The PULL Quickstart Guide

Hey Rob, how's it going, man?

Good, good. How are you? I'm, I actually think I'm a little more alive than last week, which is crazy given that, uh, your, your daughter is like having sleep, uh, sleep issues.

But, um, Rob, this is an epic, epic post today. Like, this is one, it's called the Pull Quick Start Guide, Applying Pull. Uh, we'll link to it in the show notes. It's one for folks to bookmark. It's, it's kind of like, um, I was thinking of, I was like, what is this thing? And, and the closest analogy I have to it is like, you know, orange juice concentrate, it's just like everything, like sort, and then you add water to it. This is like your writing concentrate version. And, uh, you know, there's a bunch of things that connect to it, a bunch of places to go, but it's like if you need the essence of, uh, like Rob Snyder's thinking and understanding pull and understanding PMF and, uh, how to deliver, uh, this, this is it. So literally like bookmark this thing and come back to it every once in a while. But Rob, why don't, why don't you give us context on like what is this thing and, uh, why is it on your mind?

Yeah, so we are almost done with another round of PMF Camp, and the thing that I keep noticing, or that I worry about, is that people will come through it. There's, you know, 5 sessions that cover kind of every single part of product market fit and sales that is relevant to pull. And I come out of it worrying that people have learned a lot of things and are applying a lot of things. But that they don't have a quick start guide almost, or like a, here's what's most important. Here are the, you can take away a lot of different things from here, but there is a almost like hierarchy of importance. And so I actually wrote this as an internal doc for the like PMF Camp folks, but I was like, you know what, screw it. Like I wrote it while on a plane, just on my phone. Uh, and I was like, oh, you know what, this, this would actually be a helpful thing. We can put in a blog post. Maybe we can, we can just open source it. And I think it will help specifically one of the common error modes I see, which is being right about things that are downstream and wrong about things that are upstream. And that is actually a. Massively important concept that I think plagues basically all of entrepreneurship thinking and a lot of business thinking as well, which is that these are, these are, we are very right to a precise degree about something downstream that is irrelevant because of what's upstream. Yeah.

Can you give an example of that? What, what, what could it feel like to be right down, or maybe it's even like focused on getting something right downstream. That's, uh, or downstream that, and while not fixing the thing that's upstream or something like that, but what, what does that look like with founders?

Yeah, so like the classic example is like being super, super rigorous about your discovery interviews. Where you're, you know, you're doing, you know, this is what a ton of founders do, which is you've been told to do discovery interviews. And so you get a super detailed interview guide, you do it, you like analyze it with Claude, you do like a ton of analysis on it and you get super good at discovery interviews, which are irrelevant, are generally irrelevant because they miss, uh, just a fundamental thing of why do people buy things. And given that, that upstream concept, you would not be doing discovery interviews. Like, like if you understood that upstream thing, you would not be doing this downstream thing.

Yeah. A couple areas that I've, uh, reading through this hierarchy, I was like, yeah, I did that before I did the thing before it, or the thing, 6 things before it. Uh, one was building supply, like overbuilding supply before like really understanding the ICP. Um, and, and identifying pull because pull tells you what the supply is that you should build. And then, uh, another one is there's like certain things that you get kind of hung up on. It's like, how do I price this thing? When it's like, who cares? Almost like until you've figured out what they're trying to accomplish and how to sell to them and stuff, it doesn't, it almost like doesn't matter. And you articulated that in this post in a way that was like kind of light bulb moment for me. That's just one example of that. I wish it would've been light bulb 18 months ago, but you know, unfortunately it's light bulb today.

Let me give another example too. This is one that I've seen actually very, very common in our world, which is there's a lot of sales advice out there and there's, you know, like you have to be really good at sales, which I don't disagree that you should be good at sales, but being good at sales is downstream of something that is way more important upstream. And so like I wrote about this this week online where it was, You know, they, I'm watching a sales call, probably the worst sales call you have ever seen. Just unbelievable. You like any experienced salesperson would watch it and probably vomit and it didn't matter. It, it like, yes, they should improve. Yes. I, I, I like nearly punched this person, but it did. It didn't actually matter. Because what was upstream was that there was somebody who was so stuck that they would have eaten dog food to buy this. Yeah.

Yeah. Or gone through waterboarding or a boot camp with a, like a Marine boot camp in order to purchase a product. You know, there's, there's one thing I'd like to call it before we get into the hierarchy. I thought this was a really clear articulation of Basically what you're doing essentially, and you wrote, we don't know what causes not PMF to PMF. So it's unclear what to do pre-PMF. This is what I call the pain cave where infinite things could work, but it's not obvious what will work. We can limp along in the pain cave forever because basically every startup spends time in the pain cave. And then this is the thing, and startups that escape the pain cave figure out one specific thing: pull. And that, that connected a couple of the things that you've written and that I've, I've been around that maybe like intuitive, like sort of sunk in, but it was like, okay, the, the predictive path to getting to product-market fit is actually the pull framework, which you've probably said that 15 times, Rob. I don't know why it's, it's taken me this long, but you know, when I read that, I was like, Oh, it's like it, it just simplified kind of everything in that. And so this post is the, as you mentioned, the hierarchy of things targeted at that, getting out of the pain cave and like understanding pull so that you can execute on it and find product market fit. Do you agree with that? I don't know if that, is that a fair characterization of it?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. That's, that's exactly how I think about it. And, and it's right. And so what's happening though, as you are doing that, which is, which is really interesting, um, because, right, I've said this before, but I haven't, but either I haven't said it or you haven't internalized it in the stack, in the hierarchy of things, right? Or you put it somewhere lower in the hierarchy of things. And so what I'm like, what I'm trying to do is figure out how product-market fit works, how to make startups take off. And specifically that requires this hierarchy of what is most important that nothing else is upstream of. Yeah. Because if you get something right, that's downstream or right or worse, that feels right, but is actually only true post-product market fit. It's a symptom of product market fit and taking off. Then you're just going to be totally wrong in unpredictable ways that will make no sense to you. And so that's the real, this is the real challenge of This like stupid exercise that I've been on for the past decade. It's like the, it's, you know, it's trying to figure out what is causal upstream and what's the full hierarchy from there. And I just like, you just shouldn't wish this on an enemy. It's so awful. Yeah.

You're, you're, you're in the like pink cave of articulating the causality in startups. Rob, why don't we, let's hit that hierarchy. Um, and I actually, maybe before that, I think this is for basically all founders that are trying to understand how product market fit works. Maybe founders that are in the middle of the pain cave or what's—

Well, it's not just, so it's interesting. I'm getting called into like doing executive briefings on pull at like companies that are big, which is interesting. And so basically everyone is trying to understand this hierarchy and like the, the, the, Why are some of our products taking off and others aren't? And why can't we seem to predict that in advance? And so it is like, this is a, think of this as a way to boot pull thinking into your brain in the correct sequence.

Love it. Love it. I'm going to start calling all of our meetings executive briefings for now on. I was, I was, uh, you can start telling people I was in an executive briefing with, uh, with a kids and family media company. Yeah. Um, and it was really like you and I were hanging out having a drink. Um, anyways, so let's, let's get into the list. Let's take it from the top or, um, how did you think about the hierarchy before we get into the elements themselves?

Um, how did I think about the hierarchy? So What I thought about was first, you actually need to understand the theory behind it. You have to understand the, the pull framework, what causes a purchase and what doesn't, what makes somebody weird not to buy when everybody is like most of the time weird to buy. And that's the, like, there's, and like, what are the kind of general implications of that? So you have to have that in your brain. Otherwise, you're going to be in push mode in everything you do, and you're not going to kind of— you're just not going to understand. It's not going to become intuitive. Then the next step on the hierarchy, I've realized that the kind of like number one step on the implementation side is the ideal customer profile, the kind of who you serve. Everything is downstream of that. All your sales tactics, your, like, your product is downstream. Like, all of everything is downstream of the person that you choose to serve. And they're like the way you would typically make an ideal customer profile is you'd write, you know, I sell to people named Rob who live in Mexico City and do, and, you know, like media. If you're honestly, if you're, if you're a taco seller, that's actually a really good starting point for this, but But it's, but, uh, so you're gonna define it in terms of just kind of like static characteristics and everything is gonna break downstream of that because you defined it in terms of static characteristics. Instead, you have to define it based on pull. If you define your ICP based on who has pull, who has a high probability in any one given moment of having pull. Then it's like, it's super clear, like everything downstream of that just like will work or is relatively intuitive is based on that because it's, it's really like everything is downstream of finding somebody who is stuck trying to do something but blocked by their current options.

Yeah, that's interesting. So if we, maybe to contrast the two, a traditional view, so for my company, we, you know, we produce family media and then we sell it or we partner with businesses and stuff like that to, that wanna be in front of families. I don't know, that's like sort of a sell as a, not the right way framing it, but a previous way of framing it in a more traditional route is like we sell to mid-sized brands that are trying or that that sell to moms and dads in the United States, something like that. It's like just a description of a product or, you know, and the, a version of it that is aligned to pull would be there is a brand marketer who is under pressure to improve performance because meta is declining and getting more expensive. They're looking for alternative creative partnerships in order to do that, but they're having a hard time because X, Y, Z reasons that we don't— it's like, am I internalizing the difference?

Yeah. So, so you can, you can define your ICP in a variety of different, like, so in your case, you could have defined it just like as a general kind of like company attribute. What most people will do is they'll do a step worse than that because you've already kind of, you already have the pull framework in your brain, so you've kind of defined That the worst version of that is, which I think you've also done before, is who do I want to sell to? Yeah. Right. And it's, and it's great. That's cool. They don't want to buy. Yeah. And then the second layer on it is who could we add the most value for, or who would benefit the most? Who should want it the most? Who has pain points and problems that we could solve? Right. And it's, If you get, if you do any of those things, basically nothing else is going to work very well downstream of that. And so that's why the ICP definition based on pull is the top of the hierarchy.

Yeah. Interesting. Even, even before like outbound or yeah, it feels like some, like some of that like kind of goes hand in hand, like who you're doing outbound to, who you get on conversations with.

Yeah. Or, or cuz this, this is gonna determine what method you're going to use to get in front of those people. If the people with pull are Fortune 500 CEOs who are stuck in a very specific situation, you're not gonna be doing outbound necessarily. You're gonna, or you're gonna be doing a very weird approach to outbound, but maybe you're gonna get intros from some other, like you're gonna, your, your entire business approach and product approach is downstream of this.

Yeah. Fascinating. And I love it. I'm not going to— I was going to say something else. It's stupid. Why don't we continue from the ICP down into— you call it product here, actually, which kind of like threw me for one. I was like, I thought we talked about supply. But you said product and then in parentheses, our supply to their demand. You write— or actually, before I say that, why is that the second? Why that, it surprised me that that was this high, um, that product was there. Why is product the number, number 2 thing here?

Uh, we have to have something that fits Paul. If we don't have something or some shape of a thing that, that could unblock them, then it doesn't matter. Um, then like, no, again, nothing else matters. Um, and so that's where the, it's, you know, you have to find somebody and you have to have some, it doesn't need to be something fancy. It doesn't need to be fully built. But you need to have at least the concept, the high-level requirements, what we'll talk about here, to, to, uh, as something that you can at very least put in front of them, show them or say the words to see if they actually pull.

It, it makes me, that makes me think of, okay, was it Cyberstarts? I'm forgetting the name of the VC firm, um, that we, we talked about, I don't know, maybe 2 months ago or something like that. And they started with the first one, which is an ICP. They had a very clear, they had a very clear kind of persona, I would say, which was chief security or information security officers at, you know, at companies. And then their first step was that first one, define your ICP. And they were essentially filling out pull. Yes. And then they figured out supply. And so it wasn't that they were doing them at the same time. It was actually like they would spend, I think, like 6 months or something like that, which ended up being a formula that worked. But is that how you internal, like, interpret them? It's like even if you don't— it's not that the first thing is the ICP and at the same time you need the product. The first one could actually be understand the ICP and then start putting the product in front of them in the form of like a description, a one-page mockup. Like, it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily mean I need to code something and I need to be able to pull up like an actual product.

Yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's, and it's, if you define your ICP in a way that fits pull, right? Like you're, there's not actually product or service shape as part of it, right? Like pull is product agnostic. It is this thing you're looking for out there, which is I'm trying to find a person who is stuck. Trying to do something, which is not buy a CRM. It is, I'm trying to organize my sales data. I'm trying to, whatever it is. Yeah. Who is stuck because their existing tools, methods, options are not good enough. And they are so stuck that they will pull something out of your hands. And then it, then we have to kind of just say, okay, what's the something? What are, what's the shape of the something? And, and that's, you have to have a rough shape of that for them to say, yeah, that's, that's what I'm looking for. Or even just buy it. Hmm.

This, I think this is a spot where founders get really uncomfortable. Maybe companies in general get really uncomfortable around this cuz it's like, how can I have these conversations if I haven't built the thing? Um, you know, that's something that, that's popped up with, uh, some of the, the founders in the last couple weeks in the conversation. And it's just like, how do, how do you talk with founders about, getting comfortable with a, like your version of an MVP is so simple. It's like, you know, you ran a business out of Google Sheets. You, you know, it's like, don't worry about coding something until you validated your ICP and, and their pull. How, how do you, um, you know, what do you tell founders when they're like, how, how could I possibly go sell something before I have a, like a, a product that they could open up and go into a portal for, or whatever it might be?

Yeah. What I've typically done is write out the pull framework with them and then say, okay, cool. If somebody's stuck in this situation, what's the thing that they will rip out of your hands? And then, okay, can we just write that on one slide and maybe mock up a visual of it or just a flowchart of it? And that's your MVP.

Yeah. Yeah. That's essentially under your tutelage, what I've been doing and Golly, it's so much simpler. Let's continue. You then go sales the vibe. What do you, what do you mean by sales the vibe as a third most important thing?

Yeah. So it's, it's actually your approach to sales. Your, the way you think about sales is more important than literally anything you do in the sales process. Because if you get the approach right, you'll intuit You'll like intuitively do all of the rest of the things. And like downstream of that are tactics and whatnot. And those are useful. But if you come at it with the wrong way of thinking, the wrong theory of causality of what your role is on this call and what their role is on this call, then you're just going to mess everything up. And the ways that people mess everything up are they try to convince people, they try to interrogate people, they You know, I don't know, we, we craft, I've realized actually that most sales decks when I see them first are, are making a legal case for purchasing. So like, if you agree with this logic, you will buy our product.

Yeah. I'm guilty of that. I think you've said that verbatim to me on a couple occasions.

Yeah.

Gotcha. I backed you into a corner. You can't not buy my product now.

Right. Oh, you have agreed that you have these pain points. Yeah. Now I have unveiled my product and you have nodded. Right. And it's, and so if, so if, and so if you're thinking about that wrong, you're going to do everything else wrong in the sales process. You're in and it's, and worse, you're not going to get the signals to improve. You're not, you're going to misinterpret what's happening, which I have done. And so you have to get, you have to get your mind right.

Yeah. And, and the, um, way to get your mind right is, uh, in this case, chill. Don't do the legal case. Um, you write, show them the product, or, uh, it's basically like articulate pull to them, understand their pull, show supply that fits that pull. And if it, if it works, they'll pull it outta your hands.

And most upstream of that is like, again, if they have pull, they will pull. You have to chill the heck out. Calm down, stop trying to convince them. See, like the goal here is to see if they need help. Yeah. That's it. Do you need help? In what form do you need help? In what ways are you stuck? How could I possibly unblock you? Yeah. And you, if you approach it as like, I'm here to see if you need help. If you don't need help, I'm not bothered. Yeah. It's a, just a totally different mindset than coming in. Like, I need to convince you of this.

Yeah. Yeah. Which is loading yourself with pressure over something you really don't have control over.

A sales call, like, should be 0% stressful.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm still on the path to achieving that. Um, Rob, how, Do we want to keep going through this list? Do we, are there a couple ones that, um, we want to make sure that we hit?

No, I mean, I think the, the, then it's like, okay, cool. I'll just talk through the hierarchy of the rest of the things. So, okay. So once you have the kind of like vibe or approach to sales, right? Then it's like, okay, cool. How do you execute a sales call? Well, discovery is you have to fill out their pull framework and there's like some tactics that you can do there. You can't, you can't pitch and demo effectively until you actually know this person's pull framework. And so that comes downstream. Then if it's like, cool, discovery, demo, this seems like a fit. Your approach should be, okay, let's optimize for velocity. Let's not try to sell everything at once. We're trying to just get something done relatively quickly because we want to optimize for learning. We want, and we can only learn once we've delivered. Verb and see how, see what happens post-sale. And so that's what I'm kind of optimizing for. A sales process takes form based on that. And then like, okay, cool. Then there is, and I wasn't quite sure where to put this in the hierarchy, is how do you get people to talk to you? Yeah. Again, that, that I think is still, I think that's downstream of the kind of like sales process, sales It's definitely downstream of the thinking about sales because if you think your job is to convince people, you're gonna send terrible outreach. Like you're gonna do, you're just gonna make a massive butchery of the English language in your messaging. And so like, and there's people pre and post. Yeah.

Yeah.

You're gonna offend people and feel gross when you, when you do it. And so, yeah. And so there's pre— before you figured out pull ways of getting people to talk to you and after you've figured out pull ways of getting talked to. This is again, super important, but also you couldn't just get warm intros. You can't just go places. And it's like, if you can't do, if you can't like figure out what people want and offer, offer something that fits, again, you can do tons of conversations and it doesn't really matter.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I'm glad you hit that one. One, there's a couple other gems in here. We won't spend a whole lot of time and I actually hope you'll write about some of these. I've got a, I've got a running list while I was reading this and I was like, Rob should expand on this. Rob should expand on this. Oh yeah.

And if you're, if you're one of the 3 people listening, actually now people have, I had multiple people reach out claiming to be the listener. So either I've never looked at the analytics here.

I'm just going to take your word. It's an AI persona. That's it.

That's impersonating multiple personas. But if there are pieces in here. I'll write this in, but if there are pieces in here you want me to expand on, let me know. I have plenty of things that I could write about, but yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love, a couple of my favorites are how to work with a champion and deal strategy. What you write there about pricing, I think was very insightful and actually is something I've been thinking about lately and making a big mistake on. And the way you articulated that was, illuminating. Anyways, Rob, what should founders do with this?

Follow the hierarchy. You, you, if you're not, if you haven't defined your ICP as it relates to pull, do that. That will inform everything else. Yeah.

Yeah. Awesome. Um, well, uh, like I, like I mentioned at the start, this one is called the Pull Quickstart Guide, Applying Pull. It's bookmarked on, uh, for me, it'll be out on On Friday, I highly recommend not just listening to this podcast, but like take 10 minutes and actually read through it. There's going to be something in there that jumps out to you. Um, and if there's nothing else, Rob, we can let folks go. Cool. All right. Awesome. We'll see y'all next week.