The first two things that matter for a startup ("Aero mode")

Hey Rob, welcome back. Good to see you, man.

You too. How's it going?

It's going great. You've got Jonas Vingegaard in making his first appearance in your newsletter, the 2-time Tour de France champion.

So I was, I was currently crushing the, currently crushing the Giro. He had a great day yesterday.

Amazing. Amazing. Well, I'm excited to talk today. We're talking about aero mode, the 2 things that matter. This one was like a gut punch to me at the moment, given where, given where Cumbria, my business is. But before we jump into the content. Rob, we hinted at this on the last one, or your book's coming out soon. Let's just, quick PSA, what should folks do?

Yeah, so quick PSA, my book is called The Power of Pull. It is the one by Rob Snyder, not the other Power of Pull by somebody else. It has a red cover. That, that should help. You can, you can preorder it on Amazon, Barnes Noble, kind of anywhere online. You should be able to preorder it. And We are launching a thing where if you go to robsteiner.org/book and submit a picture of your preorder, you're gonna get some cool stuff. So we're gonna do some private AMAs with me where come ask questions, hang out. And also we're gonna be giving away my Claude code skill or my Claude skill that analyzes sales calls that a lot of founders are using. At some point I'm gonna release it publicly, but if you want early access to it, just go to robseider.org/book, submit your kind of preorder receipt there, and you'll get access to it. People really find it useful. You really find it useful. And I find it useful too.

Yeah, I've used it on several of my calls. And basically you just, you know, you import the skill to Claude and then you upload the transcript of a sales call and it tells you, was there pull? It gives you helpful coaching. It breaks down like what was, what was the pull that it identifies using your frameworks. Um, and probably a lot of folks listening, like they can also try to sort of backend create it, just like upload all of your content, but you've specifically refined this one with, I don't know, a couple hundred sales calls probably at this point. So that it's a much closer approximation to like the way that you actually think in the— I found it that it's not 100%. It's like, I'll have conversations with you about the sales calls that I have. And usually, you know, there's often like a little tweak, but it's very close and honestly, like it gets me really far without having to just constantly badger you with, hey, would you watch this 35 or 30-minute or whatever it is sales call? But anything else you wanna add about the book or the code or the skill or anything?

Just the only other thing on the skill is like Pull is pretty much a deterministic framework. It's like, it's getting there towards being deterministic. And so if you just like use, you could, you could try to build this yourself and use it and you will get things that are plausible. The goal though is to get things that are true and right. And so that's why I've been working on the scale and why I keep refining it because like more, more information is not making it better. It's actually how do I compress the, the grading rubric? How do I, how do I compress and get it to actually understand Polish as I understand it? And so it's been a fun challenge. There's probably more skills and things to be built. I have people asking me to just like, hey, can you just plug into all of my calls and maybe also my CRM and like also all this other stuff. Um, and so, uh, anyway, get, get the skill. Let me know what you think, reach out. And if you need more things in that realm, let me know as well, because I, you know, I would be down to invest time in building something a little bigger there.

Yeah. And it's, uh, anybody that's tried to have a conversation with, uh, GPT or Claude or whatever about, uh, about sales, it, uh, without Rob's framework, I find it all like sort of counter helpful. Yes. Like it's, it's just like it leads you in the wrong direction. It, you know, it's, I don't know how it, it works on the backend. I'm sure a bunch of your, your audience does, but it's just, it doesn't, it's not, it's not useful. And so this is the, the first thing that I've found that's like, I actually want to, I finish a call and I'm like, I need to upload, I need another opinion on this. And, um, and it's helpful. And this is a way to get it, you know, 3 months early, like get the goat, like basically imported the PMF goat imported to your, um, imported your product.

That's super interesting. That's my experience too, which is that it's like just vanilla feedback sounds right. And that makes it so dangerous. Um, it's like so dangerous and so counterproductive. Like, like I just have a bunch of people who will reach out to me and say, hey, Claude gave me this outbound message or whatever. And it's the worst thing you've ever seen, but it seems like it would be an outbound message that could plausibly work and it connects in an interesting way and it's like, yeah, this is gonna get 0% response rate. Or if you implement the, you know, whatever call feedback you get from just a generic LLM or from even from like a really good model, it's going to be counterproductive. And so yeah, we'll see. Give it a try. Let me know what you think. Awesome.

Awesome. All right, let's jump into, into this one. Um, we're back into something very practical. So, uh, again, this, this, uh, oh, One last thing. We'll put the links to Rob's book and to the whatever in the, in the show notes for anybody that wants to find them easy. All right. Arrow Mode: The Two Things That Matter. Right. This and this one we're talking about, you know, what's going on at the start of the business. How do you choose the ICP? Rob, before we get into the details, like, why is this on your mind and who's this one for?

Yeah, so it's just I've been talking to quite a few founders who are in the stage where they are growing, but want to be growing insanely fast. And so the, the, they all kind of generally have the, the realization that in order to grow super fast, we need to actually narrow down further and do fewer things so that the things that we actually do, the people we actually serve, like we can repeat that faster and faster and faster and, and not have to worry about slow sales cycles, not have to worry about churn. And so in my mind, there was this, there's, I was actually writing this out and I was talking to a startup that's, that's featured in here. I kind of rewrote this as I was talking to, and I showed them like the party bike mode. It's like, it feels like you're in the party bike mode right now where you have all these different features and seats and different kinds of people you could sell to. There's a lot of moving parts here and we want to get down to aero mode, where you are just like on the, on the drops and like minimizing wind resistance and maximizing power output so that you could, you're like basically riding a time trial bike.

Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, for anybody that's not deep into the cycling world, the, the party one is like if you've ever gone out on like a 12-seater beer bike kind of experience, you're, you're all pedaling in the wrong direction. You're sort of probably moving with a, a motor anyways. Uh, and then on the drops just means like there's as little friction as possible hitting your body. It's like the everything is designed for that. And, uh, Rob, maybe before we get into like, what is it like to, um, uh, to be in aero mode, to be like, you know, down low wind resistance, just like flying, what are some of the resistances like that, what that you're running into when you're, you know, before you get into that state?

Yeah. So the, the resistances are like, if you have multiple different ICPs or multiple different personas or multiple, like multiple different things, then you basically have to absorb that variation yourself. And so let's say you sell to VPs of sales and also VPs of customer success for, as, as like one just super simple example, your entire pitch has to be different, which means you have to switch between pitches when you're selling to people. And there might be a new person that needs to be included in this case. Or right, like it's the same thing if you're selling to smaller companies and bigger companies at the same time, there's like a different process, a different pitch, a different, like everything is different. And so you wind up having like multiple different funnels, multiple different messaging, multiple different website pages. And it's just a, it's a function of added complexity, even, even multiple different go-to-market approaches. Okay. We do outbound and we do SEO and we do events and we do like You know, if you're an early stage startup, it's hard to be good at anything. And so it's basically impossible to make 5 things work. And so the, the, uh, like basically everything that we do, every extra thing we do is just hard to do. It adds wind resistance because it's another thing we need to think about. It's something we have to switch between. It's something we have to get good at. And then the final thing that adds wind resistance is customers not pulling. Your customer's not pulling before and after they buy. Think of it like, you know, if you're on a bike and you're being pushed, right? You're going to go faster. But if you're on a bike and you're dragging somebody behind you in a wheelbarrow or just on the ground, right? Like you're going to go a lot slower because there's a lot more drag. And so when you find customers who have pull, They will help you move more effectively, more efficiently, with less, with less drag. When you find people that you have to convince each step along the way, you have to drag each customer along with you before and after they buy. Get them to try to get them to value it, try to get them to understand it, educate them, like all that kind of stuff, which just prevents you from getting the kind of rapid growth that you're after.

Yeah. Thinking about my early calls, the first half of the call was education and that's just, it just doesn't— one, it's annoying for everybody. Literally everybody. It's insulting to them and it just doesn't work. And there's a bunch of reasons for that.

Yeah.

Do you, your, um, like the medicine that you prescribe for this is two parts. One is who has pull, who would be specifically weird not to buy. Uh, and the second one is what's one pipeline approach that works? And how do you get some subset of the people with pull to be weird not to meet with you? So we'll hit, we'll hit both of those and we'll talk about a case study here. We've written about these in the past. Some of the listeners might be already familiar with these, both the tollbooth and the weird not to buy. But Rob, why don't— why are these two things the most important? And can you— let's just start with weird not to buy after that.

Like, Yeah.

What does that mean? Because it's subtle, but it's super important.

The difference. Yeah. So, so the, the, the recent realization that led to this post was actually on the pipeline approach, which is basically once you figure out the pool of people who would be weird not to buy, there are a variety of approaches you can get to get them to maybe talk with you. And so the, we have to layer on weird not to buy. And weird not to meet with you. And when you can do those two things, that is the like most efficient method that I have seen that causes startups to grow super fast. And so it's the combination of these two things that actually matters. And it's like, okay, once we know who is weird not to buy, then let's think about the pipeline approaches that would make that specific person in that specific situation weird not to meet with us.

Yeah, let's talk about it. Let's bring it to life with this AI SEO example. So let— I'll read a little bit of the context that you have and then, and then let's get into it. Let's really use this to tear apart weird not to buy versus could buy.

Yes.

What you write, you met with this. It's a friend of yours. He started starting an AI SEO company. He started by selling to customers of all shapes and sizes, Tech startups, mortgage brokers, manufacturers, healthcare services companies. Some of their customers are startups that still think stealth mode is a thing. Others are decades-old multinationals. That probably sounds very familiar to a bunch of like early-stage because you don't know yet like who's weird not to buy. And then what you do after that is you list off and then I'll shut up, Rob, because everyone wants to listen to you, not to me. You list this off. This leads us to a simple killer question. Who would be weird not to buy and renew? And then you list 4 options. Somebody who wants to grow, somebody who gets that AI search is the future, somebody with a marketing team, a new startup that's AI native. Um, Rob, uh, any other, uh, anything else you wanna layer on his context or these like people that could buy, that examples that you give?

Yeah, so this is, this is like the hardest thing for a startup to accept. Um, which like in this situation, we were looking at their customer list and, and when you look at their customer list and then you look at like their, their kind of like sales pipeline and you see, okay, why didn't these people buy? Why did these people buy? What's common across these different people? There are so many different ways to cut that, to try to figure out what to do and like, how do we grow super fast based on that? And so You can ask the, we kind of went in circles until we got to the, like, okay, wait a second, who actually would be weird not to buy and renew and be successful after they've bought? And so when you ask that question, you can think about the, like, all the different permutations of people who could buy. And AI SEO is like the perfect example of this because it's hyped up. It's like hot. It's the new thing. A lot of people find it interesting. A lot of people think it's the future, right? And so in that, in that situation, there are many people who could buy, many people who should buy, even anybody who wants to grow their company, right? In theory should buy AI SEO tools or whatever, right? Like those, those things are just like, it's just, yeah, don't you want to grow your company? Obviously you should want this, but that's not like, that's not the right lens because So this is actually the favorite, my favorite thing that I have written recently. Not everybody who should want it buys. Not everybody who buys is sold. Not everybody who benefits renews. Plus many customers who do buy could have not bought. And many customers who do renew could have not renewed. That Like once you understand—

We should upload the transcript for, uh, for that one and just visit that, visit the blog, um, and, and read that, just like stare at that for 3 minutes.

So once you get to that, you're looking for the person who basically can't not buy and can't not renew. They, they must buy, they must renew. And it would be, it just, and so for people who, you know, just want to grow, It's okay if they don't buy because they can grow by other means. They could invest more in traditional SEO or they've never done SEO in the past or like, you know, so there's a variety of different things there.

There's a bunch— What you've written in the past on that is there's 200 things that they'll consider that they won't buy and they'll buy one thing. And so it's not weird that they don't buy you right now. Or zero things.

Bing may buy zero things and just keep doing what they're currently doing. Yeah. And so like you could, so you can imagine in, in here there are people, right? There have, so who would be weird not to buy? There's basically only one kind of person who would be weird not to buy while everyone else could buy. The person who'd be weird not to buy is the person who has historically relied on SEO. So SEO has worked and they are reliant on it. And their results, their results from SEO are going down currently. And that person is in a situation where they would be weird not to want to replace the traffic that they are losing on SEO.

Yeah.

And that person has had SEO historically work, so they know what works, what people are actually searching for. And so if you have those characteristics, not be present, you see, like you wind up with somebody who could buy, could be successful, and they had examples of customers who did buy and were successful, but they could have not been successful and they could have not bought. And so when they tried to sell to more people, like the ones who were successful, but might not have been successful, who did buy, but might not have bought. Most of the time they didn't buy and it was just like scratching their heads based on that. And then once they switched to like, no, okay, these are actually the characteristics of somebody who is weird not to buy. Then it's basically like, okay, almost everybody buys. Like it's weird if somebody doesn't buy now. And it's weird if they don't buy Faust because we know the characteristics the situation that makes somebody weird not to buy? What are, what are the forces that are present there that are not present elsewhere, even though they could buy and could be successful?

Yeah, I think that's my deepest founder envy is hearing about, uh, you know, some of the, the teams that you've worked with that are like, we know within 3 questions at 90% certainty if somebody's going to buy because it fits into that category of of weird not to buy. Like, it's just like, it's that clear what's going on with them. And so, Rob, we break this into two parts. The first one, and I think you have to approach them sequentially, like the first one is know who would be weird not to buy. And it's almost like suspend the second question until that is hyper clear and tell us about the— or let's jump into the second question of How do you make it weird for them not to meet with you?

Yeah. Yeah. So you, you can, so if you think about all the people who could buy AI SEO and, you know, should buy, would benefit from it, and then, and you start with that as your starting point and then say, well, how do we get people to meet with us? How do we generate pipeline? You can come up with a lot of ideas. And most of them are going to kind of work and mostly going to be a waste of money because they're the ideas that everybody else is thinking of. And again, you're going to get a bunch of people who meet with you who could buy, which is great, but they also might not buy and probably won't because of that. And so once you know, okay, I know that when somebody's numbers are going down in SEO, that they have historically relied on SEO, that that person would be weird not to buy from me. Then the question is, okay, how do we get that person in that moment to be weird not to meet with us? So how do we own that moment in some way, shape, or form? And so ideally in that AI SEO case, it would basically be like you're looking in Google Search Console and seeing the numbers go down. And as you know, when it notices that you're just staring at the screen, in desperation, it, there's an ad that pops up that says, hey, have you ever considered AI SEO? Because it could replace some of this, right? That's, that's like the ideal or something, something near the ideal.

Like if you had that, they would click it or like if they had that, you presented it reputably, it would be, they didn't think they were going to download a virus. They would click it.

Yeah. And basically that if you owned that, They'd be weird not to meet with you. You, you can't, probably can't do that, but that's the way to start thinking. And you work backwards from there to like less ideal, less ideal ways. And eventually you might wind up with a, yeah, the best we can do is kind of cold call a targeted list and we can do a bunch of volume with that. And okay, that's fine. But you want to start from the, like, what's the method that we can do that would be weird not to work because it'd be weird not for them to meet with us. That, right? Like, that's, that's kind of, that's the approach to pipeline here that you can do once you understand who is weird not to buy from you. It gives you weird things that you can do from there. And that's what I've called a toll booth historically. But the way I envision it, and this actual, the, the graphic that I include in here for how I thought about this in my own business, my own world, was basically you take the category of people who'd be weird not to buy, you just take that as a circle. And then you kind of like layer on, you think of it as, okay, I can't get all of them, but I could get a subset of them by doing certain things. And so I just kind of like, and, you know, and then by doing those things, I'd also get some people who aren't a fit. And so I just thought of it as like, you know, there's this, this base of people who'd be weird not to buy. And there are, there are tactics that you can layer on top of it that have different levels of fit and like will work in different, you know, they'll work better or worse. And, and like, that's the, that's the hard thing. That's the creative thing that you have to, to do here to, to figure this, to figure this part out.

Yeah. And let, let's get into some of the practical stuff before we, we wrap. One is, let's say hypothetically, uh, you're talking with a founder who is, who still struggles with the, I've got, you know, 3, 4, 5, um, ICPs that, are potential. There's, there's some sales there, there's some traction, there's some evidence, but hasn't nailed the, you know, one limited, this is the, the buyer who would be weird not to buy for you. How do they, like, how do you work with it? What do you tell that founder to do?

Yeah, so what we do in that situation is we will list out the 3 different ones, the 5 different ones, and just Try to destroy them, like literally just try to kill them by saying, by testing them specifically on the, could this person not buy? Is it okay if this person doesn't buy? And, and right, like how many of the, if it survives that, then like how many of those people are there and do we want to serve them? Right. It's, it's questions like that. You just try to kill these. You don't try to make them work. You try to get rid of them. And the ones that survive based on your proof, based on your sales call recordings, based on how the sales have felt. Then you kind of like pick one and you go all in on it and you see, you try again, you try to kill that one in the next week. You do it in a very short period of time. How do I get 5 of these people to talk to me? Um, like as soon as possible so that they can tell me, and I'm specifically going to go to them and, and try to convince them not to buy essentially and see if they fight against me. Yeah. And so like, that's the, that's the kind of approach when you have multiple different ICPs, uh, that all could work and all kind of make sense.

Yeah. It's like flipping from wishful thinking to almost like, I actually don't even know. It's like putting everybody through a furnace almost and like seeing who, uh, like all the fat's gonna burn off. Like everything that, that was, uh, you know, not going, eventually not going to work. It's a, time-saving mechanism. The, uh, let's talk about the second one. Okay. You found your ICP. Um, you know, who's weird not to buy. How do you develop the, like the make it weird for them not to meet with you? Like what tactically would you do?

Geez. I've, uh, this, this is the hard, hard one, which I'd say I'm, I'm, I've, I have many examples and they're all weird. So like Datadog scaled from 0 to 100 sales reps literally only doing conferences. Zapier owned SEO for connect X system with Y system. These are all permutations of the thing. There's the samurai sword example too. These are all permutations on the thing. And so, um, in my—

The samurai sword example was somebody that identified that CEOs that were going through like public crises needed to receive a samurai sword in the mail that said, I'm on your team, or I'm willing to go to battle with you. And then that made it weird for them not to call them back. Anyways, that it was, I think it was like Podcast number 1 or 2 or something like that that we did. Anyways, for anybody that's newer, go— all right, Rob, so you're saying like every, all of these examples are bizarre, like they're weird.

They're almost always weird and they might be less weird, right? Like you just have that one, you nail one partnership, right? It could be the thing, right? Or something like that. In my case, it turns out I think the pull framework is a toll booth. Like it's, it is the best piece of It's the best framework out there, the best, best tool out there for product market fit sales. It's like, it's this kind of upstream thing that you need, that everybody's going to need to nail. And so that just happened to be a toll booth that randomly emerged. But it's, you know, it couldn't be content, it could be IP, it could be something like that. It's, we have to like sit down and look at the pull framework and make sure the pull framework is right. In terms of this would be, this person is weird not to buy from us. And then there's the question of, okay, cool. The situation that is defined by you here is a situation as the you. How do we own that situation? What are different things we can do to own that specific situation? And that's where you start kind of like thinking about different things.

Yeah. Love it. Um, well, let's not, uh, carry this on too long. Rob, anything else on your mind for What founders should do, um, with this. Yeah.

The hard part about this, as you are, are, uh, are thinking about, yeah, is, is, is you have to kill good things, things that could work, that sound compelling.

Yeah.

And it's, you kill good things to get to things that are weird about to work.

Yeah.

And, and, uh, you know, you lose a bunch of gadgets, you lose a bunch of, uh, a lot of your ego has to get thrown in the gutter too. Like of here's, here's the list of awesome things that I really want to do that we are not doing in service of weird not to buy, weird not to meet with us and making that just repeat and scale. Like, yeah, it's, it's, it is mostly an ego thing of I want to be, but I envision da da da da da, right? It's like, I don't care who's weird not to buy and how do you grow as fast as possible by getting those people to be weird not to meet with you and make that system just work with the minimum wasted effort with the minimum track.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, the other thing that I've been going through recently is like reducing the footprint of our products. 'Cause our products were getting, like, and I'm, in my case it's media and other, in other cases I'm sure it's, you know, software code or whatever. But basically we, we eliminated 25% of what we were producing because at the end it was like, I'm doing this so that my team has something to do. It wasn't actually like, because that's what was being demanded and pulled. And That was hard. It just, it hurt. Like, you know, abandoning things that you're excited about and you invest about are really difficult. But, all right, Rob, anything else on your mind?

Nope.

Gotta rock. All right. Awesome. Well, everybody, the link to the book is going to be in the show notes, and otherwise we will see y'all next week.