PULL is everywhere (your startup isn't the exception) | w/ Rob Snyder

Well, Rob, welcome back, man.

We're here. We're here. Back from vacation. Round 2 of recording this one.

Yeah. You've been, you've been on the move. You did. Since we last recorded together, you went to a conference in the North Pole and we had Thanksgiving. So, yeah. What's your— anything notable either from the turkey or from, you know, internet rubbing elbows with a bunch of other founders?

Yeah. I mean, it was cool to go up to Helsinki and there were like a couple of interesting parts of it. What I will say is that they really need to work on having enough food for a growing American boy, a growing 35-year-old American boy. 33. Thank you very much. But I mean, come, I was like, I was just like starving the entire time and they're like, oh, here's one. I'll give you one. Little smoked salmon, you know, one little piece and then you can take a breath of cold, cold winter air and that should be enough. It's like, no, I need, I need a hamburger.

Yeah. Feast on the sessions and on saunas. Apparently saunas were a big, big positive experience.

Yeah. Sauna was great, but, but yeah, no, that, it was all great. It was like, it was really cool. I got, someone recognized me on the street, which is, never going to happen again.

And was that because of your criminal record or because of—

like, sir, you are— you are too close to our citizens here.

How did you get through immigration?

Yeah, it was actually the police.

Yeah. You're like, oh, they know who I am. This is great.

No autographs, please. They're like, sir, please get in the car. But yeah, no, it was good. And then like 2 families invited me into their houses, which was really neat. And so I got to experience a little slice of life. So, so it was nice.

So that's awesome. Shout out to the families that welcomed Rob, gave a little local, local flavor. Well, hey, we're, I'm excited to talk today. It's a very practical post. It's called Pull is Everywhere. FAQ number 1 about pull. And so this, I think the plan here, Rob, remind or correct me if I'm wrong, is to actually walk through some of the some common misconceptions, questions that you are frequently getting and like just hit those head on. As you know, what else would you add on the context for this?

Yeah, no, so basically because I mostly work with B2B software and AI startups that sell to certain like contract value ranges, it's very reasonable for people to be like, Well, I sell enterprise, or, well, I'm building a consumer product. Does Pull apply here? Or I'm in deep tech, right? And so I always get questions from people about these kind of like, okay, is this framework and approach just relevant here? And there's kind of like two pieces to that. One is just, I haven't before articulated that it is relevant in all these other places. And second is because one thing I find is that nobody wants it to apply to them. I don't, I don't want it to apply to me. I want to be able to go and just tinker around and build something and then have the world shower adulation and money on me. But that's not how the world works. And so, and so yeah. And so the concept here is enterprise, B2C, deep tech, and kind of any other angle, both pull, like somebody is trying to accomplish something but blocked, which makes space case for a new product and the like implications of pull, the methodology derived from that, which is sell one-on-one, work with customers one-on-one, ideally before you have a product to figure out what pull is. Both of those still apply in all these other domains. And so we're gonna go through, I think, type of business by type of business.

Yeah. Um, so if the listener has the thought in their head of, I really like Rob's, uh, you know, writing, I like the idea of pull, but it's for somebody else, like this is kind of for you. Yes. But let's, um, we're, we're gonna jump into it. And if you think that there's something in here that Rob, uh, or I mostly Rob, I definitely misunderstand like your context, but Rob's the smart one. So if, if there's something in here that, uh, you think Rob is getting wrong, drop it in the comments. Like we'd love to hear like what the,, what the objections are that folks have.

Yeah. Although, or what about X specific situation? Right? Like that's, that's totally fine. We, we're not gonna hit all the different situations here. Um, because I got tired of writing at some point.

And so, uh, you get to hardware and we, and we slow down quite a bit at that point.

I, I got to one paragraph on hardware.

I was like, all right, uh, I'm sorry, Rob. Yeah. You were saying like, uh, on a specific situation, there's, uh, we're gonna, we're gonna cover enterprise. We're gonna go, as you mentioned B2C, we're gonna cover deep tech hardware, and then there might be some others that we touch along the way. So if those aren't in it and you've got a question about how your situation applies, drop it in there. Well, why don't we, I'd actually, let's start, sorry to a listener that's been faithful, let's start with just recapping what PULL is. It's the, Rob, I'll just give a shot at this.

Yeah, yeah, let's say, let's say.

I'm taking the oral test right now. Yep. So PULL are the 4 requirements that if they are satisfied, the customer will rip the product out of your hands. And the 4 are, there's a project on their to-do list, U is that it is urgent or unavoidable for some reason. Those 2 constitute the demand situation that the client is in. And then on the supply side is the L and the L, which is they are looking for options and the options are lacking in some important way. That your supply, your product is positioned to address. Anything you'd, you'd add there on PULL?

Yeah. So, so this, this framework basically defines when somebody would be weird not to buy your product. And if you understand this, this framework, you realize that most people, most of the time would be insane to buy your product, even if they have pain points, even if they have problems, even if you could provide ROI to them. So the PULL framework is the way to define your ICP, what you're building It basically is the most upstream thing in a startup, and you could think of it— there's a couple different ways to say what it is. It's defining an unmet need that will lead to a purchase right away.

Yeah. Yeah. You write something that I've found very striking that I'd like you to, uh, go into for a second. Um, you write, the whole point of a startup is to find repeatable pull. Which causes fast growth. Pull, in other words, defines a buyer's unmet need, which pulls companies into existence and makes products relevant. I had, I had never thought of the reason that a startup exists is to identify the pull and to create it. What, what's— I don't know. Can you talk more about that? I find it very interesting. Yeah.

So, so pull, like the buyer's need, unmet need, pose a product into existence. It, it basically is like the, the buyer, if they're trying to accomplish something but blocked and you offer them something that's kind of like a, it's even like a service, right? Or, or something like that. We can go through kind of like a couple of examples. They're going to say, cool, I need that right now. And they will pull it into existence, even if it doesn't exist yet. And they will give you feedback. To make it better. And they will say, they will be demanding, they will need more because it is fitting a need that they have that exists on their to-do list where, where they are blocked. Right? So a startup's— so we often think that a startup's job is to build a product and convince people to want it, which is totally misunderstanding the physics here. Startup's job is to find a need to find pull, and that will bring the product into existence and bring the business into existence and basically shape those entities, the product and the thing. But like our job, we're often just focused on the wrong thing, the product, convincing, the messaging, all that kind of stuff when we need to be focused on the need, on the pull.

Yeah, I don't know how I would've responded to why, what is the purpose of a startup prior to this, but it, it would've been much closer to create products. Like it would've been, I like, I, I've, my brain is just engineered, I think for whatever reason to be supply focused, to be product focused, even if it's build a product and then find pull for the product. But that's also the wrong orientation. It's like understand the pull first. Product is downstream, as you, as you like to say, of that. Yeah.

You like, the goal is for pull to do the heavy lifting because you literally can't do that.

Yeah.

You can't lift a market.

And that's, that's not just because I don't deadlift as much as you, Rob.

Uh, yet.

Not yet. Um, let's, I really like your first example. We're gonna get into enterprise, which is an area, uh, having stalked you on LinkedIn, uh, for a while. I see this one come up frequently where it's like, this is great when you're selling to SMBs, I totally get it. But when you're selling into Fortune 500, it like, no, like this, that there's other physics that are at work here. What's, what would you say about this one?

Yeah. So, so the, the actually super common story, and I, I actually work with VCs, like very close to a couple VCs who are basically enterprise and cybersecurity, which are, which are like, that's the intersection of the place where everyone's like, okay, cool. Yeah, this can't possibly apply there. And, and their whole thing is, no, this especially applies here. And so they've seen this enough times and I've seen this enough time in enterprise and like kind of some of these domains that are, that are places where you would think, okay, this can't possibly apply. But, but then I would like my argument and I'll go through an example here., but my argument would be what other physics would apply here? Like, how, how would it work? And I think, I haven't, I've basically just heard no other argument other than that it, that is any sort of intelligibility. So, so example, like the common example here, one of my friends, I'm going to anonymize it a little bit, but, he had built, an AI executive coach. Which like, I don't know, watched your Zoom calls and, and was like, hey, you are a little too much, right?

Like, yeah, that, that would be fun. What everybody wants to hear is like detailed computers telling you that you suck at managing people.

No, I mean, I think, I think I would honestly probably, I, so I would like to have that kind of feedback, but it's not on my to-do list. Like it's, it's the kind of supply I wouldn't not want. You know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't mind. And you could find pain points, you could find like whatever. And there's probably a business to be built there. But he was trying to sell it into HR departments and they were like, everyone was like, oh wow, this is really cool. He's trying to sell it into executive coaching firm. Again, like, wow, super cool. Tried to sell it to individuals. Same thing. It was, you know, nods and not revenue. And so, so that was going on for years. And then he just randomly got connected to healthcare executive, and he was at the point where he was like, all right, we have 6 months of cash left. We have $0 and like, what the heck do we do here? And, uh, he, so he asked that person like, what are you like, basically what would you pay me to solve for you? What would you pay me to take off of your plate? And the person was like, yeah, that's really interesting. What we've been struggling with is this. We need to under— it was, we basically need to understand what people are saying on social media about certain diseases. I'm not going to go into too much more detail, but that's like, that's essentially, we don't have a good way to do that. We're trying to do that, but we're blocked. We've paid consultants to do that before and it's not, it's not great. So I don't know if there's anything possible there, but that's something that I've been thinking about recently. We've been trying, we've kind of been trying to figure out and don't have a way to figure out. The founder's like, huh, interesting. Well, I don't do that, but maybe I could. I don't think he said that part live, but, uh, but, but he's like, oh yeah, I think we can help you with that. Let's meet again maybe tomorrow and I can kind of walk you through how we would approach that.

Right.

And he comes and shows an example, basically PDF report that doesn't exist yet of like, here's what people are saying about this disease on, on social media. And it basically, this is a rough shape of a report. Is this kind of what you're looking for? And the exec gave some feedback, was, but was generally like, yeah, can you do that? Automatically? Can you do that regularly for us? Can you, could you maybe build a dashboard or something like that? And that's how the business started, right? And so it was executive trying to accomplish something but blocked, pull framework here, and sales before you have a product, which is actually quite frequent in enterprise. Very— you can deliver it as services early on, especially in enterprise because they know how to buy services. They often willing to spend much more and they, and they, this executive bought fast, but, but at the same time, like after that call, when the exec was like, yeah, it seems to be a good fit. The founder was like, cool. How do I get a couple more intros to people like this? Just to see if this is a common thing people are trying to accomplish, but blocked. Turns out it was, and he got, he went from $0 to $250K revenue in a couple, couple months. Yeah. Again, enterprise healthcare should like, everything that you will like learn is like, well, that's, that couldn't possibly work there. And it's like, it did. I've even actually, I'll pause there. So questions, comments?

Yeah. I think the, this example is interesting for a number of reasons. One of which is his first approach was start with product, sell product. His second approach is discovering demand. And the way that he did it was through a very simple question, which was, what would you pay me to do, basically, or some version of that. And so it's, you know, you've written about this in the past, just how like the simplest kind of like quote unquote dumbest questions. Like, you don't look smart when you go to a healthcare VP and are like, what would you pay me to do? But if you're like, but that's— they get to talk actually about the thing that they want you to do for them, which is the root in that case of Pool. And I think there's something in the end of this, which is not all demand is repeatable. What do I do with the repeatability piece? Like, he— what, what this founder did was he took A conversation, confirmation of demand with probably a manually created report. And then I guess used outbound to validate that it was repeatable demand that was worth approaching. Or, you know, what would you say about that? Yeah. Yeah.

So I think, I think this is one of the common traps that even I, that, well, even I like that as if I, as if I know anything, right. That I have fallen into, which is, okay, you get one. It's like, cool, let's go down, heads down, build with them. And, um, I have been burned by that enough times to just because you're going to over-engineer for this specific customer when, when, you know, maybe it's just an N of 1 or, you know, and so what you want to do is you want to do outbound or kind of get intros or whatever, but get conversations with people who kind of look like that to see, hey, I was just talking to this other exec and they were trying to do this, blocked by this. Is that on your to-do list? And if not, what is?

Um, and what would you, uh, there's, there are some differences between SMB and, uh, selling into enterprises. Uh, you write about this around, uh, I guess it, it sounds like that you're, when you advise, uh, founders who are in SMB land, they're, it's more repeatable, it's less bespoke, probably the contracts are a little bit smaller. The, the sales cycle is different. You might be selling into founders or to a very small team. Talk about enterprise or like what's the difference? How should founders— pull still applies, but how should founders think about, uh, uh, pursuing pull or understanding it with enterprise?

Yeah, man, I think, I think pull is actually more like a better fit and the like one-to-one sales model and the do it manually first model. Fits enterprise even better than it fits SMB. Often an SMB, like I was talking to a, to a company where they're like, listen, our contracts are like $100 a month. How do we do that manually in a way that like, we can be profitable or we can like make enough money to survive doing stuff, selling services first. And it's like, okay. I might have, you know, but enterprise, it's like very, very clear that you can sell something that they perceive as a service for a lot more money. You just get a couple contracts up front and you increasingly productize over time. Now the, um, the other piece here is that we, some, sometimes we think, okay, but It's because it's enterprise, because the contracts are big, we need to do a lot more like hand waving and like we need to do a lot more selling on, on the, the future and on our vision. And, and what I'll say is like, try, try it and see what happens. And what you'll find is that when you do that, you will get nods. And people won't buy because it's not because your vision isn't compelling. It's not because your arguments aren't persuasive. It's because it's so difficult to buy something in enterprise that the buyer, the champion, the person who's going to exert the effort internally to go through 47 demos in a procurement process.

Yeah.

Has to have something they are trying to accomplish. That is so important to them that they will pull you through that process. They will help you do that. Otherwise, you're basically just assuming, hey, this person's just like sitting there eating Cheetos and I show up and I paint such a compelling view of the world that they're gonna drop everything they were not doing and like pull us through this process. And that's just, that's a fairy tale, which assumes that buyers are stupid or like don't do anything. And it's just not true.

Yeah. The, having observed this recently with a sales process that we just completed with a large public university, which like falls just like you are there, you know, exactly, Raf. Raf just made the sign of the cross on me for, for whoever's listening. But, Uh, yeah, it's like if the person is not highly motivated to work with you, they will not bring it to their boss who's going to bring it to their boss who is going to require legal vetting, who's going to have to work with a, a contracts department. They, the amount of work that has to be done by the champion, uh, the, by the buyer on, on the customer side is astronomical. And, uh, and so it, you really have to have something that is very closely aligned to what their project.

And, but that's the key there. In that case, when you sold that, this person wasn't just sitting around again, like munching on goldfish, waiting to be inspired. This person who wound up being the champion was trying to accomplish something before you showed up, blocked by their current options. You showed up and they didn't say, oh, wow, that's a great idea. Let's throw everything else to the side and pursue that. They're like, holy cow, that's what we've been trying to do this whole time.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Let's see. Are there— maybe before— let's get into consumer. But before that, actions, tactical things that you would recommend to founders who are selling into enterprise who might be thinking about applying, Paul?

Yeah. So I, what I, what I'd say is it depends on your stage. If you were early, I'm going to write another post on how to sell services first without apologizing for selling services. This is the main trap people fall into when they are trying to go enterprise, which is they pitch a product and apologize that it's a service, which is a great way to not sell anything. Um, and so we'll, we'll go into that. Um, but I would just say. Watch your sales calls and see that pull is there and realize that if you can uncover pull from a champion and it's strong enough, all you have to do is fit their pull. And, and it could be that this person in this organization is a little different from this person in this other similar organization. They're at different levels. They're kind of in different, you know, slightly different departments, slightly different job titles. There's some idiosyncrasies., and you might be like, oh my gosh, we don't really have repeatability. No, it's still, it's not identical, but it's still relatively repeatable. Uh, you know, on the demand side, if you squint a little bit, it's pretty repeatable. On supply side, it's, it's identical. So I wouldn't worry too much about it being exactly identical case studies. In enterprise, you have a little bit more kind of wiggle room on, on the demand side, depending on who the person is.

That's super interesting. I hadn't thought about, hadn't thought about that. We've sold into universities, nonprofits, government agencies. And so it's, um, thinking about it through that lens, it's like, yeah, like, yeah, if you're, they're all trying to do something a little bit different. The pitch isn't 100% the same. It evolves a little bit as you're understanding the specific, like, enterprise or, you know, large corporation, uh, situation.

Um, repeatable, not identical, I think is like the important concept there.

Let's get into consumer. You write a little bit about my business, Coomber Media. We also mentioned Starbucks. In the past, you've talked and written about buying a car and what like, but let's start with the, excuse me, initial question of does pull apply to business-to-consumer business?

Yeah, let's talk about it. Does the pull framework apply where someone is trying to accomplish something but blocked and that causes them to buy something that fits in the way that their existing options don't. Like, yes, it does, right? This is a generalized framework for understanding why people buy things. Underneath it, there is a generalized framework for human action, a gen— like a generalized setup, set of models to understand why we do anything at all. And so the framework itself applies. And I think the example that we were talking about before when we tried to record this last time, and then it didn't, you'd mentioned that your podcasts, your media properties perform better in Spanish than in English in terms of audience growth. Why do you think that is?

Yeah. So the context on Cumbre, we, followed sort of demand from parents into children's programs. And so the pull for ours are— the project is basically, I'd say this is 80% of our audience, either I get in the car and I need to put on something that I don't hate as a parent and that I feel good about my children consuming, or I need my kids to calm down before they go to sleep. Like, those are the two like projects that people are working on. You like the, the, it's unavoidable because you get in the car every day to drive your kids to school or your children go to sleep every night. It's on the supply side that why we do better. So the, if we think about L&L, so they're, they're looking for options and the options are lacking that we were, we basically like led, we went into Spanish first because we looked at Spanish and English and we saw a bunch in English and we saw almost nothing in Spanish. And so there was basically like, even if they were looking, the options were lacking because audio for kids on demand did not exist basically as a category. There were like two others that were playing around, but in a different way. And so that's— we found we grow— it is— it's cheaper for us to reach families, not just because of like differences in economies, but because as soon as parents learn about our programs, they're like, oh my goodness, this is incredible. I've been— they write to us and say things like, I've been looking for your type of program and finally we found you. It's like the supply, they were so constrained that as soon as, you know, we came in, they were, you know, parents and they're sharing it. It's like it, but on English, there's already good options. Like there, the options are not as lacking. And so many of them already have established podcasts that they listen to. It's just, it's a harder market to get into for that reason. I don't know, Rob, is that the—

Yeah, no, that, and that totally, so what that tells me though is that totally fits the framework, right? Even for a media business, even for, right? Like, and I think I've even, I've even like drafted posts on like some of the new media companies that have come out too. And what you find is that they, what they find is a group of people who are trying to like understand the world, but feel like the kind of ideological tilt of their existing options don't fit them. And they just have this pent-up anger. And, and so that's kind of how new media organizations seem to, to come into existence. Right. And so this applies in media, it imply, it applies in consumer products. And you can see it in the difference between English and Spanish, where in English there are good options, good enough options. The, the, the, the list of options on that they have available to them are not lacking significantly. Yours, yours is still better than the other options out there, but it's, but they have options that fit well enough that it's not something they're actively applying pressure to.

Yeah. And so the, what I'm doing with English right now is trying to understand where is there something that's lacking. And like if we're going to produce bilingual, which we have to do for other reasons, we need to understand where is their pull, like what, what other projects are they doing? Because it's not as simple and straightforward and maybe as big as I need audio for the car before bed. But there might be something around inspiration. Like there's actually like maybe a slightly different approach that the parents are looking for. We just launched in English a couple months ago, but any— do we want to hit Yeah.

You talk about Starbucks. Let's talk one-on-one sale. Let's, let's talk. Cause everyone, cause people will be like, all right, fine. I'll grant you that the pull framework applies, but one-on-one sales and consumer, are you crazy? And it's like, it's, uh, and I get it, right? Like one-on-one sales don't scale. You're not going to use a slide deck necessarily to sell a consumer service or whatever. Right. It's, it's just not a $3 thing or $10 thing like that makes no sense. But actually, if you read back through a lot of the stories of big consumer products and companies that have emerged, what you see is a kind of a glossed over part of the story is often the founder doing one-on-one sales and customer support and, and stuff in the early days, and they're not doing it because it scales, they're doing it to figure out what works. And that's the key. One-on-one sales is def— it can scale in enterprise, right? It can kind of, you can figure out methods for it to scale in the, the mid-market SMB side. It won't scale necessarily in consumer. But it teaches you through blunt force interactions with potential customers, what are they really trying to accomplish and where are they blocked? So if you read the Starbucks story, look at how Howard Schultz, um, like evolved, unfolded the first Starbucks store from a, you know, like a bowtie barista Italian experience. To what it is today, or to kind of what it was in its heyday. And what you'll see is him observing customers interacting with the store, with the experience, with the offerings, and getting blocked and trying to figure out what are they really trying to accomplish? How do we redesign the store to, to fit something that, that is perfect for them.

Yeah. Yeah. And on thinking about bigger ticket, actually before that, that when I hear you talk about the, you know, Howard Schultz, about, about Spanx, about, you know, some of these other examples, it's like B2C goblin mode almost is how I think of it. It's like you're not doing a scalable thing. You are going to the customer. You are like observing in person, like like if you remove the pride of like my time is worth X because I'm the CEO of company or whatever, um, and you just go figure it out, sit there with them, see what they're trying to accomplish. There's probably a bunch of different ways that that applies, but similarly, you know, similar advice, different flavor to what you offer for Goblin Mode for, for B2B. Um, uh, also I, I think that I, I love your car. I've been thinking about your car sales approach. Like if, if the car dealership used a PULL framework for understanding, like structuring how they interacted with customers using like, what's the project that they're trying to accomplish? You know, why is it urgent? Why are they— what are the options they're looking at? Why are they lacking? Like, I think even you mentioned $3 to $10 a purchase or like, you know, low-dollar purchases for consumers. It also applies B2C for much larger.

Yeah, totally. I think, I think you can apply it to the individual sales process for something like a car, or you could apply it to the design of a car of like, what kind of car do we think the market will pull out of our hands? Right. And so it can apply at either stage, but like an example I give with cars is when I decided to buy our second car, I, I was on a very tight timeline., and the reason I bought the car was not, I want a Honda CR-V. I don't know that anybody has ever wanted a Honda CR-V. We all just arrive at the dealership resigned to buying Honda CR-V.

This podcast sponsored by the way by, no, um, the, uh, not, not by Honda after that rigging endorsement.

I have two, I have two and I showed up both times like, uh, there's, you know, here we go. Yeah, here we go.

But the, but the second time, right?

My wife was coming off of maternity leave in like 3 weeks. And there was a chance that one of us was gonna have to drive down to Boston, leaving the other one without a car and a baby at daycare. Right? And so that forced me to buy a car at that point. And I had just resigned myself to a Honda CR-V. Now the fun, the fun thing I like to say is if like they basically could have done anything to me in the sales process and I would have bought a Honda CR-V. They could have introduced a step in the sales process where they're like, okay, cool. And step 2 in our sales process is here's a piece of sandpaper. You need to lick it. And it's like, I'm like, all right, fine. Right. I just need this damn thing. And, and, uh, like, and then they're going to be looking at the metrics after that and saying, Well, 100% of people who lick sandpaper buy a CR-V, so therefore, right? And that, that just misunderstands the whole piece here, but there was something on my to-do list. I had the, I couldn't find a better option. Teleportation doesn't exist yet. Like, like, you know, there wasn't another good option. And so I wound up with that.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's get into a couple more. Um, one is deep tech. Can you give, uh, maybe the, TL;DR on what is deep tech for those of us that, for example, produce children's podcasts? Yeah. Yeah.

So, so deep tech is stuff that, um, has a tech that takes a long time to develop and is usually kind of some, the, with some goal of making some step change in technology and in theory with the eventual goal of commercialization. And so, right, when I go and there's like Harvard Grid and there's like a couple MIT things that, that they, that I go and help out with. And those are people who've kind of been in a lab for a while and they're like postdocs. They've been doing research for like 10 years and they've built this like new kind of way to think about exoskeletons or something crazy like that. And, and yeah, and so like the thought is, okay, because we have to do some fundamental research here, I don't know if pull applies, which like makes sense, right? You're going to have to do some fundamental research. But wait a second. No. If you're doing research, if you're going to spend your life researching something in a lab with the goal of eventual commercialization, it is even more important to know who you're— you aspire to unblock. It might not be right, like research. Is a series of happy accidents sometimes where something random happens. Oh, well, maybe it's that thing, maybe something else. But if I'm going to be spending 3 years, 5 years heads down in a lab, I want a customer lined up. Yeah. And I want to know exactly what they're trying to do and in what ways they are blocked. Yeah.

They, Yeah, we actually work quite a bit with universities because we communicate science for researchers. We help them with, with NSF grants, with, you know, DOE and some of these other like NIH. I, my interpretation of like deep tech or like other types of research are there's actually, there's two places that pool applies. One is with the granting institution that is funding the research, which is frequently looking for, they have something specific that you should be thinking about what is their project, not what is the research that I want to do. And if you write a different type of grant, when, um, like I've learned a lot working with, uh, there's a researcher at the University of Miami, um, who's— it's been super interesting watching how he thinks about it. But he essentially, he doesn't use the words for pool, but that's how he thinks about approaching it. Um, like what is, what is their project? What is behind this, uh, proposal or the RFP that submitted or they've put out. And then the other one is, this is the reason why partnerships either with the private sector, there's another researcher we featured that with the Department of Navy. And it's basically like when this researcher in that example told the Navy, like, I think we can use this, like basically engineered synthetic protein to accomplish something for you. The Navy was like, if you can do that, that is super valuable. And that, like, there are other things that are going on with, you know, in the Department of— at the time, Department of Defense— that led to them pulling this, you know, multi-year, massive, multi-millions of dollars of investment that they would need to make in order to fund this whole lab. And so that, I think, pull very much applies. I'm sure there's other, you know, that's why corporate partnerships are important for research as well, going into those applications.

Yeah, yeah. Let's separate, let's separate 3 things here. One is just research, like research for the sake of research. That doesn't necessarily need to fit anyone's pull because the goal is just research, right? Like we're trying to move some needle on technology. It's like, okay, we're, we're just doing some kind of fundamental research. That's totally fine. That's it. But the goal there is not commercialization. Now, sometimes you do that kind of just fundamental research with an idea. Of an application in the future of like, whoa, what could this do? But, but again, that's fundamental research, right? Then there's research, deep tech tied towards commercialization where you want to have the customer, you want to know, have a rough sense or no, you want to have a very clear sense of if you go the way that you think you're going to go, who's going to buy that? With the option, you, you run an option play of learning something interesting in the process of building the technology where it has an emergent use case that you have to find pull for in a different place. And then the last piece is the, the funding side, right? Which is the grants. How are we gonna fund this research? That's actually probably behaves Again, by, by pull, just like venture funding also applies the pull framework. When you're raising money from VCs, what are they trying to do? Right? They are, I think the best way to articulate what the project on their to-do list is, I am trying to not miss out on the next big thing. And so, right, like these, these are, um, Yeah, I think separating those three, but, but zooming out still applies in deep tech. Yeah.

The, the second one I actually think is incredibly important. Like if you think about a group of folks that don't understand pull, actually all of us, however, people that are postdocs that have never, you know, they've worked in research their entire lives, that's a group that you'll frequently see them trying to like, okay, we have this new technology. I can imagine it being applied in ways if they could, they have frequently something incredibly valuable. And if they knew how to identify pool, identify the project, work with customers, like there's, there's, you know, massive businesses and incredible value to be unlocked there.

Oh yeah. They, they like, that is, I loved like helping them 'cause it is shooting fish in a barrel, right? Whenever they, when it, when they figure it out, it is like, hey, I'm this fancy PhD from MIT working on this insane technology, wanted to chat like 100% response rate to, to their target customers. And then they have to have the conversations about like kind of use case. Is this, does this fit what you're trying to do and figure out what are they trying to do? But like, oh yeah, it's if you, once you figure that out, these businesses can, can really take off.

Rob, we're going to run up against time, but hardware, what would you say quickly about hardware? Kickstarter for B2C hardware. Yeah, it's before you have hardware, you've already identified that there's pull for what you're doing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. B2B operates the same. It's just one-to-one. I've seen a variety of it, and this intersects often with deep tech where it's like, here's our thing. Is this like, like this, this is the concept of what we're working towards, which would enable you to accomplish this where you're currently blocked from this. Are you trying to solve for that? And you can get pre-orders for that. Um, and, and like, that's very expensively paid pilots for that.

Yeah, we, um, I, I was on a call literally yesterday. They were, they were talking about an adjacent product that they're trying to do that's related to what we would do on the media side. And they, without realizing it, basically talked me through their pull. They were like, the project is we need to scale. If we're going to do media, like, we need to be able to scale our ability to deliver this. It's urgent because we're about to launch media campaigns. We've been looking for options with our super, you know, looking for options in X, Y, Z. We have a current provider, how— and we're thinking about DIY approaches at home, things that parents could do. Like, they just walked through the entire pull framework.

The crazy thing is that Pull is hidden in plain sight. It is in plain sight. If you watch a sale, like whenever I watch a sales call, I am just like, like hitting my head against the wall repeatedly because the customer is giving the rough contours of the Pull Framework. And we've been taught so much nonsense that we're like, cool, thanks for that. Not relevant. Now I get time for me to interrogate you and then tell you what you want. Right? Like, and it's like, no.

Yeah. Well, awesome. Well, we're going to run up against time. Leave comments, folks, if there's things that you want Rob to take on. He's doing like an FAQ series, so bring your questions or your skepticism. Like, we want to know that so that we can address it.

Rob, anything you'd add before we go?

Nope. All right, cool. We'll see everybody next week.