There’s a bunch of articles showcasing some Example Sites too.
- When it’s time to tweak your products and your marketing, there’s a whole section on Optimizing & A/B Testing
- Most of you starting should really consider using buyer psychology with Consulting and Freelancing, offering productized services, understanding the real progress your clients are hoping to make. Jobs-to-be-done, after all, is a set of fractal tools that work both with the big and the small. That’s how I started.
1. Jobs-To-Be-Done Basics
The theory of buyer behavior popularized by Clayton Christensen is found throughout these articles, and so it pays to get the basics.
2. Churn, Buyer Research and Purchase Interviews
You’ll see some articles from above are listed here too. If cancellations to your product are causing you to double down on customer research, these articles are it.
3. Validating and Discerning
Discernment is key. Should you build that feature? Will that product work? It’s best to be real with yourself: you’ll be making bets. And yet, good theory predicts behavior. If you can create a solid narrative of when and how often buyers will experience a struggle, and if you can be patient, you can hone down ideas worth investing in.
4. Copywriting
It gets easier the more you get into the mind of your buyer.
5. Struggle-First Landing Pages
Perfect for when your audience has no established mindset for the solution to their problem, struggle-first landing pages start by mirroring back the struggle of the visitor so they can say “I feel understood!”
6. Example Sites
Some of these sites no longer exist, but be sure to check out the 5-part teardown and analysis and recommendations for inscheduler.com further down.
7. Optimizing & A/B Testing
You need a lot of traffic for real A/B Testing, but thankfully you can sharpen your pages with this imperative: help people make progress.
8. Consulting and Freelancing
Lastly, I wrote some articles on applying buyer psychology to consulting and freelancing. In fact, I think most people wanting to jump straight from employment to product should consider freelancing. Start small and stay sharp.