Exponential PULL (aka: stop slogging it out)
Rob Snyder explains exponential pull, where customer demand jumps roughly 10× at each intensity level rather than growing linearly. He breaks down the pull statement (customer goal, current methods, why they fail, desired outcome) and argues founders should chase spring-loaded customers ready to rip the product from their hands, not slog through low-pull leads.
Chapters
Well, Rob, welcome back, man. How are you doing?
Doing good. We have 3 feet of snow on the ground, which is great and currently adding to that.
Really? Oh, that, I guess that's right. That they, what are they, nor'easter? I don't know why they cut out like a consonant in the middle of that, but yeah. So you are, it, you're living in a winter wonderland right now.
I, I am. The good news is I don't go outside. I, I just, I just work and have, have the weight room next to me and then there's a kitchen upstairs. So we got it all, we got it all here.
The snow, the 3 feet of snow is actually reducing y'all's energy costs by providing insulation for the house. Exactly.
Exactly. And it's, yeah, it's, you know, it's reducing my temptation to do anything other than what I already do.
Pick up heavy things and think about startups. You also sound like you are back from the dead, so congratulations.
Yeah, I am back. I'm back. Apparently there's a wave going through daycare of which I am, I'm the early adopter in daycare, uh, in the daycare center. And so, uh, and now, now everyone else has caught it. So, so they are the late majority.
It came into you and then it, uh, multiplied.
Uh, well, I feel like that's the, that's you though. Like you would always be, you were the COVID catcher. So anytime there was a new wave of COVID we would find out not through the news, but by you being sick and you, you'd just like be like, oh guys, bad news.
Got a new wave Yeah, yeah, I knew it was bad when the CDC actually sent somebody to monitor me 24/7 and had a direct alert to the president that they would send out. But yeah, so today we are talking about why pull is not uniform and we're going to— one line that was early and early in your post is, but if pull is present, Every time somebody buys something, why do company— why do some companies grow super fast and others don't? That's kind of the, the heart of what we're getting into. Uh, Rob, why don't you start us off with, uh, context on why this is on your mind and who is this a good one for?
Yeah, so this, so this is a, what, what I think is like a required addition to the theory for people to understand. I think everybody who is trying to understand product-market fit Everybody who is trying to find product market fit, trying to figure out sales, needs to understand this concept because it is not intuitive. And it is literally like, I'm, I've basically spent the past, I don't know, a couple months looking at companies that I've helped who have grown super fast. We're talking like $0 to $25 million ARR in 2 years type fast, fast, like, which by the way, is faster than HubSpot got there, which is, right, like, it's just kind of like crazy to wrap your mind around that. Okay, cool. Like, I've seen that happen and I've seen a bunch of zero to a million journeys, but not all of the zero to a million journeys have that same speed and trajectory despite teams being roughly, you know, like, not, there's not like, oh wow, this team is way better or this product is way better. And so that's why it took off. And they're both kind of using the pull framework. In it. Their sales calls are kind of like structured the same. And so the question is just like, what is happening here? I've been trying to kind of compare and contrast, and it seems to come down to this very counterintuitive thing.
And the counterintuitive thing we're talking about here is outlined in your post that it's called Exponential Pull. High-intensity pull is greater than everything. And what we're going to be talking about is The intensity of pull is nonlinear. We'll get into that a little bit more here in a second. You actually start this, you start this post with something very interesting, which is basically just like, what does pull sound like? I thought it might be worth taking a second to pop that up and I'll read it for folks that aren't watching the video. Basically, Rob has outlined what does, this is the statement of what pull sounds like for a customer. I am trying to accomplish something. This is written in first person from the customer standpoint. I am trying to accomplish something right now, but my current methods or options aren't good enough. And this, like, you know, this was one of the things, Rob, while I was reading it, I was like, it seems simple because it is simple in many ways. The way you put this previously at some point was, but the words were completely inaccessible for a very long time or something like that. And, and so this like very simple formula that's been distilled as, as for like what is pull is the result of a very long, like multiple years of thinking on, on your part. But Rob, why don't you give context on like what, what is this? Where is this coming from and how do founders use it?
Yeah. So, so this is basically, this is the pull framework just kind of sharpened one more step. I was thinking of writing a full post on this here of like, like we're simplifying the pull framework where people tend to get stuck is they kind of get get it in theory, but, but still struggle with that last mile of translating it into practice, especially around urgency and da da, like, like, what is a project? What all of these kinds of things. And so what I've done, and this is, you know, kind of coming out in some new presentations and stuff that I'm working on, is basically what is a simplification here, which is what we are looking for is somebody to literally say these words or, or something. I'm trying to accomplish X. Right now, but the current tools that I am using are not— the current methods, the current options, the current things that I have looked into, used, tried are not good enough. So I am blocked here, right? That simple sentence incorporates all 4 parts of the full Pull framework. The thing I am trying to accomplish is the project. Right now is why is it unavoidable? Why is it this thing versus all the others I could possibly possibly prioritize. The current methods or options are like, what are, what are the different things on the supply side that I have considered or tried or looked into or whatever, right? And why aren't those good enough? What are the limitations there? This in a nutshell is like, if this is present, then there is, there is some amount of like willingness to purchase something that fits, right? There is space for us to build something. This again exists out there in the world, whether or not we exist. And so this is the most upstream thing. Yeah.
And let's hit as well what you add onto that, which is you add, you know, what they will buy is like on the supply side, we being You know, founder, we offer X that helps you accomplish Y without Z. Actually, I'd like you to explain the, we offer, you know, product that helps you accomplish Y. I actually didn't, I, the without Z is the thing that got me a little bit hung up. Can you, can you talk us through this one as well?
Yeah. So you can see the color coding on this if you're watching and if you're reading the newsletter, right? And so basically what we, and maybe I need to change this if this wasn't intuitive, Uh, but what I'm trying to convey here is that if somebody is trying to accomplish something right now, but their existing options aren't good enough for some reason, then we just have to offer them something that helps them accomplish that thing without the downsides of their existing options. And it's literally like, we basically just have to say, yeah, we offer an AI note-taker. Or we offer a blank, like what is the thing so that they can kind of understand the box that it fits in. And then what does it help them accomplish and overcome?
Interesting. Okay. I think I, I feel I got hung up a little bit on the without Z, but I, maybe it can also be, um, in addition to Z, like if what, if their current solution isn't good enough because it's actually lacking something, like maybe there's a positive version of that. Yeah.
Or yeah, maybe it's, oh. Overcoming Z or whatever, right? Like it's something like that.
Maybe I'll change, change that in the future. Gotcha. But it's, it's, uh, now that, now that you bring up the color coding, I see that aren't good enough and without Z are actually, uh, both in gray. So, um, yeah, I was thinking of putting arrows there.
So that, what that tells me is, is that there are some arrows needed here or something.
Like I'm, I'm happy to be the dingo who reads this and is like, you know, dragging his knuckles and trying to figure out what's, what's actually going on. Well, what you, what you go on to say from here is every single time that there's a purchase, there is pull. And however, that as you in the examples that you gave, so every startup that goes 0 to 1 million has found some version of pull. However, that pull is not the same between the, you know, 2 years, $25 million ARR versus the, you know, it took us 2 years to get to 1 million or, you know, you know, just there's slogs and it seems like there's rocket ships. And so, but if everybody has pulled, Rob, can you give us the context on like, what are you, what is the root cause for why some have this, you know, asymptotic growth and others are, you know, still, they feel like they're, you know, in a quagmire a little bit.
Yeah. So this is what I've been thinking about and what people will often say when you ask this is they will say, You know, it's something about they have an exceptional team or they will say, oh, it's about a 10x product or it's about the market size, right? It's the market size. And those things aren't right. Those are, you know, those are things you can label after the fact usually, but they are not things that you can actually do in advance. And so what I've found, if we, if we think about pull as basically like someone being spring-loaded to purchase. Something. There are different levels of being spring-loaded to purchase something, right? There's a level where it's, you're just kind of spring-loaded versus you are like super spring-loaded and gonna, gonna really, uh, kind of like when some, you're gonna unleash a lot of energy when good fit supply shows up. And so that is what I have found as the is, is the difference between startups that take off and startups that grow and build fine businesses, but do not take off. It is on the demand side. It is the, what I call the intensity of pull, which is not something you can see just by looking at the words in a framework. It's something you observe when you sell, when you try to talk to potential customers.
Yeah. Why don't we, let's talk about this pull or the, the, you labeled the intensity of pull. You put it on the pull scale, which is a, this is a graphic that even I can understand, Rob.
So thank you for putting that together. I made this one for you.
Oh yeah.
I keep thinking that like, it's, you know, I had to make things that are like an 80 IQ level.
Yeah. Well, you nailed it.
And so I'm glad you are testing that for me.
Okay. So let's hit, let's hit the pull scale here. You have, you know, there's two endpoints. This is, yeah, it's a, it is a line segment.
It's just a line on one end. There is no pull and on the other end there is intense pull. Right. And so when I say that pull is right, like there is more and less intense pull, what you're going to do in your mind is you're going to kind of create a, a kind of like line, a spectrum in your mind where at one end there is no pull and at one end there is intense pull. And so like, cool, great, awesome. The question though is what is the behavior? What is the nature of that spectrum? When we think of a spectrum like that, we tend to think, okay, cool. This spectrum is out of 5. This spectrum, this line is out of 10, whatever it is. There's where 0 is no pull. And 5 is intense pull, right? And if you think that way, what you are naturally going to think is that, okay, well then there's a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. There's 0 to 5. And each step is like a linear improvement in pull, right? It is a, it is a, you know, we just add 1 unit of, of intensity. To pull. And so a 3 out of 5 is actually pretty good, or a 4 out of 5. 4 out of 5 is pretty much, yeah, we might not go $0 to $100 million ARR in 14 seconds, but we still build a pretty fast growing business with 4 out of 5 pull. And I think this is a mistake to think this way, because I actually just observing how startups grow. I do not think this scale is linear. I think it is very much nonlinear or logarithmic where each step up on the scale is a 10x improve, like increase in intensity. And so if you think about it, that any deal is take any one customer, right? Any one deal. And that takes a certain, let's say 100 units of energy for that need to be expended for them to buy it. And then be successful with it, right? That, and that energy can be split between the buyer and the seller, right? If I, as the seller, am doing half of the work as, as you are, right? We are splitting the work kind of evenly to get the deal done. If it's higher intensity, you, Paul, you are doing as the buyer more, a higher share of the work to purchase and be successful with it. And so that's how I think about Pull's intensity is it's this, this split between buyer and seller. And so each step you move up on the intensity scale, the buyer is doing 10x more, putting 10x more effort in because they are more spring-loaded.
Yeah, yeah, you, you have, um, several, I think, really helpful, um, uh, they're kind of like quotes that you expect to hear on each step of the way. Um, and I, as I was going through it, I was like, I've heard that, I've heard that, I've heard that, like, it's, um, and, uh, let me, I'm gonna read a couple of these. Like, they start out on the, on the pull scale of a zero. So this is at I don't know, 10,000x more difficult than it would then when you're at a 5. Yeah, it's, this is great, send me more information and I'll circle back, which is AKA like, I'm going to ghost. At a 1, it's, well, if you offer a free trial, why not? We'll just think about timelines on our side, which they might accept you giving them something free. You're not actively hindering them. However, it's, it's not a whole lot more than that. Then it goes to, do you offer free trials or pilots? Which I heard literally on Tuesday. And then it goes, yeah, we definitely need this. I'll have to follow the budgeting cycle, which was my first sale was like it had to align to a budgeting cycle. It wasn't solving an imminent need. It was like an eventual need, which does sometimes work. And then it's, can I buy a smaller version on my credit card while we loop in the appropriate people for the full purchase? And then finally, screw the procurement process, send me the contract. When can we onboard? Rob, how do these— I don't know if you have examples that come to mind of— Yeah, that you can talk us through to help bring these to life.
Yeah. So, so, okay, so this is like, this isn't like the canonical guide. This is just an example. If you're selling into like a kind of like big organization of like representative things you will hear at each, at each kind of level of the spectrum. And so you can envision in your case, right? Like, oh, we'll have to follow the budgeting cycle. How much work did you do for that to get that deal done?
A lot. Yeah. A lot. Like multiple months.
Yeah. Yeah. You did a lot of, you did multiple months of work. You did, you did a bunch of stuff and the deal got done and it's great.
Yeah.
Right. But then on the other side, if they had just been like, cool, we're handling all the details, we need this right now, you would've done virtually zero work. And just like, think about how more eff— how, like, how efficiently you could grow if it was a 3 on this scale where you're doing months of work to close each deal versus they're like, shut up, I'm buying this. I'm already sold. I like, screw procurement team. Yeah. I'll tell them what to do. Right. And, and like, we're just gonna make this happen. So, okay. So an example of this is a—
maybe to, yeah, to jump in before you, before you lead with that one. Uh, I, again, right after or right before I read this post, I had a different call with somebody who was like, we have to, we have to wait for a full contract, but this is the budget that I have right now. Like, let's, Get Started, and it was like, it was solving a much more obvious need that she had in the, in this case for like our programs to help amplify like the reach of what she was developing. And it was like the difference between those, it's like, it's so nice. I left that call being like, well, I guess I don't have to do anything because it's like, she's already committed to this.
Yeah. Let's come back to that because there is like, yeah, there is something very, very important. In what you just said. And so I want to come back to that, but like, let me, let me give you an example here. Like a different example of a friend. There's, I have a friend who just spent 2 years, like, just, just suffering, just like, you know, in, you'd have a bunch of conversations for your kind of like AI executive coach thing. And you'd talk to HR departments. They're like, wow, this is amazing. And then some of them would be like, Well, we'd love to trial this. We'd love to. And so you kind of get dragged along for like 2 years like that. Then he ran like, so he's running out of money. They're still at zero revenue. They've built a bunch of product. They've kind of like got people who use it and they like it, but you know, oh, budgeting. Oh, right. Like, well, our, you know, our budget for this could be $13.20 and it's like, okay, like what are we doing here? And so he, he was in that space where it's kind of zero to one pull. And then he gets introduced to totally different industry, executive in marketing and pharma. And basically like, all right, cool. I'm just going to forget my product for now. I just, I would like to, if this startup is going to shut down, I'd like to at least have a W on the board. And so he was like, cool. Well, like, what would you pay me to help you solve? Essentially, and the person was like, listen, here's the thing I'm struggling with right now. We don't, we're launching things, we're launching marketing, we're launching whatever, and we have no way to see how it's performing on social media, on all these different places. We paid a consulting firm and that is not, they give us a report once a quarter on stuff and it's not even good. And so what you hear there is like, we're, I'm trying, like this poll thing. Here, right? It's, it's, it's, they're kind of spring loaded. And he was like, cool.
Okay.
If I solved that for you, like, would that, I don't know, would you pay for that? And their response was like, if you can show me that you can solve this, I'm skipping our procurement process. I know this is an enterprise pharma, uh, but I'm going to buy it right now. And he closed like 3 or 4 customers with a 3 to 4 week sales cycle each. In enterprise pharma, which is right. If you've, if you know anything about enterprise pharma, that is not a place where people buy things fast, which tells you just how spring-loaded they were.
So that's the, and in this case, I don't know what, what the product was that they were developing previously, but it's probably selling, still selling an enterprise, like still And it was just wrestling with, uh, wrestling with the procurement. Probably every, uh, hoop that you might have to jump through was probably having to jump through and then still not working. Um, versus, uh, Persons Has Demand eliminates the hoops. It's not that they jump through them correctly, it's that the hoops ceased to exist.
Yeah. Super intense pull is marked by them running over their own roadblocks and hurdles. Like they have so, right, there's, you could think of it as there's so, they have so much force that they're applying internally that it just happens. It like, it, it happens. It would be weird if it didn't happen. They're going to make it happen. And this is, if you look at basically any company that has grown very fast, this is what they find. They find this.
Hmm. Um, did you want to hit the thing that I said that— Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the thing that's really interesting that you said, And this, this brings us to like, okay, what the heck do I do with this information? Right? Is, is this almost always happens where it actually happened to me where I, you know, I'd been kind of like pushing my startup forever. And then I got a phone call from someone who's like, I heard about this. This is exactly what I need right now. How do I pay? Yeah. And it's like, most of us will take that call, hang up, you know, sign the deal, whatever. Hang up and be like, well, that was nice. I wish that happened more often. And then we get back to pushing, right?
Yeah. Nice little distraction. Yeah.
That was nice. Wish that happened more. And then like, but everything is like the signal contained in that. And the difference between that experience and your typical experience actually tells you where intense pull is. And so if, right, if you think, oh, this is just a scale out of 5 and we add, right? Like it's just incremental units, then you're going to be like, okay, well, I wish this happened more, but you know what? It's, we're still at a 3, 3.5, 4. We're fine.
Right?
Yeah. You're not going to do anything. But if you realize that this is a like 10, right? It's a 10x or whatever each. It's exponential each step up. Your response to that should basically be like, okay, cool. We have just found something super interesting here. Let's compare and contrast people who pulled really hard and people who didn't to try to get to the root cause, because this is telling us something about where there is actually intense pull. And if we can just repeat this. Nothing else matters, right? We will, right? If we just figure this thing out and go all in on this, we will grow 100x more efficiently. Like, oh, it'll just be, everything will be exponentially faster. Yeah.
Yeah. That's interesting. In this case, uh, it was something that it was like a referral that I didn't know this person. I didn't reach out to this person. Um, Yeah, she, she sent me a note, was asking for time, and it was like, uh, the basis of it is, uh, our distribution can help make future grant applications, um, uh, competitive for like these like really large multimillion dollar like education and environment grants. Uh, and so, uh, yeah, that's— I've— I'm still processing a little bit, like, are— how much of this is bespoke and how much of this is like a replicable thing that we can, we can start to tap into?
Yeah, yeah, cool. The question here, as as you explore this is not like, oh, was it through a referral? That's irrelevant. That piece is not the important piece. The piece that's really important is like, before you were there, before they knew about you, what was going on in their world and why were they so spring-loaded where you've talked to other people who weren't? And it's getting down into the like, Oh, XYZ had actually happened there. Or it's because it's this kind of grant that they are applying for, or it's because it's like, there's you, what you're trying to do is you're trying to get to causality underneath this. It isn't random as Bob Moesha would say, there's nothing random about this kind of thing. And it's just, what is the causal factor that brought them to a 5 out of 5?
Yeah, super interesting. That actually, like, I think, and I don't want to focus too much on this one, but in case it's helpful for the listener, it's like, in this case, I think it's that they had developed materials, educational materials, and they don't, they discover after that, that distribution is extremely hard, like actually getting people to adopt them or even just be aware that they exist, very not easy and probably, I don't know, somewhat difficult to report onto a, like a, an existing grant that's like, okay, we spent all this money, it went nowhere. And, uh, and that's where media like comes into the, and, and specifically in our case, children's STEM media.
Uh, let me tell, let me tell another story about this. Like on, on this from, there's a company in the book, uh, that I talk about called Sparkwise. They won't mind if I mention them. And if they do, well, hey Vince.
Uh, so, yeah, the Sue, uh, Sue 280 IQ guys, like out of existence, basically.
Yeah, they're good friends. They're ex-McKinsey as well. And so what they, early on, what they did, they were at McKinsey and they were like really obsessed with McKinsey's training model of how McKinsey spends like $10,000 per consultant per year in like really effective training. And they had this insight that the reason McKinsey's training was so good was not because of all the money they spent on it. It was because of work. Like it was because of the participants, not the facility. Volunteers, and it was about the participants working super well together. And so what they did is they tried to replicate that for corporate learning. And so early on, they went and sold to a bunch of ex-McKinsey, Bain, BCG consultants, and they had a variety, like they had people sign up. The first, I think the first version of their product was literally like a PowerPoint, uh, that PowerPoint and a Zoom link. It was a PowerPoint training and they would send that to a group of people who were going through the, this training and they wouldn't join cuz the whole thesis on this was just the, the participants will make it a good training, not facilitators. And so, uh, yeah, that talk about an MVP, they sold that. I think they, I think they got $50K in revenue just for like PowerPoints and Zoom links. Um, which is amazing. Really cool and helped them kind of like say, okay, people actually, this is actually adding value. This is real. If you fast forward a couple years on that, they had a variety of customers, mostly ex-consultants who were kind of bringing their teams onto it, but they had a kind of a bunch of different shapes of customers. And these customers all had different properties to them. They were in different industries and they had different, like, Success rates, different willingness to pay. They were, some were using it a ton, some used it a couple times and then didn't follow up with it. And they were like, okay, cool. And then some, some people bought it super fast and others didn't. And so at that point they had kind of run out of ex-consultants to reach out to. And like they tried to reach out to ex-Deloitte, my brother's at Deloitte. They tried to reach out to ex-Deloitte people. Ex-Deloitte people didn't care. It just like didn't, didn't resonate. With them like it resonates with McKinsey, Bain, BCG for make up your own reason. We won't go into that.
We'll leave that alone. Yeah.
Yeah. We'll just skip on past that.
Okay.
But, but they're in that state. And so for them, figuring out what to do next was, and was basically, okay, we have customers across the pull intensity scale. We didn't have the words for it at this time, but this is kind of how we thought it through. We have customers across this intensity scale. We have to figure out like where to grow from here, given them can't keep doing this. And it doesn't even make sense because some of these customers, we have to push really hard to get them to buy. Others pull. They look similar, they look different in weird ways, and it's not entirely obvious what makes some pull really hard and others not. And so the process that we went through was to look at their, the people who pulled the hardest and compare and contrast them with everyone else to say, oh, and, and, you know, the initial hypothesis was, oh, maybe it's really big companies. Oh, maybe it's this other thing. Maybe it's this other thing. And as you kind of compare and contrast, you're like, no, it's not quite that. No, it's not quite that. And what it wound up being was that it basically was a, a L&D team, learning and development team, where they had to basically radically scale their amount of training they were delivering. Hmm. And they didn't have facilitators, enough facilitators or enough budget for facilitators to do that. So they, it was like in that situation, people were basically 5 out of 5 pull and everyone else was 2 or 3 where it was kind of a longer sales cycle. It was basically 100x more effort for them at least. To get the deal done. And, you know, close rates were probably lower and kind of success after that was a little bit lower, I would assume too. And so the entire, like, they've grown very fast since this realization. And it was basically a, the process of eliminating 4 and below and figuring out what actually causes the 5. Yeah.
Let's, let's, uh, I think that's a good place to go and maybe, uh, get closer to wrapping on this conversation. Either using Sparkwise or using other examples, it sounds like the process here for identifying the 5, like the, the most intense point on the scale is you're having sales calls, you're doing outreach. What are you, what are you looking at when you're going through this? Or what would you say founders should be, should be watching?
Yeah, you want to watch how they behave during and after the conversation. And it's just like how much, so early on your kind of hypothesis is gonna be wrong. All your words are gonna be wrong. And so what you're looking for are like just those like lean in moments of like, wait a second, you can do what? Right? Where basically 90% of the sales call is wasted time, kind of counterproductive, but there's a moment when it clicks and they're like, oh, okay, if it, if, if you can do that. Let's talk more about that. That's a signal of pull. As you kind of go on, what you're looking for are people who, right, like, don't just say nice words, but they like really, they're like, oh my gosh, I need this today. When everyone else would kind of be weird, they're kind of like, oh yeah, this is great. This is great. And so what you're doing along the way is just, and you're not going to the whiteboard and theorizing, you're comparing and contrasting real people. In their situations against each other to work your way to understand what intense pull really is.
And does this, is there, uh, what's the connection? Like, that sounds mostly on the sales side. Like you are, um, you're having sales calls, you are after the sales call doing some, like, you know, either rewatching the calls or taking notes on it. Um, maybe having a peer founder like give you your, give you their perspective after they've watched it. Is there a piece on the like cold outbound as well that, that can be an indicator of, of where it is? Or is it all in the conversations?
I think like most people are over-rotating on cold outbound messaging when reality eventually, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess I've seen your outbound message.
Just, yeah. Stop rotating there, Robert.
Yeah.
Stop rotating.
You are, Uh, because at, at the early stage, it is getting somebody onto a call is some sort of a signal, but it's not that much of a signal and changing messaging and that kind of stuff, right? You can just go around in loops in that. What matters is, do they, what really matters, what we're really optimizing for is do they rip the product out of our hands pre-sale and then post-sale use it and would be insane to churn, and they are putting forward most of the effort there. The most important piece of that is what happens post-sale. Do they get to be like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. I, I never, I will never churn from this. Right? How do we get them there? That's what we're really optimizing for. And so, you know, that just takes some time to figure out, takes a lot of reps. And so we can kind of optimize upstream of that. We can kind of, you know, optimize for pull upstream of that until we have the, the real retention indicators, the real success indicators.
Yeah. And thinking about it as a system, like the outbound only is important either if your bottleneck is getting to 5 to 10 sales calls a week or if your calls are not with the people who are becoming fives. And so it's just the loop back there and making sure you're targeting the right people with the right message. Anything else, Rob?
You know, you're right.
One other thing that I actually, I wanted to read just in case it's helpful for anybody, and I'm grabbing a couple snippets from the end of it. You write, it would be amazing if we could all just start on day one having found intense pull. Some people do that. They just find something and boom. Founders usually start with low pull or no pull and can't get anyone to buy anything. Or we get somewhere, $100K, $500K, $5 million even, With that, with moderate pull, but it still feels like we're pushing. Basically, in all cases, there are clues of possible intense pull. For example, one customer buys weirdly fast or someone really leans in and part of a sales call. Wait, you can do what? A founder's job is to take those clues and form them into a new pull hypothesis, then unfold toward intense pull. This might require changing ICPs, messaging, or something more dramatic. I thought that there was actually a piece that I, that I, that I took out of that for brevity that I probably should have left, which is basically like, and you end up hating yourself when you're stuck in the like low to no pull. But that's where a lot of, you know, a lot of founders are. Anything, what would you say to the founder who maybe like has some pull, has moderate pull, has low pull? Like what would you, what message do you have for them or tips or anything?
Yeah, I think what I've seen is that we will just kind of suffer along for a while and you don't get bonus points for suffering longer. What, and, and obviously like it's, it's, yes, changing something is hard, but push, once you realize that pull is kind of on an exponential scale, you really should be focused on, okay, who has very intense pull right now? How do I find that right now? Not like who might have intense pull in a year, not who kind of like has kind of lukewarm pull. This is the entire game is figuring out where there is intense demand. And so I would say this should be priority one. Because this, as we've talked about, generates everything else. It generates what product you should pitch. It generates what they are going to expect out of the product. It is going to determine how fast you're capable of growing. Mm-hmm. And so figuring this out and not continuing to just like slog it out and hope something changes is the game.
Yeah. I like the clarity that you brought into that.
Like, let me turn it to you, right?
Like in your case, wait a second, Rob, I didn't sign up for this.
Yeah.
You're getting it.
In your case, right? Yeah. You have life force to expend and you have time and you're building a business and you're trying to do this. You can continue to close 3 out of 5. Yeah. And that, you know, that can, you could build a nice business off of that. You can keep closing contracts, but it's going to be a ton of your effort. And you're going to look around and be like, and at some point you'll have the realization that holy cow, the business could be, could have been here by now. If I had just found people who ripped the product out of my hands, knowing that they exist. But I just kind of focused on the 3 out of 5s because it was what I was comfortable with because it, you know, da da da, right? And like, I don't— and think of the kind of difference between where you would be if everyone was a 3 out of 5 versus if everyone was a 5 out of 5, right? It is an exponential difference. I don't want you to wake up a year from now. And look at where you are and how much effort you'd have to put in to get there versus where you could be, right? Like, I, this is, this is like some of the core of my developing thesis is that it's actually easier to build a fast-growing company than it is to build a slow-growing one. And this makes sense once you understand that pull is on an exponential scale.
Yeah, totally. Uh, I feel like I have already fast-forwarded 2 years and I'm waking up having wished that I would've started from day one looking at, uh, you know, looking for that exponential pull. But, uh, your, your ideas, you should have developed them a long time ago, Rob.
Um, someone else should have done that. Like, why, why does this require an 80 IQ person? Like, there are smarter people out there. Why are we— why do I have to do this?
Um, let's, uh, anything else you wanna, uh, you wanna add onto this, uh, Rob? Or do we want to hit, we've got a couple mailbags that I, that I think are worth—
Yeah, let's hit the mailbags.
Okay. Uh, so you, you got one. Um, hey Rob, I'm a huge fan of the Physics of Startups. I think, uh, they meant to write, hey Rob and RC. Uh, can't explain how incredibly helpful it's been. Uh, I've conducted 50+ pull-style interviews and have likely not yet perfected it, but I'm struggling to see pull everywhere. When I talk to potential ICPs, I often get hazy answers when I ask them what the most urgent task on their to-do list and why they haven't accomplished it. Am I approaching this correctly? Uh, more broadly, any tips for seeing pull everywhere around you?
Yeah, so there's a couple misconceptions in here that I want to hit, and I think this is important because if you just go out and do pull interviews, which by the way is not a thing. There's no such thing as a pull interview, uh, you're, you're, you're going to get the same thing that you get out of discovery interviews, which is nothing. Uh, and so, uh, or you get information that is like not super useful. And so my suggestion here, if you're in this situation, is twofold. First, don't do interviews. If you don't have a pull hypothesis, you won't really get one through interviews. You will get one by doing the work and observing where pull might be in the work. By going and getting firsthand knowledge rather than secondhand knowledge from interviews. Hmm. That's thing one. Thing two is that pull is not everywhere. You will not see pull everywhere and you should not expect to see pull everywhere. You will see when you watch somebody or when you, when you observe what people do, what they are trying to do, you will generally see, right? Like the calendar, basically. You'll see, you'll see them spending time doing things which are their supply. You will infer their to-do list based on the to-do list in their brain, in their soul, based on that. And there are only certain cases in which those things are in conflict. Either they're doing something they don't want to be doing, right? In which case, that is kind of the coping pull we have talked about, or they're not doing the project they'd really like to do on their to-do list. They're doing something else. They are blocked. And so those are the, those are the things you are looking for. Hmm. That said, most of the time customers cannot explain this to you super well. I call this the hairball. Then, right? Where it's, it's, if, if you ask them kind of like what they're trying to do, it doesn't come out in a coherent pull framework. Most of the time it comes out in a lot of stuff, just a lot of words and concepts because they can't communicate this well and it's not their job to. Yeah. So there's a mess and our job as founders is to kind of look into the mess that they say that we observe and try to create form out of it. We form a pull hypothesis based on the raw data that we are seeing based on the things we're hearing, the things we're seeing. And we kind of choose the shape of each of the components and the kind of shape of the whole thing and then test that shape. But the arc here is of taking the raw inputs and forming that into a pull hypothesis that then we can show and see how intense the pull is. They are kind of quote unquote experts on the demand side, but even then they're not, they're, they, they just kind of like can give us a stream of consciousness. They can kind of Give us things from there and then they can react to things we, we put in front of them.
I like that. Yeah. The value of reaction versus like proactively articulating. Well, we are at the top of the hour. Why don't we save this? Shout out to Dr. Jason Radford. We're going to get to an email that you sent to Rob that I loved and that I immediately talked earlier about changing cold or changing cold outbound anyways. Dr. Radford's message led to me immediately changing the way that I was, I was reaching out. That and a random message that I got from a momfluencer on Instagram that I thought was maybe the most effective outbound that I've ever received. But maybe we can get into that in the future. Rob, anything we want to add?
I think that's it.
No. Okay. If anybody wants to work with Rob, we'll drop the link in the show notes. And even though we just finished the PMF Camp, but you're the, the async resources and one-on-one with Rob is still an option and we'll put the link to Rob's blog as well. All right. We'll catch everybody next week.
