Buying is weird and rare (a reality check)
In this episode of the podcast, host SPEAKER A interviews Rob Snyder about his recent 3‑hour voice‑over lecture and upcoming book “Notes on the Physics of Startups.” The core discussion centers on the concept that consumer purchases are extremely rare events—a phenomenon Rob calls “probability blindness.” He argues that founders often assume buying is common, leading them to misdiagnose market pull, build the wrong products, and blame themselves for low sales. Rob illustrates the rarity with massive numbers of possible purchases (millions of SKUs, millions of services, billions of products) and compares the annual likelihood of buying a relevant product to being struck by lightning. He explains that most customers have countless other viable options, so a lack of purchase usually means the product isn’t a priority, not that the sales effort is bad. The conversation shifts to the distinction between “push” (convincing a buyer) and “pull” (facilitating a purchase when the buyer already has a strong need). Rob suggests founders reframe their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) by asking, “Who would be weird not to buy this?” and then target those customers. Practical takeaways include embracing the rarity of buying, redefining ICP around pull, and testing for pull in sales calls. The episode also promotes Rob’s 3‑hour deck walkthrough on YouTube and his upcoming book, encouraging listeners to pre‑order and join exclusive events.
Chapters
Hey Rob, welcome back. Just the two of us this week.
Yep. And also I hit my 400-pound deadlift. I know you were wondering.
I, I know our, our listener was wondering that. So thanks for clarifying that up front.
Wanted to get that up front just to be sure that everyone, everyone was well aware of that.
I love, you're also looking like kind of like a weightlifter boxer with the, with the hoodie on right now.
So yeah, I recognize it. I, I realize that like everything about me blends into my background and so the, my camera is like working overtime.
Yeah, that's hilarious. That's hilarious. And hey, maybe before we get into, so this week we're talking about buying is weird and rare, which I think is like a gut punch to anybody who's in, in shoes similar to mine or who's like wrestling with, with early sales. But before that, you dropped a 3-hour voiceover for your deck. Can you just like, I, we published it on YouTube. I just wanna make sure folks saw it. Anything you wanna add on that one?
Yeah. I don't know why I keep doing this to myself, which is to say, I don't know why I did that. I don't know why I made that whole deck. I don't, it's, I just can't not do these things. And like the next thing I see coming at me is I'm going to write a textbook at some point. Like I just, I feel that coming and it's, I don't want to do it, but I'm going to do. And so yeah, I recorded a 3-hour lecture walking through the 160 slides in the deck. And we just kind of put it on YouTube and hope that it is helpful. I, it is kind of a preview of the book that's coming out, uh, in July now. So watch the lecture, preorder the book. We're also working on some way to do a, if you preorder the book, you can join some exclusive events with me to see my radiant personality and Q&A. I don't know. I know that's— don't drop everything you're doing now. But yeah, I don't know. It's, it's all, it's, I'm still trying to figure this thing out and this is another step. It is like, This is another step on the path. It will be useful to you. It is incomplete, but it is far more complete than anything else I've read or seen on this topic. And I think today's episode that we're going to be talking about is a really, really critical component of it too.
Yeah. Yeah. And maybe a couple use cases. One, if you're just with your partner on a Friday night and you're— you've completed Netflix and you want to put on a real thriller, you've got a lecture about the the Power Pull. But, um, you know, if for folks that may have read through, uh, the deck earlier, and if there was a section that really jumped out and you were like, oh, I think I've, you know, I think I'm misdiagnosing pull, or I'm misunderstanding what customers are saying to me, or the supply I present is wrong, or something, you know, some part of that original presentation, um, I'd say like pull this up. You can even skip to that part of it and just hear Rob with his, his voiceover, because the slides are great. Actually, I love that presentation. I've read it twice now. Uh, but going through, uh, and watching your lecture there, um, elucidated some of the concepts that, um, I was— my takeaways were different from the way that, uh, you were talking about it. And so it can be a— it can be, um, yeah, just a— it's a— it's a resource that's out there. I think 2 weeks ago, uh, we did like a short, um, like short episode just saying like, go check it out. It's related to that same presentation.
I think it's—
I think it's called, uh, Notes on the Physics of Startups. So we'll put that link in the show notes. Um, but Rob, if there's nothing else, we can— we can jump into, uh, into this week's. So this week we're We're going to talk about "Buying is Weird and Rare: Probability Blindness and Its Implications." Essentially, it's a reality check for anybody that's thinking about products. And it is honestly like the post that every pre-product founder should read because it checks the instinct to be optimistic and unreasonably optimistic. And that optimism can lead to months or years or, you know, just in cow people suffering. Um, so Rob, why don't we get a little bit of, uh, context from your, uh, from your end? Why is this on your mind and, uh, who's this one for?
Yeah, so this one, uh, this one's interesting. It's something that I was developing while making the slide deck and it's this, I just keep coming back to this question of why is it so hard to take off? Like what specifically is so difficult about this and where are we, where do we keep getting stuck? And it's, this could be pre-product. I've even seen this with companies that are stuck at $1 to $3 to $5 million in revenue and just not growing super fast. And I found that there's this underlying assumption, right? Like the first, the first assumption that we, we really tackled, uh, like a year ago now was the push theory of the thing that causes somebody to buy is me convincing them to buy. And that's not the case. Well, the second kind of fundamental assumption here is that buying is a common and normal thing. And this assumption, like I had been, I, yeah, it, it's just a, it's a thing that once you kind of do this mental exercise of the probability of buying a specific product that is relevant to you. That you start to be a lot more skeptical and test more and test and, and specifically like it's gonna tighten your ICP. It's gonna tighten your, like what you're selling. It's gonna, it's gonna cut off a lot of paths where people could buy, it could benefit them. It could, it's gonna cut off a lot of the like could work paths that probably won't work. But if you believe the probabilities are kind of at a different order of magnitude than they are, you're gonna be inclined to go down the could work direction versus this is saying, given these probabilities, the things that could work won't by default. And there's only the small sliver of things that where it would be weird if they didn't work and they, they kind of fit this shape.
Yeah. Why don't we, uh, do you want to hit some of those probabilities real, real quick? You, you outlined them and they're, um, yeah, sobering is like the word that I would, I would say when, when reading through it.
Yeah. So let me also, like, I didn't put this in the post, but I've been thinking about it, which is, um, after you buy a product, let's just say you, you buy a product or a service, right? There is, there is logic that you can apply to that. Where it's like, oh yeah, he bought that product to solve a problem. He bought that product to get value. And then you can say, okay, in general, he buys products to solve problems. In general, he buys products to get value and kind of, you can apply all these different lenses to it. And that will all make sense. But what we don't see when we're looking from that perspective is how many other products or services he could have bought, but didn't in that situation, in, in that particular moment. And the numbers here are insane. So if we just think like how many products or services are relevant to you right now, or at any, like today, this week, this month, this year. The number, and we could call, we'd call relevance is like, it, people wouldn't look at you weird for buying them, right? They would, it would make sense if you bought them. Solve problem, fix pain point. They give you some sort of value. You want them like all of these traditional things. Okay. If you think what's the universe? Of products and services where it would make sense after the fact if I bought them, the number is not 10. The number is not 100. It's not 1,000. It's, it's not 10,000. It is almost certainly in the millions. And like just the crazy stats here, there, there are like, I don't know. I just, I did some like YOLO Googling. I don't know that these stats are real, but they're roughly— we're about to see some consultant math. Uh, that's, that's going out here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a 3-bullet-point slide for this one. Um, but like Amazon has hundreds of millions of SKUs apparently. Yeah. Okay. If that's off by a factor of 10, cool. Doesn't matter. That's still a lot of SKUs, most of which it would not be weird if you bought them, like assuming you bought them, it wouldn't be weird. It wouldn't be crazy. There are 4 million books published every year.
That's an insane number.
Isn't it crazy? It's just absurd. Every time you walk into the grocery store, there are like 30,000 SKUs in there that you, that it wouldn't be weird if you walked up like some, yes, some subset of them. If you walk through the checkout line, person will give you a look, but most of them, it wouldn't be crazy if you bought them. There are 20 million services firms in the US. Just in the US. And like most of those, it wouldn't be weird if you bought from it. Yeah. And so like those stats should just—
I think, and what one that jumped out to me was like, I think you said it was, was it 24,000 software solutions for like, was it teaming or like workforce management or something like that?
Like there's productivity software, right? Productivity. Yeah.
Yeah.
Thousands and thousands of software products out there. Yeah. Yeah. And that number isn't going down at the moment. Like even in the software space, there are tens of thousands and they're right. Like, and so if you look at it that way, the, like, like even if you're a crazy person just buying things every second of the day, you're, you're going to buy the smallest fraction of products that it wouldn't be weird if you bought them. Yeah. You're buying the smallest fraction. So that's where I'm going to say buying is super weird and rare. And if you recognize just how weird it is for someone to buy something, then you're going to behave differently. But if you think that buying is a very common thing, Yeah. You are going to make some pretty serious intellectual errors, like, like approach thinking errors that will cause a lot of downstream problems.
Let's, let's hit a couple of those. One is you, and I'll, I'll read here from a couple of these, building the wrong products. When we assume that buying is not weird and rare, we build things that people would be weird to buy. Why? Give, give us the, you know, your take on why that happens and what it looks like when that happens.
Yeah. So what you'll often see is, and just like, I've done this enough times that it's awful. And, and, and this, this explains it. So you will talk to people and you'll do discovery interviews or you'll do whatever, right? And you will find, oh, that's a huge problem. And you do the translation in your head from huge problem, huge pain point to, therefore I will buy it. Yeah. And you build a solution to that problem or pain point, but what you don't realize when you're doing that is that there, like the list of huge problems and pain points that they're not doing anything about and will never do anything about is massive. Hmm. And so we're just not— so by focusing on these things that are plausible explanations for why people bought after they bought a thing, but they don't predict a purchase.
Hmm.
Given the number of things that could be purchased, it would be weird if focusing on a big problem, building a solution to a big problem actually led to a purchase. And so what happens is we wind up going down this path, building something, people getting like, people nodding and saying, yeah, that's, that's totally, you totally get it. And then them not buying. And us not understanding why. And it's like, why did we ever assume they would buy?
Yeah. It's one of those things I wish I could like take me out of my, out of my body or something like some weird thing and like being on, be on the other side and like observe what I'm pitching or the product that the way I'm thinking about the product. And like even after I had a, I had a call 2 days ago and after the call I was like, oh, like so excited about it., and you know, we'll see. I don't, I, this one might sell. I'm not, not really sure. And I was like, Robert, you're, you are like choosing to be optimistic about the likelihood that this person is going to buy, this product and like, don't mistake the enthusiasm that you're hearing for it for meeting an actual like, yeah, project that they are, they're trying and that they're blocked from, from accomplishing. Um, and so it's just like, the default, weirdly, I don't know, like maybe somebody can help me, Rob, you continually help me with this, but there's gotta, like there's something in our brain that's like, it just chooses optimism. Maybe it's not, maybe that's just like, you write about this at the start, maybe that's why we're founders of things. It's like there's this innate optimism that's required. It's a selection bias for human beings or for founders. But yeah, it like shows up not just at the pre-products, but also like after every sale. And eventually when you, you know, maybe this was your experience, Rob, but after running into and being confused by enough times where it was like, I think they're going to buy, but they don't, like it starts to set in that, okay, something's like that, the pain point, like all these other things that are popularly held aren't actually indicative or predictive of what's gonna work.
Yeah. Yeah. I think it's so, I think the experience here is roughly similar. And, and what I've, what I've actually been working on is like this, we've been testing this kind of Claude skill that I've been creating that's supposed to test for pull components and give you, give you your, you know, how you did on the call and was there a pull there? And so that's, that's been fun to do, but it's like, Maybe there is just some part of this of, I want it, I, here's how I want the world to work and therefore I'm going to see the world that way.
Yeah.
That could just be part of it. And, and you might have to just get punched in the face enough times by that not working and you haven't do the loop of, okay, I'm gonna try something else that I'm sure is gonna work and then it doesn't work. And you just have to do that enough times to say, okay, I actually don't like, I've had the optimism beaten out of me now and I just want to do something that works. And so how do I think about something that works? That could be the case. I, my hope, my, this is probably a dumb hope. This is how I want, this is my dumb optimism is that if you look, I just don't think we understand the shape of reality. Yeah. And I don't think entrepreneurship education has done a good job explaining this. Hmm. I think if you actually understand how weird and rare it is for somebody to buy a product that is relevant to them, you're going to like think a little differently. Yeah. It's like, it's in the post and it's just right. Like your likelihood of buying a relevant product in a given year is roughly on the order of you being struck by lightning in a given year. Yeah. And so it's like, if you just embrace that and say, okay, that's weird. Yeah. I need to now, like, even if I build something that's relevant, even though I focus on a problem, da da da da da, like that, it's still going to be weird if they buy from me. Yeah. Given that, I need to approach this differently and think about the conditions under which somebody would be weird not to buy, look for those, and then and try to convince them not to buy from me and see if they fight.
What does, what does that mean?
Yeah. So this is a, this is a post I'm working on for the future, but it's like what you talked about, what I saw, what I've seen in some of your calls.
Here we go. Here we go.
Is you ask like positive questions and everyone asks like positive questions. Would this be of benefit to you? Yeah. It's like, yes. Of course, here's how this would be of benefit to me, but it's like, there's infinite other things that could be of benefit to you that you are not doing. Yeah. And so you have to flip the question and basically say, could you just do nothing here? Like, yeah, they have to convince you that they have pull.
Yeah, I like that. I'm gonna, I'm gonna start using that immediately. 'Cause I, I totally agree. I feel like I lead the witness a little bit and they're trying to be nice with, you know, our, our American personalities. The— well, I want to hit another one that, that you hit. So we talked about you're building the wrong product, also misdiagnosing why our products aren't, aren't working. And I'm going to read this real quick and then Rob, jump in and, you know, rage rant or something about it. But because we think they should buy with the implicit assumption that buying is not weird or rare, we misdiagnose what's happening in this situation. Usually we're bad. Usually we think we're bad at sales or our product isn't good enough.
All right.
Go off on why, why those are wrong.
Yeah. So, okay. So by default, if somebody doesn't buy something, it doesn't mean your product wasn't valuable enough. It doesn't mean you weren't good at sales. It almost always means they weren't prioritizing something. Relevant, cuz there are infinite things they could prioritize. They weren't in a situation where they could not prioritize this thing. And, oh, like, or if they're prioritizing something relevant, their existing options are good enough. Like if those two things are not true, they would be weird to buy your product and it's It's no amount of changing your product, no amount of sales skills and techniques will change this. Yeah, sure. If you, if you get 10x better at sales, you might convert 5%, 10% of people who aren't in the situation, the pull situation. You're not going to convert all of them. And in fact, if you get really good at sales, what you're going to realize is you're selling to the wrong kind of person. In the wrong kind of situation, usually with the wrong kind of description of a thing. But if you think buying is a common thing, because obviously Anthropic's selling a ton, right? A lot of people are like, people, it seems like people are buying a lot of things. So buying is this common thing. They're just not buying my product. And so it must be something about me or something about my product, which is not the case, given that there are infinite things, infinite other things they are also not buying.
Yeah, totally. Maybe that resonates with listeners and in some ways definitely resonates with mine. Like the, for me, like in the marketing space, it's like when I reframe from like my product is perfect for this company to this marketing agency or this CPG brand, has a trillion options for ways to reach consumers. What would— it would be bizarre if, if like they went with ours like that. You know, that actually is kind of liberating and in some sense like overwhelming in one sense, liberating in the sense that, okay, like what I have is not a personal problem. It's like it's an understanding of what they're trying to accomplish problem.
Yeah. Yeah. And, and like in your case, I remember I was just watching one of your calls like earlier and the person was like, yeah, I never respond to cold outreach. This is the first cold outreach I've responded to in like 7 years. Yeah. And the reason I responded is because we're in a situation where we're trying to find for one of our brands. Some non-traditional ways to reach families. Yeah. And we haven't found good options for that. And so like in that situation, you just show up and say hi. And they're like, great. What's next?
Right? Yeah, exactly. And even in that case, even satisfying that it's, there's still an element of weirdness too, if they act, if it actually like ended up being like, I, there's a, there's a step there cuz she's not the buyer. It's that she's working with the buyer. And so there's like a, okay, I, I see the pull on your end. How do I make it so that it's like actually ach— not just achieving you, it's like achieving like the brand needs, helping you communicate that.
And yeah. Okay. And then the, then the thing here is in that situation, your job is not to sell. Your job is not to— is like kind of to help them buy, but when they're in a situation like this, your job is really to not convince them not to buy. It's like the, the, there is just like this massive gulf between what we think sales is, which is convincing them to buy, which, which is what you do when you don't have product market fit, when you haven't found pull. When you have found pull, the job, and this is the reason why like so many If you watch sales calls of companies with extreme product-market fit, they could do anything in those sales calls and people will buy still. And it's basically like we, they had such strong pull, aka they were trying to do something and their existing options just didn't work to such an extent that they, although it seems like the seller tried to convince them not to buy, they were unable. Convince them not to buy. And so the kind of just entirety, like all the tactics, all the, like just the physics of the situation totally changed. And that's, that's kind of where we talk about from push to pull.
That's fascinating. I love it. And I, I'm actually kind of happy you brought it in that, uh, that example. That's a, a good reminder that, uh, if there is pull, you can dissuade somebody from, um, from it if you're, if you're stupid enough or like a, a dingo like me. Um, Rob, let's keep this one, um, try to keep this one maybe, uh, brief. Is there, what are the takeaways for, uh, you know, founders that, you know, what should they do as a result of like this insight?
Yeah, I'd say two things. One is just like, think about, go on a bike ride, lift some weights, do, do something while thinking about how unlikely it is for somebody to buy your product, even if it's relevant to them. Mm-hmm. And then ask yourself the question, okay, given that, who would be weird not to buy our product? And define your ICP that way.
Yeah.
Then go find them and see if you are right. Yeah.
I love it. That, that's all the, and, and lifting weights. You, they can also at the same time think about how you, you hit 400 on your squat or deadlift or deadlift.
If I have 400 on squat, I don't know what it would be. I, I, I don't know what would be different, but I would not be able to talk about it on this podcast as well. I'll let you know. Well, you know, if we keep doing this podcast for the next 10 years, maybe.
Awesome. Again, the, the Substack is called Buying Is Weird and Rare. Drop your comment if you've got feedback on, on this one, or if there's things that come to mind or things you want to challenge Rob on, please drop it in the, either the Substack or on the YouTube or, or Spotify. Anything else, Rob, before we let folks go?
Nope.
Awesome. All right. We'll catch everybody next week.
