Pipeline: Getting to 5-10 calls / week | w/ Rob Snyder

Well, Rob, welcome back. Here we go.

Doing it. We're doing it. Let's go.

We're doing it. And we, this is like a whoa Nelly kind of a conversation that we're getting in today. We're getting like real deep into, into pipeline. Like it's, we're, we're going to, yeah, we're diving in the deep end.

We are. And I, the good news is I called you earlier this week and I was like, yo, I never want to talk about pipeline again. And here we are. 2 days later.

Yeah, the pipeline conversation, hopefully to end all pipeline conversations. You closed this week's vlog by saying hopefully you never talk about it again. I have bad news for you, Rob, like pipeline's probably not going to go away, but hopefully that this, this alleviates some of the constant pressure you get on around pipeline. We'll get into that here in a moment. I want to start out this conversation though, just like talking about what we're doing. I think, I think your view on that has like evolved and sharpened a little bit, but what are we doing here with, with your blog, with these conversations?

Yeah. So my goal with this is just to try to understand why and how startups work at the like deepest possible level. I'm trying to kind of build a unifying theory framework. How, why do startups work? Therefore, what should we do as entrepreneurs? The reason I think this is important is because it does not seem like anybody has done this to the level that would have been useful to me as a founder. There's like a lot of interesting data points and different frameworks out there that are for a variety of different things, for processes, methodologies, and you know, there's so many of them. There's so much noise that I was just trying to get to the fundamental basics of like, why does anyone buy anything? What do we build? Why do startups grow fast? And it turns out that, I don't know, as we've been exploring this, as I've been writing about it for years now, some kind of interesting foundational things have popped up, like the repeatable case study, the case study factory, demand versus supply. All of these I think are kind of foundational components. And what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to connect them and fill out this, I don't know, canvas that we're working on here of how do all the pieces fit together and how should I be thinking about this? I just don't think, at least I haven't seen theory get pushed forward very, in a very coherent way. And so that's what I'm trying to do. What we're doing is, I don't know, we're hanging out once a week and that's awesome. And so we're talking and, and we'll see, you know, it's, it's cool to get feedback. On it. What we're trying to do in all of this is we're trying to advance the kind of framework and theory that's underneath this and poke at it from a bunch of different directions.

Yeah. Yeah. You, you combine kind of like a couple unique characteristics. And from my point of view, one of them is you're a, you're a founder, like you're actually like building stuff. Second, you are a voracious consumer of basically like the anthology of business literature. Like, I think you've made it through the majority of it. And you're also somebody who like just doesn't accept things at face value. While I was still stuck in the land of Agile is a great approach to building products, you were, you were very, you were light years ahead of me being like, yeah, actually, no, that, that, that stuff doesn't work. I've tried it. And, and, you know, you were observing, having been like your friend through parts of your founder journey, like your I guess I, we've known each other since you've, since you launched your first business. Seen your, it's kind of like it was born of your frustration with, there's all this like these popular theories out there that, that didn't work for you and that you didn't think were working for others as well, but there wasn't a better alternative out there.

Yeah, it is. It's, it's, yeah, I didn't set out to do this. I just set out to build a startup and in the process of doing that, like we kind of suffered for 2 years in, in hell, just not figuring anything out. And then we went $0 to $4 million ARR in 2 years, which was cool, but I didn't understand why it worked when it worked and why it didn't when it didn't, which is, you know, you pay $120 grand for an MBA and, you know, you gotta, you read everything there is to read on startups and you kind of, you're like, I should, this should like, this should fit something that's in my brain and it just didn't. And so, right, like, so First, I just thought I was crazy and I went through this kind of existential crisis period. And then I talked to other founders who had also kind of like done that. And they're like, yeah, it doesn't operate like I thought I was crazy too. And so, uh, so what I'm trying to do is I'm, I'm trying to take my, my, my sense is that most of what's been created out there has started with theory, has started from theory of like what makes sense and then tries to apply that to startups or it looks at startups after they are successful and says, cool, why do we think they were successful? Because they're doing the things they do now. And what I'm trying to do is kind of hit my head against all the walls of pre-product market fit. How does this work? And repeat that as many times as possible to figure out what actually works in practice and combine that with like frameworks and kind of theory underneath it so that it is a full stack, but practice to theory approach and set of ideas here.

Yeah. And that's being refined as you're building your next business or your current business. Who would you say that this podcast is for?

Yeah. So let me say who it's not for. There is a certain kind of founder out there who does not think very hard other than like, I just need to get revenue. So I'm going to do whatever it takes to get revenue and I'll figure out everything after. Right. They're the people who do things and then make sense of them. That kind of person has already tuned out, right? Like none of what I have said so far is interesting. Doesn't matter at all. That's fine. There's a different kind of founder, which unfortunately is you and me and a lot of people who, you know, we come from corporate, come from consulting, come from fancy schools, right? Where our entire lives, there has been a, I need to understand something before I do it. And startups are the ultimate example of where that runs you straight into a brick wall unless you kind of like have the, you know, the right mind around it. And so that's who I'm writing for. And mostly I'm just writing for myself to try to figure this out. It turns out a lot of other people, I would say most people are not as like mentally deficient in this way as I am. But to some extent, I find a lot of people are like directionally like that.

And knowing you with that first part about the first type of founder, that's actually, you say that with a lot of respect, like the person that's just like, uh, yeah, see ball, hit ball, kind of, uh, you know, find revenue, build around that. Like that is the right, the most useful instinct for a founder to have probably.

If I could, if I could buy some sort of surgery, just do that to myself. I, I would love, like, if it's a lobotomy, I don't know what it is, but I would, I would sign up for that in a heartbeat. It is so awful to be in this brain. I'll tell you, like, it's just, I don't want to have to think about this. I just can't not do it.

It's really funny. Um, and then, you know, maybe one, one other thing to hit real fast is that there are implications for the way, like, this is gonna, this is messy. Like, some of it's messy. We might talk today about something and then your thinking evolve in, in 6 podcasts down the line and we'll, we'll revisit that like you are developing this theory live and that's what, you know, people that are, or the person who is listening, you know, has to like sign up for. And also like we want them to participate in this, like the, the real experiences of founders who are selling, who are applying these, you know, these approaches and learnings. When you're running into stuff that's like not working, like tell us like that, that is super helpful. Like there's no pride of ownership like that. We're not trying defend a theory. We're trying to understand it at this, at this stage.

Yeah. And if things don't make sense either, it's like, I don't quite know how this applies to this situation. Great. Cool. Like, let's, you know, let us know. We'll try to, I'll think about it for a while and then maybe I'll write about it or talk about it at some point.

Sweet. Okay. And with, with that lead-in, let's, let's jump into the conversation today. We're talking about your newsletter Pipeline mega post. Also, we're starting to publish these on like Thursday, Fridays, the podcast. And then on Saturdays is when your newsletters are coming out. And so if you're listening to this on Friday, the newsletter might not actually be out, but if you wait till Saturday, it'll hit your inbox. I'm going to start with one of the things that you wrote as to help ground this. Founders often come to me in product-market fit existential crisis mode, and it turns out that they speak to maybe 1 to 2 potential customers per week, which means their crisis is pipeline, not PMF. Give us, give us the concept. The context on what is like going on, what you're seeing from, from founders.

Yeah. So, so what often happens is there's this kind of like rising existential crisis in founders' brains when we're not doing that, when things aren't working and time is passing. And so, uh, in that we, we've kind of been force-fed this idea of, okay, if it's not working, pivot, right? But it matters what specifically is not working. If you're talking to 10 customers a week, potential customers a week, and they're all like, yeah, this is the dumbest shit I've ever heard. Then it's like, okay, cool. Maybe there's a pivot opportunity. Maybe there's a chance to kind of unfold or change something about your product market fit equation. If you're not talking to anybody per week, you haven't earned the right to pivot yet. You, you just, You're not having enough conversations to know what most people think at this stage is, well, I'm sending outbound with our value prop in there and nobody's biting. It's like, okay, cool. That doesn't work generally. And so, right, like how, if you're pre-product market fit, how would you possibly know what the right combination of words to send in an email or in an outbound message? About a value prop that again, you just haven't figured out yet. It would be weird if that worked. So obviously it's not gonna work. You, you haven't earned the product market fit problem yet. You are just in the, like, I need to talk to more people stage of things. And in the process of talking to more people, you might earn a product market fit existential crisis. Fun. We all go through it, but you're just not there yet.

Yeah. Yeah. And you're teasing at it like we're going to, we're going to hit that distinction really hard. Or you do in the course of the blog about what happens pre-product market fit, what happens post-market fit. We've also, we've talked about the toll booth, but you've hit a couple of the terms that my favorite terms, concepts that you talk about. One is it would be weird if, like, I'm sure we're going to talk about that. It would be weird if and how to apply that to pipeline and then we'll hit toll booth. The other one that we're going to talk about is founder magic. And really you're— the way that you divide this blog is like, okay, pre-product market fit, founder magic approach. We'll get into that post-market, post-product market fit. We're going to get into the toll booth concept as, as like the most, the highest leverage approach to generating pipeline when you really have pull, when you know the value proposition and how to communicate with customers. But why don't we— let's talk about that distinction. Like, why does it change pre-product market fit and post-product market fit?

Do you want to try to say product-market fit 5 times fast first?

I have a problem with enunciating. It's like in my podcasting career, I've found that I just have to repeat where like it's like really, really tough. So if I mumble is when you listen to yourself, the painful experience of listening to yourself anyways, pre and post product, whatever. PMF.

Got it. Yeah. Okay, so, so let's talk about what is product-market fit. Product market fit is the demonstrated capability to repeat a customer case study. That's what it— so you have a customer who comes to you where they're trying to accomplish something. They have demand. You offer supply that fits their demand. They buy, they pull it out of your hands, and they renew, upgrade, right? It works presale and post-sale. You have that as the atomic unit of your business. You repeat that and it looks pretty similar every time you repeat that. That is kind of when you have product-market fit and that's happening faster and faster. When that works, you have, you know why people are buying and what they are buying. This sounds like super simple, but Until then you have, you don't know, you have probably a bunch of different theories. It's kind of abstract and fluffy and you're just not quite sure. So after you have product market fit, you, you have conviction, you have, you've data that demonstrates these people bought for this reason, they bought this thing. Therefore, I know enough now to know kind of what to do. To get them to talk to us around their demand, like based on their demand. Cool. Before then, we don't know that. So again, anything we do is kind of like at that stage, it's spearfishing. It's like, do we, I don't know, maybe they have this value prop will work. Maybe this pain point will work and it never does.

Yeah. And it's, it's spearfishing, like not in clear Caribbean waters. It's like spearfishing in the dirty Mississippi or something like that where you're, you're really like poking around. You write one thing that resonated in the thing you or your blog this week is like pre-pull circularity and how it ends up like just preventing process. And that's, you know, the elements are your hypothesis is wrong because you haven't sold. You need conversations in order to fix your hypothesis, but you can't get conversations because your hypothesis is wrong. And so it's like the, you're just stuck. You find yourself stuck, not able to talk to anybody, not able to improve. Um, and that's like the, I don't know, how do you see, how do you see founders when they're in that moment? Like what are they, what are they going through?

What they're usually doing in this moment is they're blasting out a bunch of emails, getting a 0.2% response rate. Than reading another blog post that says, oh, actually your email should be a haiku. And they're like, oh, of course. And then they do that and you just kind of repeat that with increasingly stupid things. By the way, I've done all of this. Like I'm, I'm the most guilty. And then you read something that's like outbound is dead. It's all about community now. And you spend a year building a community that doesn't do anything. Right. And so it's just sequence of bad things is typically what happens. And it's because you are trying to basically solve an impossible equation. You don't know what demand is.

Yeah. And actually like a haiku might be so weird. Like that's, that's approaching the samurai sword level of weirdness that might actually get you a response. In that, in that moment to break out of this like circular death trap, you talk about founder magic. Um, tell us, talk a little bit about like, what is founder magic and when do you, when do you use it?

Yeah. Founder magic is basically saying, cool, I have no idea the right words to use around pain, problems, value props, demand, anything like, or even how to describe my product. So I'm not going to try. What I'm going to do is I'm going to schedule meetings with people, like by whatever means necessary, which is usually just like Saying, I'm cool. You're cool. Let's chat. Right? It's, it's being so interesting or offering something that is so interesting that people would be weird not to meet with you. That's your messaging early on. Eventually it can change to be more kind of value prop demand driven, but you don't know how to do it. So it's almost, it's usually almost entirely like product agnostic in, in this kind of messaging or like you're definitely not pitching the product. You might mention the product because it sounds cool, but the whole point of the message is to sound cool and interesting such that they would be weird not to talk with you.

Yeah. And, uh, you, you write about, uh, unfair advantage, like when, when thinking about how do you craft your own, uh, like your founder magic, if it's outbound, if it's on LinkedIn or if it's on email or whatever the outreach is that you're doing, um, you talk about, you know, find your magic or your unfair advantage. I find those to be really quite interesting because everybody has something like that if they spend enough time thinking about it. What— how do you work with, you know, founders or like what do you— how do you talk about like identifying their unfair advantage?

Okay, let's do— let's do yours for this because this— because I think yours will be interesting because it's probably changed over time and walking through how it's changed over time will help people see like what's going on here and how it, like how the thing that makes them weird not to talk to you, you can get better and better ones as you kind of like build a business. And I think actually, like, as I think about this even more, the like message where they would be weird or the approach where they would be weird not to talk to you is the thing that you're doing the entire time. Just the content changes as you become cooler, as your business becomes cooler, right? Eventually you wind up saying, Hey, I'm Marc Benioff. Uh, you want to chat, right? And that's the message. And they're like, yeah, of course I want to chat with Marc Benioff, right? Sam Altman, of course. Right. And so you get there eventually, but what it is early on is, so with you, media company doing outreach, right? Your initial messaging, I assume, was, you know, you, you told it. Okay. The messaging after I destroyed your initial messaging was was something along the lines of, hey, I'm an HBS grad, we've built an— we're building an interesting media company that's relevant to you. Would you be open to chat?

Yeah, yeah, essentially. And maybe for folks' context, I have a— on the side, unrelated to Reframe, we produce children's podcasts in English, bilingual podcasts, English and Spanish. It's called Kudra Media. And so a lot of my outbound early on was to I was, I was reaching out to businesses to understand like, what is a sponsorship? What do sponsorships look like? Or who's interested in participating? I was reaching out to like museums, zoos, like other organizations that might be interested in our audience. And so, yeah, actually, like my first outbound, I would say, was squarely in the does not, does not work. Like, did you, you know, did you know that there's like, you know, lack of equity in the children's access. Like, here's like a very, like, very long description of what the societal problem is that we're trying to solve, which nobody reads.

Like, literally just like, they're like, no, this is cease and desist, or is this like, what the hell is this?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Um, and then, yeah, that changes to something— actually, the thing that ended up, um, yeah, it became something closer to what you're saying, which is, um, For me, it was, hey, we've been, we've been producing podcasts for like 6 years with a team between the United States and Colombia. Like, we have, we're doing this children's thing. I'd love to get your view on that, or some version of that based on who we were, who I was reaching out to. And that started to generate the conversations like, okay, like they've got some experience in children's media. Interesting that they're across, you know, a couple of different cultures or societies. And that was typically enough. Like, people would give me 30 minutes of their time.

Yeah. Okay. Do you have further to go with that or how it's evolved?

And then, yeah, the way that it evolved, I actually, I would say like I took steps back as we started to develop an audience. I would talk more about our audience. That was— that did not work actually. Like, you know, it was like the numbers didn't matter and I would actually— I would use too many words in my outbound outreach. Trying to show that we were like legit, like that it was, it was like that I was trying to be like, hey, we are, I'm sure this came from like an insecurity on my part, but it's like, you should pay attention to us because we're doing this thing that's both good and that's, um, you know, that's sizable. And it just, I, I got very low response rates. People would typically ghost me. Like it just didn't, didn't typically work. Um, what ended up working was like, Hey, we produce, we, what I am actually, the first thing that worked was when we started, I would say, hey, we've produced with some of your peer organizations like X. Could we, could we chat and see if this is a fit for you? And the first one, they ended up not producing with us, but it was enough to get us on board with, with a couple others. And then now what that's evolved to is like, hey, we produce programs for children 3 to 10 that they listen with their parents. If that's interesting, could we get on the phone? And that I get very, like, very, very good responses to.

Yeah. So let's like, let's trace the kind of like evolution there because at the end you're at something that I would say is like, like pretty much a value prop pitch, but you've figured out what that is now to get people on a call and those words while they seem pretty obvious now were totally unavailable to you earlier on because you just hadn't had the volume of conversations with people to know the specific pieces that work, right? And that's the point is, is when doing founder magic, you were initially just pitching like, hey, we're inter— we're, we're interesting, right? And, and I, I probably, if I had, uh, kind of had a hammer for your message even more, I would've made it e— I would try to make it even more interesting and weird in the message, which is like, Hey, I just left my fancy job to build this children's media company because blank would like, would love to get your thoughts on it.

Right.

Yeah. That is the structure of that message is just interesting to someone who's like, oh, this person is interested. Let me talk to them. It's just a fascinating thing I haven't heard of before. Right. And then like, hey, HBS ex-consultant. Da da da da da, that's now doing this crazy thing. Thought you might be able to provide some input, right? Boom. Those people are all getting on a call with you, but you said something else that was sufficiently interesting. Hey, we're doing this kind of weird thing between US and Colombia. People are like, oh, I haven't heard that before. Why not get on a call? This sounds interesting. I might as well, right? And so what you're pitching there is no product, no nothing. You're pitching just We are interesting.

Yeah.

So, and, and then like what I would do kind of like moving forward as you get more and more legit, okay, your audience numbers were never interesting to people, but maybe some of the partners were interesting to people. So you go from being like this interesting person to meet with to kind of like this interesting organization to meet with, but then the thing that makes people weird not to talk with you like it evolves because you now have a partnership with like PBS or something, right? That then people see that and they'll, oh my, like, this is amazing. Right. And then it becomes something else. Right. And so what you see is like, I can just imagine in my mind a graph that I'm not going to make, but it's just like, like, you know, like what percent of people are weird not to meet with you with your message, right? It should go up. Over time, right? Where early on it's just like, literally, I'm a weird— I'm like an interesting person. Yeah. Some percentage of people will see that and be like, oh sure, why not? That's interesting. But over time you become even more legit. And so that should like go up and the formula should change.

Yeah. Yeah, totally. A lot of that resonates. It was like NASA is actually the one that, as soon as we, we had featured NASA, it was like, Oh, okay. Like that, like there was such a high hurdle that like the backstory on that one is that we actually featured somebody who was a cross-country teammate of mine when like that. They're like, there's still like the founder magic part of that. Yeah. But as soon as NASA had produced with us, other organizations would just like, it was like, okay, like they must, you know, they must have something going on if they're getting that kind of attention. And then now I think our next round we're producing with PBS right now. And so if our next round will probably involve like, hey, we've produced with PBS, could we jump on the phone to see if we can work together. Um, it's like, yeah, it, it gets way easier. Um, uh, I like, I like, I wish I would have known what you said early on though about like, hey, just like what's interesting about you as a human being, not what's interesting about your organization, because early on there's nothing interesting about, uh, like it's very hard to make an uninteresting organization that has very little track record into something that's interesting enough for somebody to give you their time.

Yeah. Oh, I have a shitty landing page I made on Lovable. You want to talk? Right? Like, no, no. Yeah. It's, you have to find something different.

Yeah. Um, uh, let's, um, how about this? I'm gonna, I'm gonna re— you give a bad example that I think is a good one to, to spend a moment on because I think some of our, our listeners might, um, uh, identify with it. Um, uh, and I want you to, I want you to tear this one apart, like It's a common template. Why doesn't it work? It's, hi, brackets name, um, you have an impressive background. I'm the founder of Acme Co., working on the future of agentic, agentic, agentic workflows. We are working with leaders in the space who have significant pain points around their manual processes and have been able to prove significant ROI. Would you be willing to give your feedback? Why doesn't that work?

How did that feel reading that out loud?

Other than mispronouncing agentek or agentek, yeah, it's just, it's painful. Like I feel kind of like a robot.

Yeah. Yeah. And so like, that's, that's the, the sets. If you read yours out loud and you're like, wow, I would never say that to another human. You know, it's like, it's like, okay, there's something wrong here. Let's break it down. Okay. Hi name, you have an impressive background. It's the stupidest thing to start with. And I see this in a lot of messages, like There's nothing interesting in there. You're going to lose most people there because they're like, all right, this is a sales message. The only people you're not going to lose are probably people you don't want to meet with at all. Like people who aren't getting any messages. So that one is, it's what I call burying the lead. It's like, I have something interesting about me, but you're going to have to dig and you're gonna have to read through 4 paragraphs to get there. And No one's gonna do it. People are busy. So, okay, cut that out. Then next sentence. I'm the founder of Acme Co., working on the future of agentic workflows. Cool. I'm the founder of blank is like, I don't know, maybe interesting, maybe not. Probably not the most interesting thing about you. So I would lead with that. The future of agentic workflows may or may not be interesting depending on who you're talking to. If you're reaching out to, I don't know, owner of an HVAC distributor. Yeah. Be like, I don't know. Cool. I don't understand these words. This is not a message for me. If you're talking to people who are literally doing agentic stuff, that might be interesting, but you want, might want to make it a little bit more specific and a little bit more interesting. Hey, I'm working on. I don't know, non-brittle agentic workflows in A2A communication, right? Or whatever it winds up being, like something like that. Okay, cool. That's sentence 2. So again, lead with the most interesting thing and like know your audience. We're working with leaders in the space who have significant pain points around their manual processes and have been able to prove significant ROI. Just shoot me now, right? Like don't, don't do that. Uh, uh, what that is is that's just fluff words. It doesn't say literally anything. And so this is where you kind of, where it's like clear the person, if they weren't before, they're like, I think this person's trying to sell me something at this point. And so this is what I call the uncanny valley where, right, on one hand you have a sales message, on the other hand you have founder magic message, and you're in the middle of it here where it kind of seems It seems salesy, but it's not really salesy. And I'm just going to look at it and be like, what the heck is this? And not respond. Then finally, would you be willing to give your feedback? Again, there is nothing in this message that is interesting to them. It's just, you know, you're just kind of stating random things and what you want out of them. Instead, you want to flip it and make it cool for them to say yes to you.

Yeah, I really like that. Like, what's the— I was very guilty of burying the lead, like, and I think like 97% of the examples that I've seen, like, come through our Slack community also bury the lead like that. Is they never make it to the interesting part of your message because you waste time upfront and they automatically filter you. And just think about all of— if for the listener, think about the things that are in your LinkedIn inbox and the way that you read them and you roll your eyes and you archive it immediately or delete it or you mark it as read and you move on with your life. It's like, how do you get away from that? So they at least read like the 2 sentences. One other thing that jumped out to me while going through this one was somebody— they write these messages and they might even spend hours crafting it and thinking about, okay, do I call it Agentic Workflows? So why is it— is it around manual process? Like, what's the— but they miss like the broader problem with it, which is it's not interesting to a human being. And like, that's the thing that you need to target. Before, before in that pre-product market fit, pre-PMF, whatever stage. Yeah.

And it's, it's, it's interesting to the person you're sending the message to, not interesting to your founder friends. Interesting. So if you're selling to that HVAC distributor, it's going to be a very different message than if you're selling to startups or if you're selling to heads of HR or whatever. Right. And so it's, design the message and even your kind of persona as a, as a person, right? Like if I'm sending a message to a YC founder versus sending a message to the CHRO at Fortune 500, the way I describe myself is going to be entirely different. Both will be true, but I'll just be picking different things that are interesting to them.

Yeah, yeah, totally. Let's, let's walk through one or two other things real before we get into like post-PMF with, with the tollbooth. One is let's, let's take the LinkedIn example. What frequently will happen is they will read your messages, say you crafted a message well, they will then visit your LinkedIn. This is how I think about it. Tell me if I'm wrong about this. And then they'll decide or they'll visit your website or something like that. Um, how should people think about crafting the things around the message so that it supports and it doesn't hinder people responding to you?

Yeah, that's a, that's a good question. Uh, you should think about it exactly as you just described it, right? Everything supports the message. The message is the first thing they're going to experience, or maybe they'll see your LinkedIn connection request or your, your email or whatever. Uh, and, and that's the tip of the spear. Everything has to support that. So if you're sending a message to, again, we'll just use our HVAC distributor, right? Um, you're sending your message to them. The message works. Then they click on your profile or go to your website and they see a bunch of VC nonsense on there. They're gonna be like, I don't know, this person doesn't get it. Like they're not who I, who I was expecting to see. So you want to craft your profile and your website such that the right person seeing your message, seeing your profile, seeing your website would be weird not to say, yeah, this, this kind of like all checks out. Why not?

Yeah. Yeah. And for us, interestingly, I do a lot of, uh, Instagram, um, is like a big one for us because I can send very short messages. They visit our profile and immediately understand what our product is. And, and so for, you know, it, it can be LinkedIn. Like, that's a really common one. I do for other types of people. I'll use LinkedIn for our production, like our featured partners. I'll use Instagram because that's actually the best, the best outreach. But how do you think about— I would say like LinkedIn and email are kind of probably the two most common ones that folks are weighing. How do you think about those two?

Just where are people? LinkedIn, email. X sometimes depending on, on who it is. And so you choose whichever one of that, like if I, if I'm to rank them, right, LinkedIn is number one for me for B2B because they can see your profile. And so you seem legit, whereas via email, anybody can send an email, right? And so it's kind of hard to see behind the email. And so, and most people get a ton of, of emails, often they're marked as spam and, and so like, it's just harder via email. The upside of email is that when you figure it out, you can do a huge amount of volume, whereas on LinkedIn or X, you can't. And then X is X, right? Like you, if you're selling to a certain kind of person on X, it's relatively untapped there. Um, but I've seen some people use, use things, uh, that, that help there.

Yeah. And one, one other thing you've, uh, you've run into with a couple founders that I've seen over the, uh, over the months and years is not everybody's on LinkedIn. Like there's some roles where they're, some roles where they're not. And so that might make it so that that's not the right platform. You need to get creative about cold calling is another one that we haven't, you know, I, I didn't mention it, but that can also be a really effective one.

Yeah. Yeah. Cold calling's great. Like if you're good at cold calling, I know a lot of people who've gone zero to a million just via cold calling. Right. And it's just, you know, often somebody will pick up the phone, you know, one of my friend's companies went $500K to $50 million ARR in like 4 years by cold calling because they were cold calling lawyers and lawyers always pick up the phone. Right.

So yeah. Super interesting.

Let's see.

Let's talk about, there's, there's actually one other thing. I, I don't, we, we don't have time to get into it. You write about goblin mode. Everybody should read your blog and visit the link for goblin mode, which you call the human equivalent of Zoomies. Which is awesome. Which is basically if you're having a hard time in pre-PMF, it's just like, do whatever it takes, fly somewhere, go do that. Like, just do that nonsensical thing with a ton of enthusiasm and passion. Let's talk about, let's jump into the toll booth. We did another post, I don't know, 2 months ago or something like that, specifically about the toll booth, but let's start with, What is a toll booth and when should you be thinking about a toll booth?

Yeah. So, so a toll booth, um, I'll just like say from memory of, of what I read about the first time, right? Imagine that there is like a weird genie out there and this genie says, you, I'll give you one thing because you're probably not expecting, um, I'll let you place a toll booth on any road in the world that people will have to pay you to drive through. So you're not going to, in that moment, you're not gonna be like, huh, well, I think Siberia would be a great place for this. Like, obviously not. You're gonna put it somewhere where there's basically a choke point for all the traffic or for a ton of traffic to come through so you can make the most money, obviously. Okay, cool. Well, we're gonna take that concept, this toll booth concept, and say, okay, let's kind of make it a little bit weirder, but when people have demands, right, they have a project that is unavoidable on their to-do list and their existing options aren't good enough, right? They're in a spot where they have demand and they have bad options. And that's kind of like a situation that they are in. We can put a toll booth in a situation where we own that situation, where whenever you, whenever X is happening in your life, It would be weird if you didn't run into our toll booth. It would be weird if you didn't reach out to us, come to our website, what, read our, read our blog, what, whatever it winds up being, right? And so this toll booth is basically saying, okay, once I know what demand is, the situation, who has it, I'm going to find a way to make it weird for that person in that situation not to find out about us.

Yeah. And so you talk about two of them here. One is the situation in which the project is unavoidable. I'm actually going to pop up for our listener. If you are on YouTube or if you are on Spotify, you should be able to see this. If you're on like Apple Podcasts, you're just listening with headphones and walking around, you probably won't, but just visit the newsletter and you can check it out. Basically what you have is on the left-hand side, you have the, you know, the pull diagram, which is they have a project, the project's unavoidable. They're looking for a list of options or they've been considering a list of options and then they're running into limitations for some reasons. I hadn't made this connection. I found it really insightful. The toll booth can target the top half of that, which is what you just described, which is there's a situation in which their project is unavoidable and you give some examples into that, or it can target the second half of that in which their options are unworkable. Can you, can you talk about the difference, Rob, between like what, why think about, or why, why is this the right way to think about the types of toll booths?

I don't know if this is the right way, but it's, it's one way. We might come back to this in a couple weeks and say actually that was— no, I, I think this is generally right because like, um, because when somebody has pull, right? This is when somebody would be weird not to buy your product. And so we can either target the situation that they're in. So imagine, I don't know, we've kind of unintentionally done this with the term the pain cave, right? It seems like that term is its own form of a toll booth that is in a situation, right? And, and it's when you're in this situation, you hear pain cave, you see, you see that you're like, oh my gosh. Finally, someone gets it right. And that is when you would be weird not to hear about, about me, about us. And so that is like owning the situation versus you can own the like option that somebody has looked into and doesn't fit or has tried and doesn't fit, right? Like, uh, I'm trying to think of another example here, but you know, what I've seen from a lot of startups is you hire your first sales rep and it doesn't work out because you don't have product market fit, right? Another version of a toll booth would be, you know, you see that somebody goes from 1 sales rep to 0 sales reps and you own that moment, right? And, and, um, obviously I don't want to do that, but, but like, that's an example of, okay, your exist— your options are unworkable.

Yeah, let's get into that options one you have in a little bit farther. You have this really interesting example from Chris Cunningham. I'm going to, I'm going to read this one out real quick and then want you to talk about it as a tollbooth. We couldn't afford ads early, early on at ClickUp, his startup. So we built a tool that notified us when competitors got bad reviews. Every 1-star review on— and then he listed them out. Equals instant notification with the reviewer's name and company. I'd find them on LinkedIn within minutes. Hey, I get why you hate company. We hated it too. That's why we built ClickUp. And he says cost to build zero leads generated. Our first 100 customers wasn't about, you know, no budget involved. Just get scrappy. Well, how analyze this from your perspective, Rob, on this toll booth?

Yeah. So, so this is directly attacking the moment when somebody realizes their existing options are not good enough or unworkable, right? They are, they are going in and leaving a 1-star review of a competitor. At this moment, if ClickUp shows up and says, hey, they suck. That's why we built ClickUp as the alternative to that. That's better. For XYZ reasons, right? Then that person would be weird not to meet with us and weird not to buy us, buy our product at that point, right? Like they've just written a 1-star review. Well, they're clearly unsatisfied. And so by doing this, they created an insanely efficient and effective approach to pipeline that really make it like, it makes the most sense when you understand it using the pull framework, because these are our best fit customers who have just struggled with direct competitors. So clearly they're, they're in that moment when they're trying to change, but they're just not getting there with their existing options. They would be weird not to meet with us, weird not to buy our product. You're, they're kind of like outbound should have, I don't know, 50, 75% response rates, maybe higher conversion to meeting. And their meetings should have, I don't know, 50, 75% plus conversion to customer. Highly effective, highly efficient, very few moving parts. And this is why I think toll booths are so valuable because usually you're just kind of like spamming out into the world, building a massive lead list, cold calling everyone, sending a bunch of outbound and seeing what comes through. This says, you know what? No, let's, we know who would be weird not to buy this. What's the thing? What's the like most elegant way we can approach getting in front of them at the moment when they would be weird not to talk to us and weird not to buy from us? Like, how do we design for that? Yeah.

And I also love how, just how direct and short, like that, that is such an easy thing to respond to. I get why you hate X or that, like, why we hated it too. That's why we built this. Boom. Like, it's just like, it's, it's just obvious. It didn't spend a whole lot of time like, hey, at ClickUp, we have a product that does like blah, blah, blah, like really going deep into something that's like kind of boring. It just like hits it, hits it like on the head.

Yeah. Let's, let's talk through the like levels of weird top 2 here. Right. Um, at this point, this person would be weird. Not to buy our product. We send them a message that they would be weird not to respond to at that moment, right? Like, those are the layers here. And when you do both of those, you wind up with something that is massively effective and efficient. And like they say, it got it to their first million ARR. I'm sure they probably still do this at whatever they're at, $100 million plus ARR.

I take this down. I want— before we wrap here, Rob, I want to— you know, you draw a very clear distinction between founder magic early on and, and the toll booth later on. And you say that frequently founders get those confused. They're trying to do a toll, which I think mostly means they're trying to do a toll booth too early. It's like they're pulling it forward. Why? Why do we do that? Or when— how should a founder— how does a founder know when it's like, okay, I should move from founder magic into, uh, you know, finding the toll booth.

Yeah, I think, I think it's like a pretty simple equation here, which is, do you have 5 to 10 customers who are basically the exact same case study? And do you understand the mechanics of the case study underneath it? Like until then, toll booth is not the right approach for you. You just don't know enough to do it right. You should keep going with founder magic. But as you continue with founder magic, as we've talked about, I actually think Tollbooth is just a, an unfolding of founder magic if we're gonna like use that term. Uh, because remember, you start out with a message, you start out with a message that's like, here's why I am interesting to meet with, right? Eventually you evolve that to say, hey, Mark Cuban just invested in us. Here's why we're interested. I don't know if that's cool anymore, but like, here's why we're, here's why we're interesting. Okay, cool. Right. And that, that message evolves and over time it evolves and targeting evolves such that like you take an approach that again is still weird for them not to meet with you, but you just have so much more information about what demand is that you can do something that is like, like a million times smarter and more effective. At the toll booth stage, but that only comes later on. Like once you have demonstrated this kind of repeatable case study 5 to 10 times, so you can compare and contrast the differences and then you're like, you have a very strong conviction, you know, like what the mechanics of it are.

Yeah. Very, very, very interesting. Um, we're going to wrap here, Rob, practical things that founders should do that you would recommend.

Yes. Stop writing to me about pipeline. No.

Um, listen to this podcast over and over. Yeah. First time you have a question rather than writing to Rob, listen to this podcast.

Yeah. Read the book. No, I mean, it's, it's like, uh, one, look at how many meetings you have this week. Do you need to think about this? If you have 5 to 10 meetings this week and you're going to have 5 to 10 meetings next week and you're pre-product market fit. Disregard. You are fine. Your bottleneck is downstream. Second, if you don't have 5 to 10 meetings this week, ask yourself a couple questions. Question 1: Am I trying? If not, try. Question 2: What is my messaging? Right? Am I sending founder magic messaging or am I sending messaging that's kind of salesy and kind of in that uncanny valley? Usually it's the messaging's problem. Fix that, get to 5 to 10 meetings per week. Now, if you are at 5 to 10 meetings per week and you're finding some customers are converting, others aren't, that doesn't mean you need to change from founder magic to toll booths. It means you probably need to change something about your founder magic approach, perhaps targeting. You might just need to target people better who are more likely to have demand. And then once you're starting, once it kind of starts working repeatedly, you got 5, 10 case studies that are kind of like, or not even like written case studies. I'm thinking like 5 to 10 successful customers who look pretty much the same, came for the same reasons, got the same thing, are happy. Then it's like, okay, let's understand the mechanics of demand and figure out what our tool truth is, test it out and like go after it.

Love it, Rob. Any parting thoughts before we drop?

No, I think that's it.

I'd love to see some comments on this one if you, if our listener made it this far. So that one thing we want to start doing more of is, you know, responding directly to the questions that we get in YouTube, Spotify, or on directly on your newsletter. If there's something that comes to mind, drop it in there. If there's a hole you want to poke or something to clarify, please do.

Um, otherwise, one last thing, one last thing. We got a comment: love your discussions, guys, you're helping us a lot, you seem to be good people too. Uh, totally wrong on that last point, but we'll take it.

Yeah, yeah, like, uh, horribly, horribly human beings, but we're very happy that that is, uh, helpful for our, for our listener. Um, all right, well, we'll catch everyone, uh, next week. See ya.