If your product hasn't taken off (radical simplification)

Hey Rob, good to see you, man.

How you doing?

I'm doing great. You had a big presentation yesterday for an incubator.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of fun. I'm doing a lot of podcasts now. I've gotten kind of punched in the face on a couple of them by people who are not familiar with anything I talk about. And so it's like I'm speaking French, but this one went well. And so that was good.

But bigger news is you're joining the barbell club.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. I got tired of staring at myself in the mirror and just being constantly disappointed and the look on my girlfriend's face every time she sees me. So, joined a gym and getting after it, doing something other than cardio, which is my happy place. But anyways, hey Rob, before we, today's post, we're gonna get into something that's super practical for founders at a bunch of different levels.

The post is called, If your product hasn't taken off yet, radical simplification, the upstream fix.

We're going to get into like Rob has basically simplified. If you feel like you're not hockey sticking basically, or if you feel like it's not easy to sell, there's two reasons that we're going to get into that Rob's kind of distilled from the pull framework and we'll jump into that. But maybe first a little bit of, you know, PSA housecleaning stuff. Book course, can you just give us the context on what's going on?

Yeah, so the book is still available for preorder. If you haven't preordered it yet, please do. If you have, or if you're not entirely sure, just do it again just to be sure. That's, uh, um, and you know, order it for your VC that if you, if you have an investor or for your founder club or whatever, uh, uh, I think you will actually.

I find it a very digestible way to get all of these con—

to build an intuition for the concepts that we're, we're writing about and talking about here in a kind of complete way. So yeah, the other thing is I, a couple weeks back, I think we did a podcast about it, but I was out in Utah with the Sandbox Fellowship and Master's Program in Entrepreneurship, and they just had me record 5 like course sections, class sections for their team on everything from like pull to how to run sales calls, to how to get people to talk to you, to how to structure and design a sales process.

And so that was like super fancy and professionally recorded.

I can't give it away, like based on the agreement there, but we are gonna start selling it on my website now. And so before the book comes out, it's gonna be a certain way and a certain price, which is probably gonna be less than after the book comes out. So if you really want to deep dive into it, like I think there's like 7 hours of lectures, workshops, whatnot. And I think you'll find it super valuable. So check it out.

Yeah. And on the book thing, just a quick reminder, if you buy and then upload a screen grab, you get access to the Claude skill, which I use literally daily. Like it's literally hit kind of the accelerator on how fast I'm iterating and learning. So I cannot recommend enough that, you know, people get access to that ASAP. And then Rob, what are they going to get out of this course? Or like, what do they get out of the course that they don't already get from consuming all your other stuff?

So the course is basically what I've previously called like PMF Camp.

The 5 sessions from that are what I put in here.

And what you get from there are a bunch of examples.

Of like actual sales calls, actual outreach, like actual all of these things. And the thing that people find super useful from this experience is I've structured it to ask specific questions where your intuitions are going to be backwards.

Hmm.

And so that's a really, really helpful way for every single piece of like a sales process, why people buy, product market fit, like all those kinds of things for for it to test you, your intuitions, and when it's not right, it'll help you kind of recalibrate.

And so this is good for you if you're listening, or for a lot of people who are listening, your startups are taking off now, which is sick, but you're trying to find ways to communicate to your team to like get them to have the intuition.

And this is a great way to get other people up to speed. They can binge it at 2x, they can, uh, you know, rewatch it and whatnot. And a lot of people say it's a kind of like mental conversion experience.

Yeah, yeah. Spiritual conversion experience. Spiritual, spiritual, yeah.

Awesome, all right, well, we won't beleaguer that anymore. We'll leave the links in the bio to make it easy for folks to find. All right, if your product hasn't taken off yet, Radical Simplification, The Upstream Fix. Let me start with something you write early in this post, and then Rob, we'll jump into like your thoughts on this and why it's on your mind. You write, if your product hasn't taken off, It feels like there are a million reasons this might be the case and a gazillion things you could try. When this is the case, you throw spaghetti at the wall under the banner of experimentation. Most of the time nothing works and it's not clear why. If you're like me, you start believing the real problem is you.

Uh, all right, Rob Snyder, like, why is this one in particular like, or yeah, why is this one on your mind? And then let's talk about the different contexts in which, uh, this applies to founders.

I, so I just find that, I looked back at my conversations with founders over the last like month to try to figure out the thing that was on everybody's mind. And it was this challenge of feeling like there are a million possible things that could be the cause of us not doing that hockey stick growth.

And when I looked at the actual situations, I saw a ton of different startups and we're gonna like work through a bunch of them. It's always the same. It's, we can kind of break them into two actionable things, not a million. Because when you think there's a million, right, there's so much you could possibly do.

It's overwhelming.

You're going to change things.

And by default, they're probably not going to work because I don't know why, why would they?

Yeah. It reminds me one of the, one of the most popular slides that you put in your first presentation was like, basically WTF is going on right now. And it was like just a combination of all the random thoughts that you have when something's frustrating. It's like, maybe I should, maybe it's my website. Should I spend time on like building a community? It's, you know, there's 100, is it, you know, competitor benchmarking? Like there's 1,000 different things.

You distill it into 2. Let's talk now about this second part.

Like who is this for? Like where, You know, you went back and you reviewed, you know, a bunch of sales calls to try to figure out like what are the things that are going on? Is it always that it's a, you know, zero revenue startup that, you know, doesn't have traction? Like what, who are we talking about here?

No, this is, this has actually been for, yeah, so it has been for that kind of startup, but it's most often somebody who's at 50, 100, 500, even a million. And growth is just brutal, or it's not easy or intuitive. Maybe you have a variety of customers, some who are really happy and bought fast, others who don't, you know, who aren't necessarily super happy, haven't bought fast.

And it's just, it's like, in my experience, it was looking at a bunch of startups that were taking off, looking at how hard I was working and saying, I have no idea how I could possibly work harder.

And I have no idea. I don't actually know what to change in order to hit that hockey stick to grow faster or why we're not growing as fast.

Yeah. So the experience of the founder in that case is I have sales, I have a real business, but it doesn't like, I know I'm, I don't know, is it, I'm on the path to burnout? Is it, I'm just frustrated with the business?

Like what's, you know, It's just, it is, I think anybody listening knows this, like you just, it's one of my friends once told me he stopped checking LinkedIn because he stopped wanting to see Series A announcements.

Like he just couldn't see any more Series A or B announcements of startups that were taking off because it was just like, I can't, like, what is going, why isn't this taking off? I've tried a bunch of things.

I'm doing a bunch of things and it's not clear how to make this go vertical.

And so, So yeah, and like the good news is that the pull framework, um, like all the work we're doing here to try to create a very precise model of what causes a startup to take off, it like clicked in my brain that there's actually two things that it could be. It, in this case, it always kind of comes down to two things. It's either you haven't figured out who has pull or you have figured it out and you're doing something to prevent them from buying.

And those are the two causes and they, they could, we'd go through both of them, but it's like, it's figure out which one of those it is and like attack that immediately.

And what you'll see is, okay, cool. That's how, that's the path to, to, if not like, you know, Anthropik's growth curve, it's a path to a way faster growth curve.

Yeah.

Let's, let's get into those.

And there's some non-intuitive things about, about both of them.

So reason number 1, you haven't figured out who has pull and is weird not to buy your product.

What is it, what is the founder who has not yet figured out who has pull, what is their experience like? Or are there gradations of that? Like, what is that like?

Yeah, so you may or may not have customers.

So like we had a session yesterday with a startup, a security startup that's, you know, well past the million ARR range. They've kind of like grown very fast.

Um, but what they had was they had a variety of customers, some who were really happy and bought fast, others who weren't, and it wasn't clear what the difference was across them. And so growth was slow because they were targeting kind of everybody. Mm-hmm. Like, like they were targeting all of those people and it wasn't clear, okay, should we, do we make the product better for these people? Do we make the, for the people who aren't happy? Like, do we find some way to make them use it more to do whatever? Right? And, and so what they realized was that, okay, cool. Like, uh, we could do all that work, but there are already people who are pulling our product. And so instead of saying like, here's what we think our ICP is, and it could cover all of these people, for them, the unlock was how do we narrow our ICP just to the people who we know have pull before and after they buy and just focus on them versus all the people that we could, that we have historically been able to sell to.

Yeah. And, um, what did that look like for that particular startup? Did that mean firing customers? Did it mean just like the changing their outbound to the only focus on the ones that they, they determined really did have pull?

Yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't. So some people fire customers when you do this. It doesn't mean you have to, it just means you, look, you will likely lose them eventually and you won't care as much about it and you can decide whether to proactively fire them or not.

In this startup's case, these people just weren't really using the product. It was kind of shelfware for them.

And so it's like, okay, cool. We're just not gonna invest more effort in trying to get them to use the product because it's just not a fit for them. And so, uh, but then what they did, right, is they said, okay, now we actually know who exactly has pull, which means we need to only focus on those people. So they came up with a much narrower target account list for who they were selling to and just focused on them and kind of retooled their entire sales process and demo and all of these things and even pricing. To just focus on that kind of company.

Yeah. Is that knowable in advance? Like if you were to go back? No. Okay. Tell, tell us what, why is that not knowable and how do you decrease the amount of time that it takes to where you understand what's going on?

Um, you, so there, the, there are things that you cannot predict. That wind up being important. And so for this, this company, they had signed a really big public customer as one of their first customers who wrote, like, used the product, was satisfied for it, but all, but they only used it for a certain amount of time. The project was done. They didn't continue needing it for reasons that this startup wouldn't have known in advance.

And maybe even the customer wouldn't have known in advance.

Right.

And, and so after you do, after you like work with a series of customers, What you're gonna realize is that some are happy, some are not, and most of the reasons for that are not in your control. And you, like, there are things that are maybe obvious after the fact, but they're not at all obvious in advance because there's a, like, it, you always feel stupid after you figure out what they are.

Oh, obviously it was that.

But then, right, what you forget is there were a million possible variables, most of which you couldn't have imagined in advance.

Mm-hmm. And the ones that you imagined were relevant in advance turned out not to be relevant.

And so, um, this happens at every kind of stage along the way. When you start trying to sell early on, you have a hypothesis of who might have pull, and then it turns out some of them don't for, for reasons you couldn't have anticipated. And it turns out you're, you're, you have to change your hypothesis, who you're targeting until you find somebody who actually does buy. And then Of the people who buy, not all of them are successful. So you have to change your poll hypothesis again and like, and, and it's just kind of iteration based on what reality tells you versus what the whiteboard and, and your brain can process in advance.

Yeah.

There, there is, uh, thinking about like my, one of my customers that I, I would say it falls into the category of like they're satisfied, but I don't think there's like really a future. Like I don't, I don't think this is gonna, um, I, looking back at it, I think there were things that were unknowable, but if I would've better defined and required that I understood their pull in advance, it would've been easier for me to like foresee that, yeah, this was a project I wanted to do, but it likely was different from, or it just, it was different than what I thought was selling. And so there's something there that's predictive. But not, uh, there's also a bunch of things that you're just gonna, you know, discover along the way.

Yeah.

And like, we're, you're always gonna early on sell if to most people who are like, yeah, I think I'll actually buy this. Early on, I'm like, hell yeah, why not? Let's do it. Let's, let's do it. I, the future me can, can take this one on the chin, but today's me is gonna celebrate this. Um, and so it's like, that's, that's normally what happens, but like zooming out here, If you are in the situation where you're not taking off and you can't identify who has pull, basically who would be weird not to buy, that is the only thing that matters. Hmm.

Yeah.

Because nothing downstream, like everything else is downstream of that. Your, like your outreach, your approach to go-to-market, your pricing, your demo, like all of that is downstream of this.

Mm-hmm.

And so if you don't have that, then that is the bottleneck and you have to figure that out first.

Yeah. If you know that and you're confident, like now this startup is basically like in the stage where, um, they know exactly who that person is.

Everything else is just debugging their approach to selling to that person.

Basically, how do we waste the least amount of our time and kind of shoot ourselves in the foot less? As we try to sell to them.

Yeah. So, and delivered, I imagine. Yes.

At this point, like the factory that you talk about. So yeah, that's reason number 2. You figured out who has pull, they're weird not to buy your product, but you are preventing them from buying.

I think that's such an interesting choice of words, Rob. What, can you just, Briga said, when you, you're not saying you're not selling to them, right? You're saying something actually like different. You are actively preventing them from buying. What, What is that? What does it look like? What does it feel like? What do you see founders doing when they're, when they're preventing someone from buying?

Uh, yeah, so we talked last week or a couple weeks ago about the difference between something that causes them to buy and something that causes them not to buy. It turns out that most of what we do in our sales process is in the category of causes them not to buy.

It basically convinces them we are not a fit.

And so outreach we do convinces them not to meet with us. In the sales call, the, the execution, the way we execute our sales call convinces them we are not a fit for them. The demo we show, the way we describe our product, all of these things almost always convince this person not to buy and make the reasons invisible to us. And so, uh, like pull is what causes somebody to buy. Pull and something that fits their pull is what causes somebody to buy. What we tend to do is, um, like basically our actions can generally only be negative. Uh, uh, they're, they're, they can, they, they're not going to convince them to buy because they're, they're kind of like trying to do something in their world. So what, so, you know, if you watch somebody's sales call, we did the sales call recordings last week. What you'll see is that most of what Harold did in those calls, or much of what he did, were actually counterproductive to what his goal was.

And to like, to the customer doing what they need. So, so yeah, it's, it's, um, uh, the takeaway is that by default, once you know what pull is, you can design everything downstream to basically fit pull, how you do outreach, who you do outreach to, how you approach the sales call, how you approach the sales process, how you approach onboarding and delivery to fit pull.

And anything you do that doesn't fit pull effectively adds, at best adds wind resistance.

Yeah.

And that causes people not to buy, but in most of the cases, actively convinces them not to buy, actively works against the purchase.

Yeah.

So what, um, you, you write some, I'll just read from what you wrote here. Uh, I, I would conservatively estimate that 25 out of 30 minutes in the typical startup sales call I review convinces someone with pull not to buy. They don't need our theory of the market or our differentiation statement, or to explain how their how their process works in detail, and they certainly don't know, need to know how to configure our product.

Are those the most common, or how would a founder know if, you know, if they were to like to step back and think about auditing their own sales process, how would they know if what they're doing is, you know, streamlined or if it's preventing or where it's preventing a sale?

Yeah, some heuristics just from a couple sales calls I've reviewed before this.

Um, or if you can't fill out a pull framework based on a recorded sales call, you actually don't know what the pull is based on the sales call. That's a signal that everything you are doing is going to be counterproductive in that call. It just, it would be weird if you weren't counterproductive because you don't know what they're trying to do, what options they've considered and why their options aren't good enough. So you can't, you can't pitch the right thing there.

Um, And then the second thing is just to look at how much of the time do you spend talking or walking through your product?

If you are spending the majority of the time explaining your theory about the product, explaining what the product does and how it works, you are probably convincing them not to buy. Yeah.

Is there a heuristic around, like when you watch a call, you're like, okay, this is too much time or how long?

Anything more than 2 minutes of like explaining the product. If you don't give a conceptual overview of the product first, that's like 60 seconds max and pause to see if that fits what they're looking for. And then if your demo on the first call is longer than 1 minute, maybe 2 max.

Uh, I tend to see it's like 20 minutes in the average call that I look at.

It is just, it's working against you to such a massive degree. Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's, there's probably also a feel to it. Like you finish calls and you, they feel fine. You, you talk about this. Yeah. They feel fine and then they don't convert. Like that's probably also a pretty good signal that you— Yeah, they don't—

I think, I think the main thing is like, do they pull, AKA do they, do they request the next step?

Versus do you suggest the next step? Does the buyer initiate? Do they actually act?

All right, Rob, we're going to have to wrap this one up a little abruptly. Sorry everybody that I'm not better at time management. Anything, Rob, you want to add?

Nope.

No. All right. We'll catch everybody next week. Bye.