PULL isn't a "rational argument" (in defense of "Me-search")

Hey, Rob, good to see you, man. How's it going?

Good, good, good, good. So I, yesterday, I have a deadlift story for you, which is that yesterday I was like, I am going to hit my 445 double or else. And guess what? I learned what or else means. So I blew out my back on the second one. I will say almost, I almost got it, but it's good because good for 2 reasons. One is that it means I was really trying, which, you know, if you're not, if you're not really pushing it to the edge, you're like, am I, could I be doing like way more? The answer is no, very much not. I couldn't even be doing what I was doing. And a second thing I've learned is, you know what, what the cure for blowing out your back with deadlifts is?

Buffalo Bills. I have no idea. What is it?

More deadlifts. I did a ton of deadlifts today and I've done so many deadlifts and my back feels great. It's insane. I didn't know. I don't know. I have no idea. So, so we're going to, we're going to put up a medical disclaimer. But I feel great.

Yeah, yeah. Please, please do not misconstrue us as understanding physiology in a meaningful way. Or this, this podcast does not replace the relationship that you have with your personal care provider, medical provider.

Also, I haven't been to a doctor in like 6 years and it's becoming a problem, but that's a separate— this is very much not a medical podcast. Why don't we talk about something else?

Yeah, yeah, I love it. Okay, let's— today we're talking about MeSearch. Which any of our listeners who are kind of like the business school type, it's been drilled into your brain most likely that me-search is what you should not do. And there's a, and it's like, you know, research, if it's a new word for you, research with me, take out re, and you're just basically like looking inside yourself in order to extrapolate about a population. And where it goes wrong is when you've got like a Stanford MBA who is like, well, thinking about how do I market Walmart to a population, but they grew up in Connecticut or in some privileged environment. And so it doesn't, I don't know, sorry about everybody in Connecticut, like Stanford. I don't know where it was.

Yeah, this podcast is not for people in Connecticut. You stop listening right now.

But there's, yeah, so you're basically taught like, don't do me-search, like look at the data, understand, And, you know, get close to the customer. Like, there's some parts of that that are actually good. But what you're coming like basically hot in the defense of a specific application of MeSearch. And so maybe Rob here, why don't you just— this is something we, I think we hinted at it in a previous podcast, maybe even the last one. Why don't you give us a little bit of context on why MeSearch is on your mind and yeah, like what maybe some of the misconceptions are? Around it are?

Yeah. So, like, just running into— so I'm trying to help a bunch of startups take off, and, like, most of them use the pull framework, and it works, it kind of works, and they kind of, like, iterate their way to it working well. Some get stuck for longer, some don't. And so I'm always looking for ways to make, like, to find pull faster. And I don't know how I got down this rabbit hole, but I ran into Friedrich Hayek's book from, I don't know, 60, 70 years ago, something like that called The Counter-Revolution of Science. No idea how I got there. And it just slapped me in the face. Like the book hit me Like a ton of bricks because it, you know, I'm including a Claude summary you can link to in the newsletter. But it made me realize that the way that we business people look, just the way that we see the world, the way that our analytical minds approach the world, our analytical, you know, tendencies is that it is totally wrong for the specific task of figuring out what customers want or figuring out what their pull is.

Mm-hmm.

And so I've just been kind of like, I've been rereading and like rereading and just thinking and thinking about and like, and trying to articulate this concept. And it turns out this is a concept that is either basically impossible to articulate with words, or it's above my IQ to articulate it with words. Both are equally like, or like quite likely.

They're happening at the same time. Yeah.

And so, and so I'm just like, I just, I'm going to encourage you to read the summary of High X, Counter Revolution of Science. Do the exercise that I suggest doing in this newsletter, which is basically to do some me-search on, on your own experiences purchasing and how you felt leading up to what was happening in your world, understanding the situation and how, how just what your life was like, what it was like to be in your own mind. Leading up to a purchase. And if you do those things, I think you're going to understand everything a lot better. And I think you're going to be way, way, way better at understanding customers to be able to build something they want and applying the pull framework.

Yeah. Well, we'll get into an example or two of that to kind of, kind of role model it, but basically like the goal here, the higher goal is Pull is kind of abstract. It can be hard to wrap your brain around like what's actually going on, and especially because it's so counterintuitive relative to a push method, to popular sales methodology, to everything else. And so I think basically what you're saying is this is the purpose of this post, of this podcast, is let's give you something that's highly practical, to make pull visceral, to make it something that you like kind of understand in your bones. And then it's not that every single customer will go through that exact emotional experience with you, but you'll know what needs to happen or what's going on behind a purchase that motivates it, which will help you intuit basically, or recognize when you have pull and when you don't have pull. That's kind of how I'm interpreting this, Rob. Is that the right way to think about it?

Yeah, it's a way to know what you're looking for and what it feels like to be in the customer's side. So I'll give like 2 quick stories on this. Story 1 is that somebody we know reached out to me and was explaining how Pull made sense to him. And this was months ago and I just kind of like filed it away as something that was just an interesting anecdote. But he said, yeah, when I saw Pull, I started to pay more attention and think through the stories of when I had purchased something. And I realized that it was a much better description of my purchasing experiences of what was going on in my mind when I bought things, what was going on in my life and mind. than all the other descriptions out there. So that's one side of this. The other side of this is helping a startup now with like the most kind of rational business thinker I've ever met, who is, who is just bewildered that customers are not reacting to, to what he's trying to sell to them. It's going to save you so much money. And you're saying saving money is a priority. What is going on here? And it's like, and it's because we're— he's approaching this from the outside in, not actually. And so we've, we've been interviewing some people who haven't bought, and I've just been doing this to try to show him like the, what's going on in their minds. And it is just a, it is a very disorienting experience for somebody who is like super rational, super like, Yeah.

Let's, one, I love feelings. And so I'm glad that we're in feeling.

You were always the feelings guy and I was always the exact opposite of this. I'm being dragged into this kicking and screaming.

Welcome to my world, Rob. We're welcoming you with open arms and we're going to talk about our feelings while you're here. Rob, it's not that you're saying that analytics or an analytical mindset is always wrong. Like you've created the Case Study Factory. When you think about outbound, it's a system, there's percentages, there's, you know, like you use analytics and an analytical approach for a lot of startups. So when do you think about an analytical mindset as being helpful? And when do you think about it as being like, it's actually either counterproductive or not the right frame to take to a problem?

Yeah. So the analytical approach is good for basically everything other than what's in the customer's mind. It's good for, it's good for everything other than minds. And so the Case Study Factory, I've finally figured out how to make people care about it. The Case Study Factory is a model of business that is basically the only way to grow as fast as possible. If you look at your business as a case study factory and think about throughput in the factory and just attack the bottleneck, there is not a faster way to grow than to do that. Because that is guaranteeing that you are focusing on the thing that's going to make your startup growing— grow as fast as possible out of the infinite things that could possibly— that you could possibly focus on. That is an analytical exercise. deeply analytical. And all of that works only if it like all rests on the foundation of what is in the customer's mind, what are they trying to do? And so I think of it as there is a foundation of knowledge in business that you have to understand the customer's mind. Which is like, maybe it's like 1%, maybe it's what, like, I don't know what percentage, It is, but it is the percent that is holding up all of the other pieces.

Yeah.

And so whether it's like you're in sales, right? Like a lot of sales is tactics and like scripts and stuff and processes. But the most important part is not because you have to understand what's in a customer's mind. What's the difference between what's in a customer's mind when they don't buy and when they do buy? And what causes a change? How does that work? In building a new product, right? A lot of it is like, okay, how do we like architect the thing? How do we put it together? How do, like, all that kind of stuff is analytical stuff. And it's, you know, it can be deeply rational. It can be all the kinds of things that, that people like me, not people like you, like. But it all rests, whether it works or not depends on what's in the customer's mind, which can't be analyzed the same way we analyze a machine.

Yeah. To me, it almost feels like there's like an engine that is powering the factory and that factory is built on, or excuse me, that engine is like the feeling that you're trying to tap into here with MeSearch. Yes. How do you, Rob, you know, you write about having like read a bunch of sales methodology books and frameworks and blogs and like just consumed all that. And noticing that this was absent from it, but there were tactics, um, that were, that were part of it. It's, you know, creating urgency. It's about challenging. It's about, you know, all these other, uh, methodologies that are, they're tactics. How is that different from understanding like what's going on in a customer's mind? Where is it the same? Or like what, yeah, what do you do? What's the difference that you're teaching there?

Yeah. So, I mean, this, this is a, honestly, this is a kind of realization I've had in the past couple of days. And I'm, I am, it's all downstream of like actually thinking about what Hayek is saying in The Counter Revolution of Science and then realizing, holy cow, this is a massive thing that is missing. Hmm. I didn't know this was missing until this week. It's, it's just so crazy to me. And so when you, so now when you look at like startup books and sales books and business books, What you'll see is that they take this analytical approach to customers, to understanding customers. And so, what that leads to is them describing basically customers as, I would say, annoying machines, like defective machines that don't do what we want them to do. And so, they give you kind of like these simple user manuals to the machines that are That are like, I don't know, here's what worked with this stupid machine, right? Like, here's what works with this stupid machine. Here's how this stupid machine works. And it's annoying. It's kind of getting in your way. And so, right, like, on the path to your greatness, here's how to deal with these stupid machines that you have to deal with. And so it does. And like, if you look at stuff, it's basically like, okay, here's how to poke at the machine, right? Like, the machine Really, these machines, you know, respond well if you challenge them, right? Like, that's a, that's a, um, uh, and, and, or, or like, you know, here's how these machines should behave. You know what? If, if the machine sees 10x ROI, it's illogical for the machine not to, to buy it, right? That's, that's like Homo economicus, right? Like, that's, that's the kind of theory, like, Theory of person as rational, you know, whatever. And so all of these are just bad instruction manuals for a machine when the thing we're analyzing is not a machine and can't be understood like a machine.

Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. It's, I have, you know, I studied economics in undergrad and then obviously through business school, it's like, yeah, there was like this weird way that you would talk about people. And this is probably what Hayek is getting at as an economist, but it's like, there's that The rational, like when consumers behave rationally, this is what they do. But there's all these instances where they behave irrationally and it's like, oh, you're just not explaining it correctly. Right. Right.

Right. Yeah. The whole thing on like behavioral economics and all of the biases and all this kind of stuff. It's like, okay, cool. We're describing a rational mind and deviations from that. None of that is actually relevant. Like, none of it. Like, this is all a kind of like path down a dumb, down in a dumb direction. I promise you, if I can't describe this well, if you read Hayek, well, Hayek is like basically impossible to read. If you read an AI summary of Hayek and have a conversation with your AI of choice to like dumb it down to like our levels or your level, if you will. It will change your view of the world. It is so useful.

Awesome. Let's make this practical before we wrap up, Rob. How should a founder do me-search properly? Like, pretend that I'm an idiot. Pretend that I'm one of the stupid machines. Help me like do me-search in a way that you find useful and that's going to give me the lessons that I need in order to You know, better sell to customers, to better design products for customers, et cetera.

Yeah. So, so I would just start by thinking of a big purchase that you have made. So I talk about buying a Honda CR-V in here and, and my story of that, but think of a big purchase you've made and just kind of walk through the story in your own mind, what it was like, what your situation was, how it was changing, what drove you to do something versus do nothing. Like, Why did you choose the thing you did choose? And that, doing it with a big purchase is often like fairly straightforward. Like I did, at no point did I want to buy a Honda CR-V. At no point did I want to buy a car, right? Like I was, I was basically pushed kicking and screaming into buying a car. And yet when I was at the dealership, I would have done literally anything. to walk out with a Honda CR-V based on the situation. And so, and so like understanding that and understanding what it felt like in the moment, in kind of each moment along the way, when you finally kind of got there, doing that with a big purchase, I think, is going to be a good place to start because big purchases like are not usually that subtle in terms of why they happen. And then you can move to subtler and subtler purchases, and then you can start Like understanding this, not even for purchasing things, but for actions you're taking. Like, why are you listening to this podcast right now? These kinds of things, you can start to get a— like nobody is.

Self-hate. Yeah. Like there's the accident, can't— like the next button is broken on your iPhone.

Yeah. But like what? Yeah. So, and so Just start to get into the practice of this. It will help you understand the pull framework, but really like the thing that's underneath the pull framework, the thing I'm trying to describe with the pull framework, which is more important than the framework itself.

Yeah. You know, and one area that I've specifically learned by doing this kind of thing is like when I purchase things for my business, You know, there's all like this theory of like ROI is required. Like you have to build a business case for all of these things and you have to, you know, it has to be a pain point. Frequently when I'm buying a, I'm actually making a transaction for Cumbre or increasingly with you and me, I'll reflect, I'll be like, I never thought about ROI. I never, like, this wasn't a pain point. Like it's like, but there was something happened that triggered it. And then I'll like pause and be like, okay, what What happened and what did I do as a result of that? Like, where did I look for what if somebody would've just like magically appeared in front of me with and said magic words? What would've been those words that would, I would've been like, oh yeah, like gimme that. I'll just like, let's get this out of the way and purchase. And that's, it's both in my personal life, you mentioned the CRV, but then also like buying on behalf of a business and because We sell more in the B2B space, like has helped me empathize or like better understand like what's likely going on on the purchaser's like journey and background of what's going on in their head. Rob, any other advice? Like what, I think that what should founders do about this is like just start implementing this like kind of me-search reflection in their lives. Anything else that you'd say, you know, customers or actually one thing you brought up is Going back, and if this is not natural to you, I love the tactic of reach out to some folks that you thought were going to purchase and see if they'll just give you 15 minutes and just like talk you through like, hey, I thought this was a really good fit. You told me it was a good fit. Why didn't you buy? Like, be honest with me. Like, I'll frequently say like, throw cold water on my face. Like, you know, help. That's the thing I need right now. Anything, or I don't know if you think about that or anything else you'd say founders could could do right now.

Yeah. Oh, that exercise is fascinating because what you realize is that you had constructed some sort of like a logical argument in your head and it's, you know, and it's like, you know, it's this small and you, you just zoom out and see that the logical argument wasn't relevant in the context. And so, um, and so yeah, highly recommend doing that. Highly recommend just like starting to notice this in your own life. It's, uh, it's going to teach you things about yourself and your own mind that you might not like. Uh, but it's still very worth doing because it's gonna get you closer to, um, right? Like you can't, I don't, I can't understand what's in your mind. That's Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments. Like, I, I cannot understand that. I cannot feel what you are feeling. It's, it's, it's, but I, I, I do that by analogy. Yeah. By imagining myself in your situation and seeing how you behave and then seeing if that makes sense to me and then kind of like adjusting. And that's, that's his whole, that's like the whole foundation of the Theory of Moral Sentiments. And so this is a thing that's been around for, for a while. I think Hayek would argue that we've bludgeoned this kind of thinking out of business, of of the social sciences by a couple French people in the post, post-revolutionary France.

This podcast is not for people in Connecticut. It's also not for French people.

Even though, even though I'm French. No. So, but yeah, no, I think it's— this is, this is a thing worth doing. And hopefully this is a trigger for you. to do it because it's very easy for people with the analytical mind, with the logical mind to, or with the tendencies to avoid doing this.

Yeah. Awesome. All right, perfect. Well, let's keep this one shorter and we'll wrap for today. And if you're interested in working with Rob or if you want information about, yeah, whatever we— oh, quick teaser. We've got a PMF camp that we're going to be launching here in A little more than a month, something like a month, but we'll get more concrete details out to folks soon. Anyways, we'll see folks soon. Take care.