An 86-minute guide to finding PMF | Rob Snyder (Author, The Power of Pull)

The theory behind a sales call is if you have pull, you're going to rip the thing out of my hands. So I have a very specific structure of a sales call for getting into discovery and then transitioning out of discovery.

How can people use this framework to help them come up with ideas that are more likely to actually be successful?

One of the main mistakes people make is thinking that pull is a thing that a company has. It's a thing a person has. You're not selling to SpaceX. You're selling to the head of legal at SpaceX who has a project on her to-do list that they can't do themselves.

You have this idea of the Hail Mary approach.

You're talking with people and they're like, oh my gosh, this is exactly what I need. A lot of the time that's not gonna happen. That's also an opportunity to what I call throw the Hail Mary, which is, is there anything on your to-do list that you would pay me to do right now? We're seeing if they try to buy. If they don't, cool, we've learned something. We can kind of keep iterating from there. If they do, okay, great. Now we might have something. Let's see if it repeats.

Say you actually found something, something that is pulling and people are like, I need this now. What comes next?

Retention is super important and it's not obvious. And so what I recommend is—

Rob, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

Hello. Thank you.

You are the author of The Power of Pull. I've got the book right here. You have a newsletter called The Physics of Startups. I don't think I told you this, but the way I learned of you is a very unusual way. I have this Slack community for my paid subscribers, and in the Slack, just in the past month, 2 different people started threads where they're like, Lenny, you need to get Rob on the podcast. I've been reading his book and it's extremely useful to what I've been doing. And these are Some founders, some product people, and I'm just like, well, who is this guy? I gotta find out. And so I reached out and that's how this came to be. Essentially what you've written in this book and what you do in your newsletter is you've basically created a very pragmatic guide to finding product market fit and basically going from 0 to 1 and then 1 beyond. And to give people a reason to believe you other than what I've already said about people Saying how useful this has been. I know you've helped something like 50 different startups get from zero to over a million in ARR. Speak to just where this insight and advice comes from.

Yeah, I did not expect to be writing a book or doing anything like this. I got punched in the face as a founder trying to go zero to one and then randomly figured it out. And then a bunch of my friends started pulling me in to help their startups go zero to one and just kind of got obsessed with this stage. It's super interesting, super weird. I feel like there's not a lot of good stuff written about it. And, uh, and so I've just gotten strangely obsessed with doing zero to one as many times as possible.

I love that. I'm going to read a couple of quotes actually from my community to reinforce the things you just said of why, of what people have been saying about what you've done. And this is really unusual. There's like, even though you just said there's not a lot, there is a lot of content for founders. Here's how to find idea. Here's how to find product market fit. So it's really, it's a big signal to me if people are saying this is in particular extremely useful to them more than anything else out there. So a few things that people told me in my community. One, I remember reading the first chapter of his book and feeling the weight lifted off my shoulders that I'm not some silly clueless outlier and that this is a normal part of the process. Another, besides all the very tactical stuff, personally I found him normalizing just how painful Lonely, weird it is to go through finding product-market fit. Finally, we ran into the same zero-to-one traps Rob describes, building based on what prospects said they wanted rather than what actually got them to say yes.

Wow. You have very nice people in your community. That's, that's, uh,

that's true.

That's super kind. That's true.

That's true. All right. Anyway, so there you go. Just to give people, okay, let's pay attention. Okay, give us an overview of the pull framework.

Yeah, so the pull framework describes a person who will pull your product out of your hands. Someone who's weird not to buy your product. So we like know what pull feels like. It's the thing that's written about with startups. You know, it's the thing, startups that take off, you, your newsletter had insane pull. You grew like that, right? And everybody wants And most of us are in the situation where it feels like we are pushing, we're trying to convince people to care, convince them to buy. And they're, it's like kind of maybe working. And so pull describes a person who it would be weird not to buy. The question is just like, what causes somebody to pull a product out of your hands? And for that, I found a lot of the traditional descriptions of things, like when I was a founder, I went out and found hair-on-fire pain points, big problems, offered a differentiated solution that provided real value. We had design partners using our product every single day. And so I was like, okay, cool. Check, check, check, check, check. This thing's going to the moon. And then tried to sell it and just got smashed into a wall for 2 years pivoting around aimlessly, not having no clue why. And then we randomly pivoted it took off and I realized that it wasn't the thing that causes people to pull a product out of your hands. It's not pain points or value props or things like that. It, um, because I realized that people can basically just say, uh, yeah, like great. This, you know, it's great that your product solves our pain points, problems, offers a ton of value, but I'm not going to drop my priorities to buy it. And so I realized it's about priorities, a certain kind of priority where somebody's trying to do something, they got a project on their to-do list, trying to do it right now, but they can't do it with their existing tools, methods, or options. In that case, they're like a coiled spring, right? Trying to do something, stuck, and you show up and just offer something that gets them unstuck, that helps them get that priority done. That's when they rip it out of your hands. And the PULL framework is just an acronym for

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Yeah, so acronym P-U-L-L. There's a P, project. They have a project on their to-do list. You can think of a project like a job to be done. It's, you know, Bob Mesto. You've had him on. He's amazing. Project is not like I want to buy recruitment software. It's I want to hire more employees kind of thing. U is the second one, is unavoidable. This is a thing that I have to do right now. Why now? Why not later? There's some reason why you have to do it now. First L is list of options I consider for doing the project. Could be, again, hiring somebody. Could be having our existing team do it. Could be using the tools I already have or the tools out on the market. And the second L is limitations. Why are those options not good enough for getting me, getting my project done?

Amazing. So the first 2 are really important there. And, um, it's interesting. The second 2 feel less important. I'm curious why they're so important. So the first 2 are essentially like, I have a problem I need to solve, a job to be done. And this is an urgent problem. So in a sense, this is the hair on fire problem, very concretely defined. Here's what hair on fire looks like. I have like a to-do my boss is waiting for me to do, and it needs to happen now. It's not just like a general thing that I need to solve.

Yes.

Why are the second 2 so important? This idea of other options and why those are not working.

Yeah. So you can, you can imagine a case where like a product team, for example, um, they have a really important thing that the, that has been mandated down. They have a really important feature they need to build or something that's an unavoidable project on their to-do list, but they're going to do it themselves. So they don't need anything. They, they won't buy anything unless they, their existing options aren't good enough. And so it really, really is important that it's not just, I'm trying to do something and I can do it myself, or I can do it with a, with a kind of category leader. I can do it with whatever tool is out there. It has to be something where my existing options are not good enough. So I am like stuck. I'm, I'm blocked.

Let's do an example to make this even more real. What's like a product or a company that gives us a sense of what— I basically use this as a template. It's like a Mad Libs thing where it's just like P-U-L-L and you fill it out. So let's go give us an example.

Yeah. So my friends are at a company called Jump, which is an AI note taker for financial advisors. Very interesting space. They did the same thing I did, by the way. They spent 18 months just like hitting their head against the wall and then finally found Pull, tried to sell and figured it out. But what they found was that financial advisors have a project on their to-do list that is to minimize the amount of time they spend taking notes for client meetings and putting those notes into their CRMs. It's a project on their to-do list. The U, the unavoidable, is if they don't take notes and put them into their CRMs, they could go to jail. So they have to take those notes. But when they're taking the notes, they don't want to be doing that. And so, so they want to minimize the amount of time because they don't enjoy doing that. It's just not a, not a fun thing. So the list of options they considered to minimize the amount of time were, uh, you know, like a generic AI note-taker. You're, you're kind of, there's a list of, of all of those out there, but those AI note-takers were not good enough because they didn't integrate with the financial advisors' CRMs. And it wasn't clear if they were compliant with the SEC's regulations on this. And so there's a list of options they, they really couldn't use. And so when Jump showed up and found that pull, People ripped the product out of their hands. Well, I think one person literally said, "This must be how Alexander Graham Bell felt when he invented the telephone." Like that's so weird thing to say about a product for financial advisors.

Amazing. That's a great testimonial to stick on our website.

Yeah.

Okay. What would be like a bad version of this? Like what would it look like if it wasn't if there wasn't pull?

Yeah. So fun conversation with the with the jump team about they they said okay cool financial advisors. They have this project. You know who else meets with clients all the time? Insurance agents. So maybe we just go and talk to them. And it turns out they also have the project on their to-do list of minimizing the amount of time they spend taking meeting notes. But the U isn't there because they don't have to, they're not required to put meeting notes into their CRM. So their existing options, the first L, are not taking meeting notes. Which they were already doing. And so you can see the framework kind of doesn't fill out for them, or it doesn't, there's not, the force isn't there. They're fine.

That unavoidable piece, uh, I see why that is so important. And this is an example, basically, if basically you need all 4 here.

Yes.

So that's a good lesson here is all 4 needs to exist for real pull. In the first example, that to-do to me doesn't feel like it's like a to-do they just wrote down. It's kind of this general to-do. Just like generally save time. Is that an okay P for a project for to be a to-do just to gen— or is, or is the, was this like specifically at every financial advisor's to-do list?

Yeah. So it was a thing that I wouldn't say it's like actually something they wrote down on their to-do list, but it was like a thing they were doing all the time. It was a part of their workflow. And while they were doing it, they were trying not to do it. Like, I think there's like a, the action I'm doing right now on my calendar, And then the project is my intention while I'm doing it. And so while I'm doing it, the project on my mental to-do list was like, spend the least amount of time doing this annoying thing.

Got it. And so if a founder or product team is listening to this and they're struggling with their product, it's probably one of these 4 is not there.

Yeah, you need all 4 at once. If you find P without U and in the L's, so you find something that somebody's trying to do. Kind of, but they're not actually trying to do it right now, and their existing options aren't good enough. What they'll do is they'll complain and they won't buy. If they have P and U, but their L's are good enough, they're gonna say, yeah, that's exactly what we're doing right now. And working with Claude Code on it, we're gonna figure it out.

Something along these lines that you talk about is that this pull exists. It's like this thing that is already there and you're just kind of this, like, I don't know, hunter looking for the pull. And discovering it. Talk a bit about that.

Yeah, this was super liberating when I like realized this because I always thought that I was incompetent. I wasn't good at convincing the market to want my product. And it was from that perspective of, okay, I'm building something that's really valuable and people aren't buying. How do I convince them to want it to buy? And it turns out this pull, this project on their to-do list exists. Before and independent of me, which means I just have to go out there and find it. I don't have to convince people to have pull. And it's like, I haven't quite figured out how to do that, but I think it's very, very hard to do if it's possible at all.

That feels very familiar, just trying to convince people, look, this is so great, it's going to solve so many of your problems. Uh, and I love these ideas. These, like, I just love how very specific and concrete it makes all of these general Pieces of advice around finding product market fit, coming up with ideas. It just tells you exactly, here's what it looks like. Um, something else you talk about, you mentioned this earlier, this idea that it needs to feel weird for them not to buy it. That's like the sign that this is right, that it's like, it's weird. Why aren't you buying this? Talk a bit about that.

Most people, most of the time are like, fine. It would be weird if they bought our product, given what's on their to-do list, given what they have, given their options, like, So it'd be weird if they bought, but a person with pull is weird not to buy. They should actually pull the product out of your hands because they are like that coiled spring. And so if you talk to somebody who has pull, the conversation should basically go like, wait a second, you can do what? Okay, how do we get started? Does the product exist yet? Like, how do, how do we get on board? Where basically every other conversation you have with somebody who doesn't have pull, Can have anything other than that. They can be enthusiastic and nice and say, wow, that's amazing. That's super interesting. That's totally the future of our industry. Wow. I can see how that would save us so much money, but they're not saying I need this right now. And that's how you know they actually have pull.

Those conversations sound very familiar. Okay. So before we get into the kind of the whole journey of the startup process and how you can use this framework. Anything else around just the general idea of the pull framework that's important to share?

One of the main mistakes people make is thinking that pull is a thing that a company has. It's a thing a person has. Even if you're selling enterprise software, you're selling not to the company, you're not selling to SpaceX, you're selling to, just going to your Genable conversation, you're selling to like the head of legal at SpaceX who has a project on her to-do list that, that they can't do themselves.

That is really useful. So it's not like SpaceX needs this, it's like, say, Jen.

Yes.

Needs this. Uh, and you're saying that that's often a mistake people make. They don't think about the specific person with this need.

Yeah, yeah. It's, it's super common to say we sell to, right, like mid-market private equity companies. It's like, you don't, you sell to a partner or an operating partner in there who's specifically trying to do X, Y, and Z.

Awesome. Okay. So through the lens of this framework, let's go through kind of the key moments of an early stage startup finding product market fit. So I want to talk about coming up with an idea, getting your first sales call, closing your first deal, and then kind of scaling from there. So let's start with coming up with an idea. Yeah. How, how can people use this framework to help them come up with ideas that are more likely to actually be successful?

As a founder, I have a notebook of ideas that are all like, what if we built an API for APIs kind of thing? Like there, there are all these like product ideas and the product ideas all sound unhinged. And so I can never tell between product ideas, what's a good idea and what's a bad idea. Well, fortunately, the pull framework is a, is a thing that's upstream of your product idea that says, I believe there is a person. Who is trying to do X right now? We it was basically weird not to buy. And so what I've found to be helpful is to use the pull framework to stake out a claim and say, "I believe for whatever idea I have, I believe this specific person is stuck." And so I'm going to go and talk to them and see, do they want to? Do they try to buy from me even before we have a product? And so for me, the the idea of the the Um, the pull framework is, is to come up with a hypothesis of who has pull and then go and test that. And then the question becomes, okay, how do you find this pull idea, this pull hypothesis? What do you do for that? I have some fairly strong opinions on this. Like, I don't think we take this stage seriously enough. Like, if your life depended on it, How would, would you, would you be doing like 10 customer interviews for like 30 minutes on Zoom? No, you would go all out. You'd go in person. I have like a couple of stories of friends who have done crazy things to go and like do the job with the potential customer to feel it firsthand, to find that pull firsthand. And they've either built something that they would buy themselves or they've like embedded with people to find that like, that moment when someone will act, is like trying to do something and stuck.

Amazing. So the advice here is don't sit around and brainstorm. Don't just look for big markets and figure out where there might be something massive. What you're saying here is almost like this lens of if your life depended on it, how would you find a problem that is likely to be a real I guess, have real pull. And what I'm hearing here is get like in the weeds, get your hands dirty, like get in the way. This reminds me of a quote, um, Nan, who is the head of product at Linear now, he just went to OpenAI, described what he looks for when he's trying to find opportunities is he, he describes it as, I want to feel the pain of the person the same way they feel the pain.

Yeah. Yeah.

And what you're saying is the way to do that is get in there with people building things. Is there an example of Yeah.

So a friend from, uh, from school, he had no idea what he wanted to build. He had no product idea. He wasn't, he didn't have my notebook. He didn't have any of that. He just said, you know, I like serving small businesses. I like small business. I'd like to just find somebody I like to serve and I'll figure out the idea from that. And so he wrote out a list of industries that he thought might be interesting. And then he went and shadowed them and like worked With them for like rode along with them for days at a time. And so he started with solar panel installers and, uh, he hated them and they hated him. So he moved on to the next one. He eventually worked his way to like independent physical therapists and he went and spent days with them. He loved them. They loved him. And it was like, okay, cool. What am I? What is the pull here? What, what, what should I do? And so he watched over their shoulder days on end. He He even tried to buy a physical therapy franchise to like, was able to see the P&L and was actually considering it. And in that process, he came up with something like, wait a second, you're, it looks like you're trying to do X and are stuck there. And so it's, it's, um, firsthand experience is, is what you, what you should do there.

Awesome. So like live it yourself and

live it.

And is the reason you need to do that Is it part, is it because people would have discovered if it was easy, basically somebody else would have found the idea. Uh, what, why do you think that is so important approaching it this way?

Yeah, I'd say I'll, I'll, I'll give 2 reasons. One is, you know, these things don't really emerge from a whiteboard. Like it would be weird if his idea came to him that he eventually wound up finding from brainstorming. Like think of how many different ideas he could have come up with. And it wasn't something that, like, it was something he saw only by observing where it's unclear that that would have emerged in an interview either. But I'd say the second thing is like more of a philosophical thing, which is you're building a company to serve this kind of person. The whole point of building a company is to serve somebody, to help them do something. And so, if you don't have firsthand experience, how are you going to make the thousands of decisions it takes to actually build something that serves them.

And is the idea once you have this insight, say with this physical therapy company, you write it out through the PULL framework to kind of pressure, is that, is that you call that the PULL hypothesis? Is that right?

Yep.

So talk about that. Just like say you have this insight and I'm curious what you actually found with this physical therapy business and how to kind of start to think about it through the PULL framework.

Yeah. So you then take that and say, okay, this is, this is the kind of idea I believe this kind of person Is this physical therapist is trying to cut some specific cost on their, on their P&L. I can't actually remember what it was unavoidable for XYZ reasons. And, um, their existing options of getting a consultant to come in and do this wasn't good enough for some specific reason. It was too expensive. It was too slow. Wrote out that pull hypothesis. And then what he did next was super important, which was he said, he showed it to that person and said, is this you? Person said, oh my God, yeah, that's exactly the thing. He said, okay, great. Would you buy something if I helped you get this done? Yeah, totally. Okay, great. And then he said, I need to go talk to 5 other physical therapists and just make sure this repeats. And then he did that and they also pulled, which was the really important thing to make sure he wasn't just building a product for one person.

What is it that he showed this company? Is it this, the 4 bullet points with, here's the project, here's why it's unavoidable, or is it something else?

Yeah, so I actually like recommend having 2 slides. One slide is basically the pull framework. You don't have to show them the pull framework because no one's going to understand it. You can just say, here's what I hear. You're trying to do X right now because of Y, and you've considered this, but it's not good enough for this reason. You say, is, do I have that roughly right? And then the second slide is a kind of conceptual overview of how I can help. So it sounds like you're looking for a way to cut this line item that's faster than a consultant. We could offer that for XYZ with, with, does that kind of fit what you're looking for? And you're looking for the first slide, them to say, oh my God, yes. And the second slide, yeah, how does it work? How exactly? How do we move forward?

What I love about your stuff is it's like very plug-and-play, pragmatic. So we'll actually show a slide of the actual template you have people use to fill this out. So the phrasing, I'll read it from this slide too. There's a project on your to-do, like this is the project in your to-do list and it's unavoidable right now because of this. And options you looked into are this and they're lacking for this reason. Amazing. I love this. So the idea is you have this little slide that you just create to kind of run by people. And the idea is this is the hypothesis. And what does it look like when there's pull once you show it to them? Is it like they're ready to send you money? Is it their pupils dilate? What do you look for?

Yeah, you look for a couple things. The thing that really, really matters is that they actually try to buy. They say, okay, cool, how do we get started? And they will do that. I have a friend who was selling into, he kind of pivoted around for a while, but he knew he found pull when someone, an exec in pharma, before he had a product said, if you can do that, I will pay you right now. So, okay, that's the signal you are looking for. What you're looking for as well is they're leaning in. Wait a second, you can do what? What you're not looking for is kind of like leaned out enthusiasm. Okay, well, tell me more. Well, let me, yeah, we'll, we'll think about it. Could you send more information so our team can review that? Like, you know, and, and any of those kinds of things, anything that is not like, okay, how do we actually move forward on this? It's just not worth your life force going after.

It's interesting how much body language and just like the physical experience of getting excited about an idea is, is a sign that it is good. Uh, I just had Josh Woodward on the podcast, head of Google Labs, and he's Similarly, like you see a twinkle in their eyes and their eyes just light up. And it's so interesting that that's a sign of pull.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's what you're seeing is, is it weird for them not to buy right now? Are they like, are they behaving as if it's weird for them not to buy?

Is there like a limit, like a, you know, there's like the, I will buy this idea, like they say they will buy it versus a sign they will actually buy it. Is it the body language? Like, how do you know they're serious about it?

So I call it like a pull-shaped action, not a good, good, uh, uh, term, but, but a pull-shaped action is like, I need this right now. How do, like, I am pulling it out of you. How do, how do we move forward right now? It is not like a, oh, I could totally see us using this in Q4. Kind of thing. That's a, that's a not pulling towards me. That's a kind of pushing out into the future.

Like the urgency of like, I need this now. There's always this advice of solve your own problem, which is different from what you described. Is that a path you recommend or would you recommend against that?

So a friend, um, so like Emily at a company called Clearly AI, she was in security engineering at AWS and she found something there. that she would have paid somebody to solve, but there was nobody out there. And so in that case, it's solve your own problem. Yes, 100%. Where the solve your own problem falls kind of flat a lot of times is, um, it's a thing that you wouldn't have paid somebody to do for you, but you just think should exist, right? If it's, and so you have to be honest with yourself. I have done things where I've built things that like, Oh, I think the world needs this. I ran into this problem, but if I looked myself in the mirror, I wouldn't have said, yeah, buy this right now.

Along those lines, is this advice mostly for B2B SaaS sort of software, or is this applicable to say consumer app?

So I am mostly in the B2B space, but I have seen quite a few people. I've been kind of surprised that a lot of people from the consumer space have used this as well. And someone sent me the story of like Spanx, which was basically, she did the same thing of, Um, uh, like selling one-on-one with people, seeing how they reacted to figure out all the different pieces of, of what became SPACs.

Yeah. And she solved her own problem famously.

Yes.

Just tore off her pantyhose or I think that's the story. Just, I guess she needed it now. I think it was like, yeah, she was going to an event. So that's, that's a cool example. You have this, we're going to talk more about this, but you have this idea of the Hail Mary approach. Talk about that.

So the Hail Mary, so We've been talking about the happy path here. You find something, you're talking with people and they're like, oh my gosh, uh, uh, yeah, this is exactly what I need. A lot of the time, that's not going to happen. You're going to get that kind of lukewarm feel. And so what I've tended to find is that's also an opportunity to what I call throw the Hail Mary, which is, okay, this doesn't seem to be a thing. Is there anything on your to-do list that you would pay me to do right now? Like that you would pay somebody to take off your plate. And that's just an open-ended Hail Mary. I've actually seen quite a few startups totally pivot and take off from the Hail Mary, which has been really interesting. There's one startup, they were trying to sell an applicant tracking system into governments and they had a call with somebody and the person was like, yeah, that's kind of interesting. But after the Hail Mary question, yeah, what I'd actually pay you to solve is this, like, job description thing right now. And that became their first contract, that became their first customer, and they've grown super fast since then.

That's awesome. So the advice here is just sometimes feel free to just ask, what problem can we solve for you?

Yeah. And that like leads to how to think about sales. Well, I'll just give a little, and we can dig into this if it's interesting, but like, I always was kind of nervous to sell as a mega introvert and overthinker. Like, It just feels like a lot of pressure. Um, and it like, I need to convince you to buy. And so that question feels uncomfortable, but if you kind of reframe it in your own head of, you know, I'm just seeing if they need help with anything that they are stuck on. And if they don't, that's fine. But if they do, cool, we can explore if it, if I can help, then, uh, it kind of changes your orientation towards sales.

I am in the same boat as you. And that's a really nice way of thinking about it. I'm just trying to solve someone's problem.

Yeah.

That's why, why is it so hard? Before we get to the next step, which is getting your first sales call, finding, basically finding someone to talk to that you don't already know, are there any anti-patterns or just kind of signals or just like, uh, traps people fall into when they're coming up with ideas?

Yeah. Uh, infinite. But the, but the, the main ones that I have seen that are like really, really brutal are feeling like you need to build it. Yourself first. So you come up with an idea and you're like, I don't think this is ready for primetime, or I think people have to see it to get it. And then you go heads down and build it. Now, now with AI, you can kind of get that out of your system in a, in hopefully a couple weeks instead of, you know, months or not. But, uh, you do not— you, you want to face the cold wind of reality as soon as possible. And so don't delay the customer conversations where you can Actually find pull.

You're also not a fan of design, design partners, which is okay. Say more, because this is typically very standard advice to find design partners.

Yeah. The, I don't know, maybe in some context it's helpful. I have yet to see it help be helpful. What I've seen in basically every single time I've seen somebody with a design partner is that you recruit a design partner who quote unquote buys into your vision for the product and they give a bunch of feedback and never buy from you. They never buy. And you realize that all of their feedback was just like them playing Steve Jobs. And there's like, I'm going to help this startup versus I have something I'm actually trying to get done. And if you think about it, like the people who actually have something really important they're trying to get done, they don't want to be a design partner. They just want that thing done.

I love that. Okay. So, so your advice is don't set up a bunch of design partners and we'll go through kind of the process you actually recommend. Okay, so I guess just to think about this coming up with an idea step, the core moment is some insight based on being hands-on, living with the people that you'll be helping. The term I've heard to describe this idea, I think it was a VC, Floodgate, that uses this. You're basically looking for an earned secret. Yes. And your advice here is the way to find that earned secret, either it's you have lived it at a company, say Amazon, you gave this AWS example, or you're on the ground working side by side with the people dealing with it and just looking for problems that they have.

Yeah. Yeah. And you get like, the method kind of doesn't matter. It might come to you in an ayahuasca retreat. Like you get, you could get that secret from anywhere, but the things that are most likely to actually work are like getting your hands dirty and learning it from reality versus from theory.

So just to follow that thread, say there's like a pie chart of the, say, 50 companies you've worked with, where their idea came from. What would be like the biggest chunks of the pie chart?

I would say 10%, um, own experience, 90% going and getting firsthand, uh, uh, like experience. And within that, it's been a bit of like, some of them sold the wrong product to figure out what the right product was. But most of them actually go and do the thing firsthand.

And then what percentage ayahuasca retreat? There's no room for that. 100%.

That's mandatory as part of me advising you.

That's the pull hypothesis. Okay, sweet. Okay, so say at this point, you've got a Pull a hypothesis. There's signs that maybe there's something really good here. The next phase in my eyes is finding someone to talk to and sell it to. So basically landing a first sales call. Talk about how you go about landing that call and what happens kind of, and then we'll talk about actually running the call. But before we get there, just like finding people to talk to.

Yeah, this is a fun one. So my goal is actually like, I want to have 2 to 3 conversations per day with potential customers. But to get there, you have to first get your first conversation. So you can do warm intros, you can do all that kind of stuff. We'll just talk about if you don't have any of that and you need to get people to talk to you cold. The way I typically recommend founders start is to just reach out to your potential customers on LinkedIn or via email. And it's with a very specific kind of message. That is not a, hey, do you have XYZ pain points? Would you like to buy our game-changing solution? Like no template you get online is going to get you any responses except for like, leave me alone. And so I call it a founder magic kind of outreach at this stage, which is basically like, you're interesting. I'm interesting. Let's chat and see. And this is totally acceptable. Like one of the startups that I helped, their message was, Hey, Snoop Dogg invested in us and I thought you'd find it interesting too. Would you be open to chat? That's a fun message. Everyone has their own version of that. Like everyone who listens to this or everyone who's a founder, like has an interesting message you can send and you don't have to convince them in the message to buy your product. You just get them to talk with you. This pull exists out there on their to-do list. And so The message doesn't do anything about that. It just, it's just to get them to talk to you. So just say something interesting to cause them to meet with you.

Okay. This is really helpful. So your advice here is don't craft like a whole value prop pitch, problem identification. Don't tell them how much pain you're gonna solve. It's just like get their attention with something interesting.

Yes.

Uh, the Snoop Dogg example is awesome. Any other, any other examples, any other kind of ways of thinking about what might be interesting to someone?

There's, there's been a variety of ones that I've seen. Um, random ones that are like, hey, I dropped out of my PhD and I'm now working on something for content marketers, right? Like something, something that's just kind of interesting enough there that's not super magical. Um, you can have, there's a variety of different things I've seen from, um, I, you know, I was, you know, Sam Altman's chief of staff, right? That, you know, if anybody sends that message, That will work quite well. It doesn't matter what the rest of the message says. I thought you'd be interesting and open to chat. And so it's finding something interesting that's like worth a conversation, uh, with them. Yeah, I could, yeah. What I'd say is it really depends on your end customer too, because if you're doing outreach to like, for example, HVAC companies saying, hey, I'm Sam Altman's former chief of staff, thought you might find it interesting. We're gonna say, buddy, I have no idea what the words in this message mean. So it could be like, hey, I was at my dad, like I worked at my family's plumbing company in high school and now I'm working on this kind of interesting thing. Thought you might find it interesting. Would you be open to chat?

Uh, an implicit element of this is keep it very short. Sounds like it's just like a sentence or two.

Yeah.

Okay. And then what's your take on, uh, AI emailing a bunch of people versus individually reaching out and thinking about some unique message per person?

I, uh, have not seen AI personalization work at this stage. Usually what it does is it tells them something they already know about themselves and they're like, that looks like Claude wrote it. And so I don't usually recommend that. I also don't, I haven't seen personalization be super important here. The, these messages that I, like I said, the entire message that I would send, you don't need to actually have a ton of personalization in it, or Or like, hey, I'm going to X conference. We're gonna be pitching. Would you be open to chat? Like something like that can be good enough without any personalization at all.

All the examples you shared are very simple and don't have anything to do with them and just say something interesting basically. Uh, and what you, what you don't recommend is, is basically, yeah, the idea you're not trying to sell them immediately. You just wanna have a call.

Yeah. And on the call, we'll see if you have pull. If you do, You're going to turn it into a sales call. If you don't, nothing I do is going to change

that. Okay. How many emails/LinkedIn posts should you start with? Say you're just getting started to try to find some calls.

Yeah. So I tend to start on LinkedIn because the kind of person who you and I like talk to, they have interesting LinkedIns. And so if you're reaching out to someone, they're going to say, oh, okay. So that's going to do a lot of lifting. You can just get started. And so you can add 100, 150 people on LinkedIn per week, go for that. Add 20 a day and then message them when they accept the connection request. And if you're sending, like, if you're connecting with, I don't know, let's say you connect with 100 people per week or you send 150. Um, my typical targets for that are like 30 to 40% of them should accept your connection request. And then of them, 30 to 50% should reply. And a subset of them should say yes. The majority of them should say, yeah, sure, why not?

Okay. That's an awesome benchmark. So if you're not at that level, basically your interesting email is not, is not working. You should find some more interesting.

It's, it's, it's, it could be your profile. If people aren't accepting your request, like they might look at you and say, you don't look like somebody I should accept this request. Or it looks like you're about to pitch me, right? Or something like that. Or your message just isn't interesting. If you're getting 30 to 40% accepts, And then people aren't replying.

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Mostly 2 steps in a sales call. There's the pull discovery step, and then there's the kind of conceptual pitch of how we might help step. And so the, uh, the theory behind a sales call is, again, it's like If you have pull, you're going to rip the thing out of my hands. I don't come into this call like wired up, ready to try to convince you to buy like Super Ant. No, it's just, if you have pull, you're going to convince me to let you buy. And so I approach this with the vibe of just like leaned back, excited to chat. Let's, let's see if I might be able to help you. And so I have a very specific structure of a sales call that I recommend. Mm-hmm. For getting into discovery and then transitioning out of discovery. Basically that you start the call, hey, thanks so much for taking the time. I'm curious, I'm sure you get a bunch of people reaching out to you. Like, why did you take the call with me today? That's a chance for them to say, you know, you mentioned AI agents and I've been thinking about this and I've just been waiting and I looked at your website, whatever, whatever it winds up being. And they, they fill out the entire pull framework for you right there. That's ideal. And then you can say, oh, that's interesting. Let me, can I ask a couple follow-ups? But most of the time they'll say, I don't know, you reached out to me, excited to hear what you have to say. Say, great. You use what they have just told you and say, okay, great. That sounds like a great agenda for today's call. We can do that. And that, does that sound good to you? Get their thumbs up on the agenda, and then you earn the right to ask them some discovery questions about their pull. By saying, great, okay, before we get to those items on your, you know, on our agenda, um, do you mind if I ask you a few questions to better understand your context? And that way you've earned the right to ask questions. It does not feel like an interrogation to them because if it does, uh, they're not telling you anything.

Okay. A few tactical questions. One is just how long should you try to make this call? How long should your invite be for? And then where does, where does the demo fit in? Do you recommend demo on this call or doing a separate call for that?

Yeah. So this is almost always a 30-minute call on the calendar. Just, um, I've found smaller calendar blocks, uh, they don't see on their calendars and so they don't show. Um, and so 30 minutes and then iffy on doing a demo. So if you're super early, you probably don't have a demo to show. And so, um, but later on you might have a very short demo in, in your first call.

I guess, 'cause I'm thinking about the Jen conversation I had and her advice is wait to do the demo, but that's an enterprise sales sort of product, not like an early stage, just pull hypothesis phase.

Yeah, totally. Totally.

Okay. Got it. What's a sign that the, this meeting went well? Is it this kind of leaning in, pulling from you feeling?

Yeah. So, so it's kind of, you're able to surface pull or you're able to say, okay, you don't have pull at all. Help me understand why this isn't relevant to you. What is? And so you come away with an either filled-out pull framework of, okay, I understand this person's pull and they are trying to pull, or you understand why they don't have pull.

How many of these calls should you do before you're like, okay, there's no pull here, time to move on?

I don't have a hard— what I tend to do is if you have 5 calls and everybody's leaned back and and you learn nothing, then there's a sign that something's wrong. If you have, and I've seen people do like hundreds of calls where they still don't know how to get, they, so do 5 and then check in and see what you've learned from the calls. Was there any pull there? Did we learn anything interesting? Like a startup I was just helping out, they had done like 5 calls into banking and they just felt nothing, but they got an intro from one of the people. Yeah, this doesn't seem relevant to me, but you might consider defense companies. And they got an intro into that. They know nothing about defense. And in the first conversation in defense, the person's like, holy, are you serious? And they're like, okay, maybe there's something here. And they changed their pull hypothesis.

It feels like a big part of this, of your framework and approach is to just like be brutally honest with yourself, whether there's something here. I imagine a lot of founders are just like so excited and convinced this is real. And your approach is just like, here's Here's a way to validate that and be really real with what's working or not.

Yeah. And I think it's thinking of it as we're selling to learn, not really to, to like push something. Yeah. Not, not to push it. We're, we're gonna learn and we're seeing if they try to buy. If they don't, cool. We've learned something. We can kind of keep iterating from there. If they do, okay, great. Now we might have something. Let's see if it repeats.

The whole idea of calling this pull is so smart because you always hear product market fit is you're feeling pull, you're feeling pull, this boulder's pulling you down, the wind is pushing you. And so not only is it this acronym of what you look for, but it's this reminder of what you're looking for is pull, something pulling.

Yeah. And you can also tell like, do I feel like I'm pushing right now? Do I feel like I'm convincing? That's a red flag that something either in your mind or in the conversation is off and like, okay, cool. Let's figure out what that is.

Is there an example that comes to mind when you think about a good sales call, what that kind of feels like, looks like, what a pitch would be?

Yeah. So, so what you're trying to do is you're trying to get, again, get the pull out of them. And so they say, um, you know, oh, I'm trying to, I'm trying to make a website, but one of those, like, you know, those typical point-and-click website design things are just like too much effort for me. So you have something about pull there. You've kind of pulled that out of them. They, they, they've described that. And so the kind of interesting thing is that once you have pull, your pitch is like quite simple. What you're not trying to do here is you're not trying to describe this massive product vision or your theory of the problem. You know that they're trying to do X, but blocked because of And so your pitch in that case is, okay, so it sounds like you're, you're looking for something to make a website without all the hassle of a point-and-click thing. Is that roughly it? And you describe it in a really, really small and simple way, not a really big way. You describe it in a small way and they say, yeah, that's, that sounds like it. How exactly does that work? Like, tell me more. They're pulling more information out of you. And that's when you know you're like, Starting to be onto something.

And are you in your head thinking through the pull framework of these 4 points and just thinking through like, okay, is this actually something they need right now and unavoidable? Are there, what are their alternatives? And kind of thinking through all that.

Yeah, those are like actually the questions I will ask too, which is like, um, if I, if they don't tell me at the very beginning when I say, why'd you take the call? Then I'm asking a question that's kind of like, is there anything as it relates to, I don't know, your QA process? That you're trying to do, but you've been unable to do with your existing tools, methods, team, whatever, right? And so that question has all the elements of pull in it so that they can then say, "Oh yeah, actually, we've been trying to automate end-to-end testing, but can't do da da da da da with you know with our existing tools." And so, and then if they kind of give me some element there, then I have the framework in my mind. And I know a lot of people actually have the framework in like a doc. During the call and they're filling it out live. And it's like, I don't think I have the you. And then you ask a question, you're like, okay, but like, is it okay if you don't do that now? Like, can you, is there some reason you have to do this now? Or is this okay to do another time?

And you're like scared to almost ask. You're like, oh no, it's not going to work.

Oh, and the scariest one is to say, well, what have you, I'm sure you've looked into other options. Are they good enough? Right. And, uh, to hear that one, uh, when they're like, actually, yeah, we can do it ourselves and that's good enough, but it prevents you from, again, pushing a product the market doesn't want.

And just spending years of your life trying to make it work.

Yeah. I, yeah, there's a reason I look like I'm 60 and I'm 35, right? Like, don't push. You

look great, Rob. You look great.

Filters.

Oh man. So this touches on a, like, we haven't actually addressed the specific challenge, which is that there's a lot you have to get over for people to decide to try something new and to buy something new. The status quo is generally fine. They have so many priorities, they have so many things they're dealing with, just like the bar to get over for people to be like, I want this, I'm gonna buy it now, is really high. And the idea here of this framework is to get over that hump.

Well, it's to find the people for whom the status quo is not okay, right? It's to find the people You know, everyone says like change is hard and all this kind of stuff. Well, you're looking for the people who are already trying to change, who don't need convincing.

There's this idea that your product has to be 10 times better than the existing solution for anyone to care. Do you feel like, like, how do you think about, okay, this is better. They tried alternatives. None of them do it. Or some of them do it okay. Like how much better does this have to be for them to care? Or is it okay if it's just like, you know, just a little bit better?

The example with, with Jump, I think, again, the AI note taker for financial advisors is a good one. How much better are they than the other generic AI note takers? Well, if those note takers don't get the job done and we do, they are infinitely better. They unblock something. And so that's kind of how I think about how stuck are they with their existing options. And so I don't know, I don't know about 10x, like that thing that doesn't quite register in my head. It's really. Are they a coiled spring and how do they respond when I show up?

So I think about a company like Linear who competes with Jira. I don't know if you know, do you know Linear?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So just, I'm curious if it applies through this framework. So in my understanding, Linear wins over Jira often 'cause the experience is just better. It's just like a beautiful, smooth, you know, well-crafted experience. And so they win a lot of customers because it just feels nice and engineers really like using it. Do you feel like that works through the pull framework or is there something else going on there?

Again, if we use the pull framework to, to analyze that situation, what would have to be true is there's a certain kind of person who is trying to do their issue tracking, but like they are blocked from do— they're trying to do something around issue tracking and something about Jira's experience is blocking them. from doing the way such that Linear's way better experience is actually relevant to them, right? Like I've done, so I've made the mistake of taking that analogy and being like, okay, so I can just come into a category with way better UX, way better experience, and I'm going to crush it. And like, try that in HR software. And, and, uh, I tried, I tried it in HR software and it turned out The user experience was not relevant to the buyer. And so they didn't have pull. They didn't care that their systems look like they're still on COBOL or whatever it is. So it wasn't relevant there. But again, the pull theory would say that basically in, in, uh, the case of Jira versus, uh, Linear, that there was a kind of person who was kind of blocked by Jira's experience.

And I imagine the stronger the pull, the faster all this stuff happens and grows. I know Linear took them a long time to get people using it, to trust it, to switch. And so maybe the pull, because of maybe there wasn't as much of that blocking and it was more of just like, okay, I can just move faster, be happier. Uh, it took longer. Is that, do you find that just like the stronger the pull, the faster the company grows? Yeah,

I've seen a bunch of startups where like they go zero to whatever, like everyone now is going zero to infinity super fast. And, and it's like not, it's because they have found these like pockets of pull where people will rip a product out of their hands. Um, and it's like, people will see these AI pitches now and it's like, wait a second, it can do X and buy basically instantly. And I've seen, I've seen that happen in like enterprise. I saw an enterprise deal close in like 2 weeks. And it's just like that thing did, when I was growing up, enterprise deals took 18 months. Like what, what the heck?

When I was growing up, I like that. Okay. So let's move on to the next step. So at this point, we, you had your first sales call. Uh, I imagine the next step is closing the deal and interesting because it's still early. You may not even have a product. What does that look like going from, okay, I want to buy it now. What do you, what do you do next?

Yeah. So it's kind of going to depend on the size of the deal, but you want to come back with some sort of a concept and some sort of a plan. And so, uh, examples of this. So the pharma company that I mentioned, uh, earlier, the company selling into pharma. He showed up and just threw a hail Mary on an intro to a pharma exec. Pharma exec was like, oh my gosh, thank you so much for asking. Our current market research is da da da da da. We're trying. It's just so bad. It's so slow. And the founder was like, okay, I don't even have slides here. I'm just hearing this for the first time. And so it sounds like you're looking for faster market research that that looks like the current research you're getting, but kind of. I don't know, like it's just better in these kinds of ways. Is that roughly right? And the exec was like, yes, that's exactly it. And so the founder was like, okay, let's do this. What if I come back to you in a couple of days with a kind of mockup of what I think that could look like? And then we can, we can discuss if that fits what you're really looking for and then decide if we want to move forward. And so in that case, no slides, no nothing, goes and vibe codes a kind of rough layout of what this would look like, gets some feedback on it, says, okay, based on that, is there anything else you need to know to decide whether this is a fit that you want to bring into your organization? Says, uh, like, yeah, what's the price? And then there's a, there's a talk track you can use for price, but that's basically it.

Okay. Tell me more about this price talk track.

Yeah. So the interesting thing about the pull framework is that it can help you set the bounds for pricing. So what's the value of getting the project done? Or what are the costs of the alternatives? So, uh, the, the L's. So what's the value of getting this market research faster? Or what is the cost you're currently spending with your, um, with your market research consultants? Both of those can tell you, okay, the value of market research is like X. The cost with consultants is, I don't know, $50,000 per, per year. And so that gives me a rough boundary to say, okay, what if we charged $50,000 a year, the same price as your current market research consultants? It kind of gives a frame on price that, um, that makes it intuitive to your potential customers.

Awesome. Okay. Um, so the way you've kind of written about this closing step, there's kind of like 2 parts. There's the fit. of just like, is this a fit? And then it's just a bunch of project management to get the deal closed. Um, so we've spent a lot of time, I think, on the fit, the project management. Is there anything there important to talk about?

Yeah. So this is, uh, you, you did a great episode, uh, with Jen, a great couple episodes with Jen on the like sales process. And so in bigger deals, enterprise deals, there's like the champion has pull and decides, yes, I want this. And then you have to do a set of like 17 demos. You have to genuflect in front of 4 committees. Like there's all of these things that you have to do. For smaller deals, you like don't have to do that kind of stuff. It might just be the CEO who's like, yeah, cool. Next step is you send me the Stripe link and we schedule an onboarding call. And so the project management step will depend. My typical recommendation for project management in larger organizations is to have a conversation with the buyer, with the champion to say kind of, okay, cool, this is the project on your to-do list. When does this need to be showing results by? They'll say, oh, definitely Q1 next year. Okay, cool. That's a forcing function. You work backwards from there to say, okay, given that we need to be live Q1, what are the set of steps that need to happen between now and then so we can be deployed and Showing results by then. And that is a forcing function for all of the steps in the sales process.

Awesome. So basically asking, when do we need to show success for this to be a thing that you all roll out? And then working backwards from that. Okay. Um, at this point, a lot of people would create basically design partnership arrangements where they're like, okay, well, cool. We'll build this with you. We'll figure it out as we go. We won't charge you. Uh, per your earlier point, you are not into design partnerships. Uh, I imagine your advice here is just like sell it directly. Don't try to give them for free. Don't set up some kind of partnership thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Why? Well, why shoot yourself in the foot?

And again, the reason not to is because it just, you find that doesn't lead to the best, to stuff that actually sells and works building this kind of design partnership relationship.

Yeah. If they're like, it basically takes something from, I need to solve this right now to like, Okay, now I'm helping you build your product. Like, where, what are we doing here? So it, it's a negative signal to the most, to people with, who actually have pull and it's a positive signal to people who don't.

Awesome. Okay. That totally makes sense. Like if there's pull, just go with it. You don't need to, yeah. Yeah.

And you can sell something that's like, you know, you might not have a full platform ready. You can sell something that's more service shaped early on. I've seen a bunch of startups do that where they sell, You know, okay, we're going to have an AI product manager who can do X, Y, Z kind of thing. For now, it's delivered by us while this thing is working behind the scenes. And so you can kind of frame it so they're not expecting a full platform, that like enterprise-grade platform ready next week. They expect something more service-shaped and you kind of validate that there's real pull there and you figure out what the actual thing to build is. While delivering it a mix of manually and automated.

Okay, that's really interesting. That's come up a lot on the podcast, especially with go-to-market sales conversations, this idea of services being a great place to start, which historically has been a terrible idea because the fear is you never actually get to a place where you can automate it and you're just running a consulting business forever with terrible margins. So you've seen this work, this idea of starting with basically humans doing the thing and then slowly building. product around it that increases margins.

Yeah, it definitely has downsides, right? You definitely can get stuck in a kind of service businesses kind of thing, but everything has downsides.

Awesome. Yeah. And the idea is AI kind of does more and more of this stuff. And part of it is you learn more and more of what, uh, what the problem opportunities are and things like that with people doing the work. Okay. Um, going back to price real quick, uh, Classically, founders are afraid to ask for big numbers and throw out, you know, high prices. Uh, knowing that this stuff changes and you'll learn as you go, any advice for that first price pitch of what number to throw out?

Yeah, so early on, I'm really more testing willingness to transact versus willingness to pay. And so I don't care about pricing a ton in the early couple of customers. That said, I was just working with a company that set their first deal as enterprise. And they've got a big demo day coming up. And so they're like, how do we get the most possible revenue out of this so we can look like that for demo day? Totally valid thing to do. In that case, what you do is you throw out a number in a way that doesn't like get you slapped. And the specific approach that I'd recommend for that is, um, almost like using a case study as a, hey, react to this kind of case study. And so you'd say, when we talk to others, the way they've, everyone's kind of done pricing differently. Some of them have been, you know, it's been, sometimes it's been a small project for $80,000. Other times it's been up to a million in terms of, right. And these are kind of the levers here. And some people, a lot of people wind up in the middle. You tell me, how are you thinking about this? And so what you're doing is you're not like me on this side, proposing pricing to you on this side. It's both of us looking at like an example, a kind of semi-real example of what you've heard from others as how they think about this and letting them, them throw up on

that. Throw up on that. I like that. Um, I know this case study concept is, is actually an important part of this whole framework. I'm gonna come back to it.

Yeah.

But okay, so, so let's talk about the next steps. So say you have the sales call, maybe you have 2, what kind of comes next after this first batch of sales calls that you're doing?

Yeah, this is where the paths might diverge. So Hopefully you're right. And these people have pull. Great. You now have customers. Time to deliver and start repeating this and start figuring out how to automate things and just systematize this. You're on the right path. A lot of the times you get kind of a weird set of responses. You learn that the people you thought were weird not to buy are actually weird to buy. It'd be weird if they did buy. They're not behaving in a way where they have pull. And in that case, what I tend to recommend is you just analyze, you go back and review the calls and you say, okay, did 1 actually have pull? Did 0? Like, what have we learned here? And then you craft a new hypothesis and run it again.

Got it. And imagine most of the time it's not, it's not there. And is that your experience or what's kind of the pie chart of yes, success versus not at this stage?

Yeah, I've seen like. Maybe once or twice where it was there, uh, from the beginning. And that's magical. Like you feel like a hero when you, when you get it right the first time. Uh, a lot of times it is, uh, it is like we're so wrong and backwards that we don't know. And so you just ask a Hail Mary a couple of times and that gets you on the right path. Or you like do something crazy where a friend just, uh, like went to a conference and scheduled 20 meetings and just was like, I don't know what to do. You tell me what to build. You were something like that. I call that goblin mode where you just, just going all out and doing unhealthy things to see like, who will buy something from me right now to then generate your hypothesis out of.

Say more about goblin mode. This is amazing.

Yeah. You know, like when, when dogs do the, like get the zoomies, right? And they just like, that's, that's the thing I have in my mind for what goblin mode is as a founder where it's like,

and this is a good thing or not a good thing?

It's a, it's a break glass in case of emergency. thing, uh, where it's, um, and I think some founders actually operate like this all the time where it's like, okay, there's actually a conference tomorrow in Europe that has these potential customers there. I can't get them to talk to me. So looks like I'm going to get on a plane right now and go there, right? It's just doing, uh, kind of somewhat crazy things with the goal of getting in front of customers right now. And, uh, Yeah, like some people can do this all the time. Others like me who are getting old, like I can pull this out once in a while.

Get that goblin mode out sometimes. So the idea there is, and you're saying this sometimes, this can work, just like going nuts, just like going and talking to everyone, looking for these earned secrets.

Yeah, and one example of this, like it's kind of a crazy example, but a friend's building a company called Tero, which does dental staffing for, for dental hygienists. And he, his version of goblin mode was his parents went door to door to different dental offices to just get people to, to talk to him about, about being customers. And that worked. And so it's just like weird stuff like that can work.

Amazing. Okay. So say do a couple sales calls, say do 5. Is that, is that kind of the idea? Do like 5 and assess? Is that rough heuristic? Okay. So say to your point, most times you'll find, okay, this is not There's no pull here. Sorry. What do you do? Do you go back to the beginning, go hands-on with some other small business sort of thing, or what do you recommend?

Yeah, so different pathways there. Hopefully you've asked the Hail Mary question and you've learned something there that's like worth double-clicking into.

And the Hail Mary question is just like, what is there anything that we can do to— yeah, right now that is a problem on your to-do list?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so you've generated some new information that you can then use to like do another set of 5. If not, then yeah, you just go back, get some firsthand knowledge, try it again.

Awesome. Okay. So, so this process is very straightforward. Have a pull hypothesis, fill out this template, schedule basically cold outbound with a surprising message that'll get people's attention, think you're interesting. Uh, do 5 calls roughly, get a sense, is there pull or not? If there's not pull, throw out some Hail Mary questions, maybe enter goblin mode to look for something, come up with another pull hypothesis, do 5 more calls and repeat until you're like, oh wow, we've got this pull.

Yep. And then you have a business.

There we go. Off to the races. Okay. So say you actually found something, something that is pulling and people are like, I need this now. What comes next? What do you kind of the, there's kind of like the building Onboarding process and then just keeping them happy. What's that process like? What advice do you have there?

Yeah, so I found that I didn't really have a good way to think about what happens after people buy. And so I felt like the dog who got a car and I just kind of like threw the software over the, over the, over the fence and like, good luck. Um, what I've learned since then, the hard way, obviously, is that, look, retention is super important and it's not obvious. And so the way I think about like delivery, post-sale is that basically everybody who buys is guaranteed to churn until X, in which case they're weird to churn. And all delivery is, all, everything is about figuring out what is X and how do you design a bullet train so every customer gets there. And so X is, You might think of it as, oh, they're using the product or they have high NPS or whatever it is. It's almost never those things. Mark Roberge has this kind of leading indicator of retention, which for Slack was like, you've sent 10,000 messages or 1,000 messages in your first X amount of time. If you hit that, it's like, it'd be weird if you churned. You're, it's the leading indicator of retention. For my startup, we, gave retention software to restaurants. If they got a notification that somebody was going to quit that they could prevent within the first 2 weeks, uh, after purchase, they would like go insane. They would tell all of their friends about it and they, it would be weird if they churned. And so we just designed the onboarding process to that. And so what I recommend is once you have a couple of people who are saying yes, don't just like throw the product over and like, Send them a login and pray. Go deliver firsthand as well. And you're going to learn a ton from that and keep asking the question, like, are you going to churn now? Are you going to churn now? Like what? And try to find the moment when, when they're like, oh, okay, cool. I can't live without this.

I love how your mind works with these formulas and these templates and just everything is this. And obviously it's not like this clean cut, but it's really helpful, I think, for people to just think of it in these very structured ways. Uh, to take these general ideas of what it looks like when things are going well and how to find an idea to just like, okay, here's what you plug in, talk about the specific thing, it's working, adjust. So this is great. On the churn piece, is there, what's like a sign? Okay, shoot, everyone's churning. Just like a sign of like, okay, they thought they didn't, but that it's not working. Anything there of just like, what's a sign at this stage? Okay, maybe it's not working versus it is.

Yeah. So if everybody's churning, The, it is unacceptable for you to not figure out why. And so, uh, what I've actually seen is in a lot of cases, like for a lot of horizontal products, you're going to have a lot of like user drop-off. Yeah. One startup I know, like they, they were a horizontal AI workflows product. Cool. Join the club. Right. But they found through being a horizontal AI workflows product that like one or two kinds of customers kept using it while everyone else was churning. And so if a bunch of people are churning, 90% plus of your customers are churning, first of all, I'm sorry, it sucks. It really, you know, you wake up at 4 AM every morning just sweating. But in that, you often can figure out why. And is it something that you're doing or is it something about them? And that can tell you, okay, who actually had pull that we can sell, deliver, retain? And, and for like that horizontal workflows product, they found that freight forwarders were using it for one specific workflow. And so they pivoted the entire company to focus on that. And so they went from being this horizontal product with massive churn, low price to a very premium product for freight forwarders.

There's no point at which like, okay, we figured it out. We're going to be a massive success. Like every moment of the startup journey is an uncertain moment. But what's great about this process so far is every step you get, it's more and more certain there's something here at least. And then there's like the forever doubt of like, how big can this get? I remember talking to the founder of Databricks, which is now like a bazillion trillion dollar company. And he said something like, even at $100 million ARR, they were still very unclear if this was a thing that will last. And I think that's very common. So that's, it's like its own topic of just like—

That's nice to know. That's nice to know. 'Cause everyone, yeah, everyone's like, how will this become a big thing? It's like, I don't know, we'll Yeah,

it's just kind of one step at a time. And so in this conversation, the final step in my mind is this idea you have of this user case study factory, which kind of takes you from things are starting to work to, okay, now we can create a repeatable system that helps us grow. So talk about that, what that looks like, what that's about.

Yeah, so this is the thing that whenever I talk about, everyone just like, everyone's eyes glaze over. And so I haven't found a useful way to talk about this yet. So just bear with me. pre-warning, I think is the most important thing in all of this, which is how do you think about your startup? What's your conceptual model for your startup? And like, you need to have a way to think about your startup to know how to grow it as fast as humanly possible. So what winds up happening is you find somebody who has pull. You give them a product, a service, a whatever that they pull out of your hands. So it turns out they were trying to do X, their existing options weren't good enough for Y, And you offer Z that helps unblock them. That sounds a lot like a case study that you would feature on your website. And it's a helpful thing because, okay, my job as a founder is not to produce 100 different case studies, totally different case studies, because that's not scalable. That's not repeatable. I'm looking to build one case study where a customer says hell yes before they buy and after they buy. And just repeat that a million times. And so that model helped me go from thinking that startups were a bunch of different things. I need to know all these different things to like, no, a startup is just a thing that repeats one case study infinite times. And all the stuff that I do is to build a factory for repeating that case study. And if I do this right, there's a case study where customers say hell yes, and they pull themselves Through each step of the factory, the steps are the pipeline step. How do we get people to talk to us? Sales step. How do we turn potential customers into actual customers? And the delivery step of the case study factory, which is how do we get people who are customers to be weird not to churn? And so everything we do kind of fits into this case study factory. And if you see this in your mind, it radically simplifies like a startup, how it works. And then you can use like. The theory of constraints. We're going to get really nerdy for a second from manufacturing to like, look at your case study factory and say, okay, where is our, where's the bottleneck to our growth? Is it that we're not like, we don't have enough pipeline? Okay, cool. If that's the bottleneck, then that's the only thing that matters right now. Let's solve that bottleneck and then we'll move to the next one. The next one is our close rate is lower than it should be. Okay, cool. That's our bottleneck. Now we're going to go all in on that. And so it lets you go, like the case study factory model gives you a way of thinking about your startup and knowing exactly where to focus at any one point in time.

It's a really interesting way to think about it where instead of we are trying to just get more customers closed and more deals closed, instead we're looking, we're building case studies, like almost like working backwards from what's the case study going to be of this company we're talking to, say we're talking to SpaceX. Just like we want it to look consistent across all the companies we're talking to. People talk about, call this repeatable sales motions, but I like the idea of thinking about like, it's almost like working backwards from the press release, but for sales. What is the case study we're gonna write about SpaceX? Okay, here's how we got them. Here's how we got sold them. Here's how we delivered it. And then here is just like create like consistent repeatable case studies that you'll later be able to share.

And yeah, and exactly. And then, and then what sales becomes is it becomes kind of like Hey, this is the case study that we deliver on. Is this relevant to you or not? And it becomes actually like, you can show the case study to people and they say, yeah, that's actually what I want as well. And so it becomes this kind of tool and you can say, yeah, you don't look like our case study. So it's probably going to be a lot of work and it might not be a good fit. And you can use it for qualification, disqualification, and for people to understand what you do.

That's funny. There's this whole theme now of building software factories. where, you know, product builds itself. But this is really another version of a factory you're building, which is even a broader version of just the sales, the user, the case study factory.

Yeah. Yeah. We don't make software here. We make case studies.

So is that your advice? Just like think of it that way? Yes. Like we make case studies here. Yeah, that's interesting. And it's not like you need to actually share and write up a case study. It's just a mental model for how to think about what you're trying to build as an with sales, go-to-market org.

Yeah, totally. And the good news is if you have the pull framework, then you just describe, here's how we helped them and what they accomplished, and you have a case study.

Amazing. Okay. There's a couple of things I want to touch on because this is the end of the process basically. There's a few things I want to touch on that came out of the community and things you mentioned real quick. One is you had this term, hell yes customers. Say more about that. Is, um, you mentioned it of like when you're looking for someone to buy it and then use it, there's this idea of they want them to be hell yes.

Yeah, it's, it's basically somebody who pulls the product out of your hands before they buy. And then afterwards they use it as if it is addictive. And so they, they might literally say hell yes, but what matters is they're weird not to buy and weird to churn. And that process is mostly them pulling. Versus you pushing. That's your perfect fit customer. Your job is just to find more who are basically clones of them.

Okay. Uh, the other kind of point I want to reinforce is you recommend no pilots, no point proof of concepts, no design partners. Just go straight to, we're going to sell this to you and roll it out and it's going to be amazing.

Yep. And like sometimes you're going to do that and they say, okay, but the way we buy here is we actually need to pilot it. Okay, cool. But don't proactively.

I see.

Awesome.

Okay. Another big question that came out of the community is from an external perspective, this feels like this just for startups and founders, but this actually applies for, and we mentioned this at the beginning, but just to reinforce this point, for larger companies that are working on new feature, new business line sort of thing. Talk about just if there's anything that you would think about differently through this process, if you're at a mature company building a new product.

I'm helping a couple companies launch their second product. And what they are doing is actually the founders are like, cool, we're doing it again. We're running it back. And the founders are taking this approach to existing customers because they're going to try to upsell them. And they are actually selling new features before they've built them. Another example at existing companies is, I can't share the name, but a company was, a new product leader at a company was telling me, hey, yeah, the way we get our ideas, all of the ideas that have worked have come from sales calls where they said, cool, yeah, you can do X, but could you also do this other thing for us? And the products that came out of the customer in the sales calls asking for something that could do that project for them, uh, all worked. All the ones they whiteboarded never worked.

So the idea here is you have a product, you're hearing, you're basically finding these little nuggets of this could be a thing. And what I'm imagining is then you go through this whole pull hypothesis step by step, just like put up the hypothesis, talk to 5 of your existing customers, look for that pull, see if they're going to actually buy it, and then kind of go through the same process. And an important wrinkle here that we haven't reinforced enough maybe is that it's the founders that should be doing this, especially in a startup. But it's interesting you said even at a mature company, if it's a new product, the founders ideally are doing that sailing.

Yeah, ideally not always the case. There are people who are doing zero to one stuff, but I just recommend if you're in that situation, and you're a non-founder, really focus on trying to sell the thing and learning through selling because there's a lot of ways to get lost in zero to one.

Awesome. And then again, if things aren't working, uh, there's this idea you shared of goblin mode of just like, okay, just try a bunch of stuff, talk to as many people, get on planes, go have 20 meetings and just look for something.

Yes. Yeah. Hail Mary, goblin mode. Like all of these things are just the, your break glass in case of emergency. Time is really valuable and like staying stuck is awful. If you're in this like pain cave of zero to one, it's like the worst time of your life and you just don't want to prolong that. So just get on a plane, go to the office, go in person, do whatever it takes to find something.

Rob, we did it. We went through everything. That was amazing. Is there anything else that you think is important to share or anything you want to, I don't know, double down on? Before we get to our very exciting lightning round.

Hopefully what's come across is kind of how simple this is. Pull framework, show to people, see if they pull. There's a lot of ways to like overcomplicate this, and there's a lot of ways where we try to solve every variable in our head in advance. And I've found that just pull framework, sell, see if they try to buy. And think less in that process, it will get you there.

Awesome. That sounds very simple. And I think it's important to note, like, this is very actually not like, it's hard to find an idea that actually works. And this is all here to help you save a lot of pain and suffering in building and be kind of being disillusioned, not disillusioned, miss feeling like there's something there, wasting a lot of your life and doing something that's not going to work.

Yeah, think of it as like a, um, you know, like a metal detector on a beach. Like, this is just giving you a metal detector. You might not find metal where you're looking right now, but at least I'm not giving you a spoon.

At least I'm not giving you a spoon, meaning, wait, what does that mean?

For the beach, right? Like, to look for metal in the beach. Oh, I see. You're not.

Oh, I see. You have a metal detector versus looking through all the sand with a spoon. Wow. I love that metaphor. Uh, and then sometimes you may find a thing that, and then you, Don't realize it's not worth anything. Okay. Wow. That's a great metaphor. Well, Rob, with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got 5 questions for you. Are you ready?

Let's do it.

First question. What are 2 or 3 books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

Oh gosh. The, um, my favorite one is the 4-volume Nature of Order series by Christopher Alexander. It's a book on architecture, a series of books on architecture. Best thing ever.

Never heard that recommendation before. Those are my favorite. Uh, favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

I have 2 favorite movies that we watch repeatedly. One is the Pride, the most recent Pride and Prejudice, and the second is the Penguins of Madagascar movie. Don't know why. Very different. Both ends of the spectrum there.

Favorite or most interesting AI product that you've recently discovered or use or love?

I've been using Muse and it's like, if it works for me, it can work for anyone.

Yeah. Very hot right now. Uh, amazing. Okay. Favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life?

Hmm. Uh, life is what you make of it.

Hmm. So true. Final question. I'm curious to get your thoughts on this. So there's this idea of Tar pit ideas. So I had Dalton Caldwell on the podcast. He was a partner at YC and he has this term tar pit ideas, which are ideas that people constantly have that are just terrible and don't work. And people keep having these ideas and they keep trying it and they're just like, okay, it doesn't work. Is there, are there any tar pit ideas you just find people keep coming to you and you're like, don't do that. It's not gonna work.

Oh, that's interesting. The category is of ideas is to go after a space when there is already a clear winner in that space without any theory on being different. I just keep seeing that it's just like, oh wow, Lemlist just built a sales automation tool and they're bootstrapped and they're growing really fast. So let me just build the exact same thing as them or something very close. And, you know, it's like, okay, but they, they've already, they've already won that or they've already, they've already done that thing. Um, and so, uh, unless you're like, oh, but this kind of customer is unblocked. And so we're going to build something kind of different for them. Those ideas almost always don't work. And you feel like you're going crazy because you're like, well, it worked for them. What am I doing wrong?

And I imagine everyone answers, but it's better. And as we know, it can't just be a little bit better. And basically you're saying like, okay, this is unblocking them.

Yes.

And it's better than all the alternatives. They're just going to go with that thing. But I guess then, you know, this goes into a whole other conversation. Like, what if it's like 2 times better? And I guess your advice there is it's, it's probably not good enough.

There are many things, right? You could give me a 100x better printer for my house and I won't buy it because I don't, I'm not blocked.

That's a great example. Oh man, Rob, we did it.

We did it. Holy cow.

We did it. Holy cow. Um, okay. How can listeners be useful to you? That's our final question.

Oh gosh. If you like the framework, use it, tell other people about it. Um, check out the book if it's useful and, uh, reach out if you have any thoughts, ideas, or this is a kind of, this is a theory framework model that is just in development. I still feel like I'm kind of scratching the surface on this. This is kind of like what I'm, what I'm going to be doing for the next 10, 20 years. So if you have ways to improve it, like reach out and tell me.

Awesome. And your newsletter is exactly that. It's you just, I don't know how often you're publishing, but just like, cool, here's like another way to think about this. Here's a wrinkle here.

Yeah.

Uh, just the idea of calling it Physics of Startups is, is, is an awesome idea.

So,

so we'll point people to the newsletter. Uh, Rob, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you.

Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.