Pain Points vs. PULL Points

Hey Rob, good to see you, man.

410-pound deadlift.

We're, we're jumping straight into the thing that listener really needs to know, which is, are you actually getting stronger? Are you, you have, yeah, you had plateaued there for a moment. So don't worry, listener, Rob's back in the saddle.

I'm back. I'm back. The lesson here is that I had tried a bunch of different things and it turns out, you know, I've like started drinking whole chocolate milk, like a ton of it and like I need, and, and it turns out that it was just my grip and specifically it was I needed chalk on my hands. And so I've done all of these. It's very much like how we do things as founders where it's like we have this, we have a problem and we go into this existential doom loop of all the possible things and it's like, oh no, I just needed chalk on my hands. All right, we're good.

I like that among the options that you considered for your pull of lifting heavier things was drink a lot of chocolate milk.

I'm, by the way, I am now hooked on it. So I am, I am, that is, that is just a part of life now, and my wife finds that absurd. But it is, it is one of a list of many things that she finds absurd about me. So we're going to keep rolling.

That's amazing. Well, hey, we've got an interesting, pretty practical post today. We're going to, we're digging into this one's called Pull Points versus Pain Points and Schrödinger's Date, which is kind of a hilarious analogy that you work into this. Before we jump into that, a quick personal request. If folks are listening to this and they have purchased Rob Snyder's book, if they care about Rob Snyder's well-being, could you go on to Amazon and leave a review for Rob Snyder? It'll help with— Rob, you know more about this, but I think it helps with the ranking on Amazon and the discoverability of the book.

Yeah, yeah, there's apparently a trigger which is in a couple of days where if the book doesn't get a certain number of reviews, by that date, it doesn't get an algorithm bump. I was told this by somebody who was connected to a Speaker of the House of the United States. We will talk about that another time. That was very, very strange. Um, but this person was like, listen, if there's one thing you do, it is you need to get X number of reviews. I think it was like 30 or 40 reviews on Amazon within 15 days of it coming out. It's like, oh gosh. And now I have a new life's mission.

And so, gotcha.

Please do that.

Yeah, we'll leave, we'll leave the link at the very top of the notes. Please get on there and leave a review. And also, if you haven't bought the book, you should buy the book. I spent, I was on the plane, I'm flying up, I flew up to New York and I think I spent literally 3 hours reading one chapter of it over and over. Not just because reading is really hard for me, it's because I was like rewriting my business like while I was going through it. And it's just, it's a great book. It goes super deep into a lot of this stuff. There's many things that Rob Snyder has in the book that are complementary to what it's not just, you're not gonna read the same stuff. It's definitely worth the time. Rob Snyder, let's jump into today's. Can, so we're talking about pull points versus pain points. We're not, we talk about pain points a lot and why they are like not the right thing to focus on. Can you give us the quick thesis on this and then we'll get into like what should founders be focusing on instead?

Pain points are not necessarily priorities. And so when you find somebody who has a pain point, you are going to think, because we've all been gaslit into thinking that pain points are what matters, you're gonna think, oh wow, pain point, therefore buy, therefore purchase. And there is almost no causal link there between pain point and purchase. And so, um, We're told to look for pain points. We're told to do discovery interviews to find pain points and problems. We're told to ask about pain points in sales calls. When you do, you find them and then you think they're going to buy. They don't think they're going to buy. And that leads to chaos downstream.

Yeah. And, uh, chaos in the form of wasted time, like, uh, developing features, developing products, you know, how else do— how have you seen— and I mean, you did this, Rob, with your startup, like your first startup, you found real pain points. Like what, what was wrong about that approach? Why did you make the decision to go after it? And then what did it look like in practice when you were pursuing a pain point to build a business around?

Yeah. So the challenge is like most things that sound right, the logic is self-contained within it. And so you, you You're like, oh, I'm looking for pain points. I have found pain points. I have built a product that offers a solution to those pain points and it offers a lot of value and ROI. And within that, the logic holds, the logic makes sense. But the important thing is that doesn't lead to purchases and it has barely any relationship to what leads to purchases. And so you wind up being extremely confident about something that is totally wrong. And so in my case, we built a full product. We got design partners signed up onto it. We spent a year working with those design partners to make it, you know, to make the product better, to get their testimonials. And then we couldn't sell it to others, but we misinterpreted the reasons why the startup wasn't taking off, why we weren't selling. And specifically, we thought it was because we weren't good at sales. Or the, and then the second one, which equally wrong, the product wasn't ready yet. And so this just led to a point where we were burning cash, hiring more developers, bringing on salespeople, sales coaches by totally misinterpreting what was happening.

Yeah. And I was there for, uh, the, a lot of the frustration with that first business. And then you found, you know, what do we do with this, Rob? Like your, your business turned a corner and it was a pain point and it's, you know, that you were solving, but it, but what made that pain point distinct? And maybe, maybe we hit that. Do we want to introduce pull points here, Rob? And we can just like lay, lay that out and then discuss the distinction there.

Yeah. So what I found was something that you know, you could put a Venn diagram around pain points and priorities, but like priorities are more important than pain points. It just happened to be a coincidence that it was a pain point. That wasn't the relevant thing. And so, and so let me first explain Schrödinger's state, which I got a lot of joy out of, out of writing this, which is, so when you're on, let's just say you're on a sales call. But this is also true for discovery interview or whatever it is. I don't like discovery interviews. We can come back to that another time. When you're on a sales call, you will ask about pain points. Oh, what about your current process is painful? And they'll say, oh my gosh, the workflow is super tedious and annoying. It takes forever and it has all of these implications, right? That's a pain point. Then what happens is you pitch your product and you will get what sounds like an enthusiastic response.

Wow.

This seems, yeah, this seems like it would totally solve that pain point. And then what you're not hearing is I'm prioritizing this right now. Therefore, let me buy— we talked a couple of weeks ago about what pull feels like. Them being enthusiastic is not pull. Them saying, I need this right now. How do I get started? Is them pulling. And so what's happening here is because you're focused on pain points rather than priorities or pull. You are getting what, what's in your head is like, this person's gonna buy. What's in their head is not that. It's not necessarily that. It like might be, but it's only by accident that it's that. And so I, so I, when I thought about this and I was like, oh, wait a second. This is like one of those sitcoms or, or like a, you know, TV show where there are two people out to dinner. And one of them is like very confident it's a date and the other has no idea it's a date and doesn't think it's a date. And, and so you can see that situation where both of them are like talking past each other.

Yeah.

One of them and one of them just thinks it's a pleasant conversation. The other thinks they're about to get married or whatever. And, and at the end of the date, one leans in, the other's like, whoa, wait a second. What the heck? And. And the, and that recasts the entire interaction, but that's basically like how all of our sales calls are when we are looking for pain points. It's that, that we're talking past each other and then we go, we lean in and they're like, whoa, wait a second. And so if your sales calls at the end feel awkward or if you get ghosted afterwards, well, this is what, this is why.

Hmm. Is Schrödinger's date— is that a thing or did you coin that? Is that— is that a Rob Snyder original? Yeah, that's what I— I love that analogy. And it gets to the core. You know, you alluded to this about why you hate Discovery interviews because that's just— it's like if you were to— if you were to take dozens of hours and just go on dates that— yeah, that are not set up to lead to a relationship or a sale.

Actually, that's a really good point, which is, which is like, what, what tends to happen is we go on a, like, we go on like an endless number of Schrödinger's dates as founders because we keep looking for pain points and keep thinking like, what am I? We, we misunderstand it. Like, what am I doing wrong? I am right. I need, and we, we interpret it like, oh, maybe I need to wear a top hat. I don't know. Like I'm doing something. I'm clearly doing something wrong on these dates. And we misinterpret it. It, it's just, that's, that's what the pain cave feels like is I feel like I'm being gaslit here. I have no idea what's going on.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I forget which startup this was. I think you did a public interview with them at one point, or maybe in the Founder Community, but they talked about how their, their process, and this will probably resonate with some, with some listener, was probably dozens or hundreds of interviews in the target space. You know, they had a full spreadsheet of the pain points that they were hearing. They force-ranked them, they looked at the frequency, and then, you know, they chose— I think you also write about this in the book, you know, and they choose like the 9 out of 10 that shows up all over the place, build a product around it, and then, 8 months or 12 months later discover that people are not willing to purchase. And just like feeling the difference between that and, you know, take an example of, you know, that you've talked about in the healthcare space and in the, you know, in the AI agent note-taker space where it's like one interaction with a person that pulls randomly. And, you know, one of those is like, it's literally like a 10-minute, like sometimes it's just a random, almost feels like a throwaway comment that somebody's like, oh, you can do that. Or your interaction that you write about from your first startup, which was the guy was like, look, I know you're trying to do this. I wish I could pay you to do this other thing. And then the business takes off because you actually start. And it's just like the way that one of them feels scientific, it feels data-driven, it feels logical. And the other one is like a sort of a happy coincidence that just boom, like lines up with, you know, with what somebody's actually willing to purchase.

Yeah, totally. Totally. And I think that, that brings us to, okay, so if we're not looking for pain points, what should we be looking for? Which is pull, right? And, and somebody, Doug, shout out to you. I don't know if you, you, you're our listener or not, but he, he months ago was like, pain points are stupid, create pull points. And I was like, that sounds great. And I drafted a blog post titled pull points and I didn't write anything in it for, for the past 3 months, but I finally had to finally thought about it. And, and so the pull framework is what we've all talked about, right? Like, it's, it's, instead of pain points, you're looking for pull, which is a priority, a project someone's trying to do right now, but their existing options prevent them from doing. They're unable to do the thing they're actually trying to do. And so what I found is there are two pull points that we are looking for. One is, they can't delay the project. The second is they can't do the project with their other options. So you can basically just like, that's a, it's an elegant way to, to fill out the, the POL framework on a call, which is like, basically saying, okay, why can't you avoid or delay the project? Like, why can't you, why can't you not do the pro— this? And then Why can't you do this by like with your existing options? Or aren't your existing options good enough? And when you do those things, so you figure out what the project is roughly, you figure out if these two pull points are present, and that's what discovery is. That fills out the pull framework for you.

Yeah. Can we, can you give an example to bring that to life? Like what does it look like? Pick a startup or your startup and what did it sound like to, you know, I can't delay this project and can't do it by other means. Like what did, what did that look look like.

Yeah, so like when we were doing the, when we were building the like employee retention software, it was, you'd basically, hey, they'd say, hey, yeah, we are trying to find ways to retain our employees without like adding burden to our managers who are already like stressed out. Say, okay, cool. Like, can you just delay this? Like, why, why do you need to do this now? And they'd be like, well, we've, we're like spending all the money we possibly can and on, on hiring, we literally can't spend another dollar on hiring. We, we, if we lose more employees, like we, we can't lose more employees. And I know we're losing employees for stupid reasons. It's like, okay, cool. That's like a, that's a why now? Why can't they delay the project? Um, and then it's like, okay, cool. But right. Can't you just. Do this yourself? Can't you just like, why, why can't your managers do it? And they're like, well, yeah, we tried. We have this thing that they're supposed to follow, but they're way too busy to follow it. And it's hard for them to remember. And so like, we need something that can automate this. And so, um, uh, and so you could kind of hear there, that's filling out the pull framework. That's them saying, you know, way to retain my employees. Um, because hiring is not right. Like we, We're, we haven't, we can't figure out hiring and we're losing employees for reasons that are going to really, really hurt us. Like we're going to have to, you know, we're going to have to like pay way more overtime. We're going to have to do all these different things that like are not acceptable to us. And so this is our number one priority right now, right now. And also we can't do this with other, with other options.

Yeah. And reading, um, you know, the way that you laid this out, it struck me both have to be sufficient. Like, so the, you know, obviously if there's no project, then the second one is irrelevant because, but the, but then not able to delay it. If they can delay it, they probably will delay it. Like it's not their number one priority. And then not, I think the place where I started being more critical with myself when I'm selling or trying to understand pull for, for my startup is on this second one. Can't do it by other means. And you write a little bit here about like, can somebody just— which will be relevant for some, some, some listener, can they just Claude code it? Like, is there, is there a, a different way of getting close enough? And why would they, you know, why would they purchase you? Anything you would add, especially on that second one, can't do by other means, that founders should be thinking about?

Yeah, this is a scary one to ask about on a sales call. Because, because you're worried, well, wait, why can't you just do it with cloud code? Right? Like, you're worried that you saying that's going to cause them to say, huh, I never considered that. Let me do that.

Right?

Let me try it. Um, uh, and so it's like, it feels when you're looking for pull points, it actually feels like you're convincing them not to buy, which, um, what you're actually doing is you're not trying to convince them to buy. You are leaning back and asking them to convince you that they have pull and are worth you investing your time into. And so, um, and so first, if they, if Claude Code is a good enough option and they haven't thought of it, they're not going to be a good customer of yours because eventually they're going to realize it and they're just gonna be like, wait a second, I could just, but right. And so if you're trying to sell to that kind of person, Most of the time they're going to be like, oh, I've— Clogged Code is good enough. So you're going to have low close rates. And then at some point they're going to realize they can just DIY it. And so you're going to have high churn. That's not ideal. So what you're looking for is a way to position your product either. I've seen two cases of this, uh, two different like permutations of this where it's like, okay, cool. We have to go to the people for whom Clogged Code is not an option. Or for, to the people where they've already tried Claude Code and run into something that they can't solve with Claude Code. And it's like, okay, cool. In both of those ca— what, what this is doing is it's forcing us to be very honest with ourselves and it's forcing us to hear reality from the potential customer about how they are considering their options so that we can just focus on people who do have pull and stop wasting our lives focusing on people who we would like to have pull.

Yeah, that's, that's fascinating. You know, and the way I've started integrating that into sales conversations, like for us with our, on our media side is like, okay, you're, you're trying to reach our demographic. Like, why aren't you just doing this through like Meta? And, or why, why, when, uh, why does, you know, search not work for you? And sometimes like if I get a wishy-washy answer, it's usually because that's good enough for them. But where it jumped out was in one case, it was like, it was talking with an agency and the agency's response was because their client actively has asked them to find other options that are outside of Meta. And so, in which case, like we sort of fit, you know, we go into that niche. There's other things to investigate, but that's the biggest one for us versus, you know, Claude.

Yeah, and I think we can leave it here, but the important thing is that you're not saying like, what are the, what don't you like about Meta? Right? What don't you like about Meta ads? They could fill out that list forever and still just keep using Meta ads. You're asking that question. That's almost like a confirmatory way. If they answer that question, that doesn't mean they actually have pull. Your question is like, well, why isn't Meta good enough? Isn't Meta good enough? Which requires them to kind of fight against you there to say, to say, to, to go against the current. You, you, you are almost opening a door for them and saying, here's the door. You, you, like, you tell, here's the easy way out. And they have to, they have to come back. And the good news is if they, if they're just like, yeah, Meta, yeah, Meta's great. No, not right. You are gonna spend a ton of your time trying to convince them to buy from you. And they almost certainly weren't. So you can just say, cool, when that's not the case, here are some examples of when that's not been the case. If any of these come up, reach out. And then what's going to happen is they're going to say, wow, thank you so much. Thank you for not leaning in to kiss me here. Right? You're not trying to sell me when I, when I actually don't have demand. And when this, one of those things happened, you've planted a flagpost so that when it, when one of those things happens, I'm going to come back to you and I'm going to buy in like 2 hours, the sales cycle's gonna be this versus now it's gonna be right, like 12 months plus that.

Yeah. Fascinating. Um, well, we're gonna have to drop here in a second. Um, I recommend people jump into the link and like check this blog out, uh, especially for just like spend some time thinking about pull points in the context of your, of your business and then read through, um, you know, what Rob writes about the, the way to phrase that question. And there's, you know, you draw, you draw some subtle differences between like what are the limitations of the options you're considering, which is like kind of looking for a gap to sneak through versus are your existing options good enough? What, you know, you just talk through that. But it was helpful for me reading through this. The thing that might be helpful for other folks as well. Rob Snyder, you're going to have to drop for another, another thing you got. But anything either on how founders should apply this or other thoughts for folks to leave them with?

No, I think that's good.

Okay. Awesome. And a quick reminder, please leave a review of Power Pull. Um, link will be in the show notes. Thanks. Uh, thanks everybody. We'll catch y'all next week.