The PULL Theory of business

Hey Rob, welcome back, man. How are you doing?

Good, how are you?

I am good, happy, bunkered down in Mexico City, not doing a whole lot of traveling as this country like goes through some, some stuff. Um, are things starting to thaw up in New Hampshire?

Yeah, so we got like 8 inches of snow and then it was 50 degrees the next day, and we're getting 9 inches of snow tonight and it's supposed to be like 70 degrees next week, so I don't It's— we're having— for us, spring is either winter or summer, but not a mix of both. And so we're having fun with that.

Yeah, that's the winter equivalent of bipolar disorder, it sounds like.

Yeah. But I spent— I've been— so I'm going later today to teach at Harvard again, and I was there at the business school earlier this week. And every time I do this, we've talked about this before, I just get so angry. It's really, really nice to just get the juices flowing of just how, when you're there, you're just like, oh my gosh, they are literally just steering startups into the abyss.

Is there something that triggered that thought, a preview maybe of a future rage post? But yeah, why is that on your mind?

Yeah, so what I realized, so we had a, it was funny, like the professor had me, Randy Cohen from Field Axe. He basically was like, "Give me the one-sentence overview of your book that is interesting enough that people want to read it, but not so much that they, you know, feel like they already understand it." And I was like, "Oh, that's a pretty big challenge." But my overview of the book is that basically The way that we are taught to approach startups in all of the popular books, methodologies, courses, and stuff like that, if you follow that, it causes you to fail. Hmm. And it's worse than that because if you have these concepts in your mind, they are a poison that causes you to fail even if you don't follow them. And so I just— talking about that and then having students basically be like, wait a second, I just spent the entire last semester doing a bunch of customer interviews. What the heck have I been doing this entire time? You just kind of like, you get this sense of rage from students who are like, wait, what have I been doing here? Like, this is— I've just been— I've been basically— I wasted an entire semester that I could have spent actually productively trying to sell something. But instead, I've been doing the exact opposite of that. I've just been basically making this into a fake research project that's almost certainly not going to work.

Yeah, yeah. Having spent a fair amount of time doing fake research projects, I can empathize with that. I wish somebody would have told me much, much earlier, just go start selling in order to figure out demand. Well, hey, we are talking today about evolutionary selection pressure. So we are deviating. We are typically in the physics as a scientific discipline, and now we're going into the biological sciences. We'll see the number of times that I'm gonna try to work Charles Darwin into this. We'll see if we make it all the way to sexual selection in this particular one. But let me read something from the end of your, your Substack. This one is called The Pull Theory of Business. Pull generates everything. And here's, here's a quote that you have, and I'd love to get your early reactions to it. It is easy to avoid the unpleasant feeling of selection pressure. In fact, basically all the modern startup playbooks with their rabid avoidance of sales, their emphasis on customer interviews and design partners, all actively delay you feeling selection pressure. You feel productive until you experience reality. So yeah, you hinted at some of these themes based on your visit to Harvard, but why is this on your mind and who is this for?

So, so I've basically made a series of arguments over the last couple of years that are kind of touching at each part of this. And, and, and so you've probably seen, oh, the pull framework in sales, like it's really useful for sales. It's also useful for it's useful for my ideal client profile. Oh, it happens to like kind of set post-sale expectations and expectations for what the product is. It has all of these like useful characteristics to it that can be used in a bunch of different places in the business. That's kind of where we are now in the development of the physics of startups. And it turns out, as you kind of put all of those things together, you can form this view in your mind that connects all of them, that simplifies basically all of the different things that we've been talking about here into one statement, which is— I just like trying to kind of like simplify things to their very essence because, you know, I feel like a startup is not a bunch of different things, it is actually just one thing. And so, um, so So what this all comes to, and we can talk about those different pieces, but what this all comes to is like pull generates startups. That's it. 3 words. And when you realize how that works, it very much helps you narrow your focus and see how pull operates in almost like an evolutionary term, an evolutionary way on you as a founder and on your startup.

And I wanna get more into that evolutionary thing, but let's just for anybody, if we've moved from our one listener to two listeners and the second listener isn't super familiar with P.O.L.E. yet, let's just go over that framework real quick. So P stands for project, that the customer or the human being is trying to accomplish. U is for urgent or unavoidable. U also stands for right now, just it's less convenient. L is they are looking for a list, they're considering a list of options, but the options, the other L, are limited in some or lacking in some important way. And so you've distilled this into I am trying to accomplish something right now, but my current methods or options aren't good enough. And if those, you know, the pull being if those criteria are met and if you show up with supply that matches that pull, they will rip the product out of your hands because it's, you know, yeah, it satisfies what's needed for a purchase. Rob, what would you add to this?

Yeah, so like, we're all here trying to build something that takes off, trying to build something that people want. But like, we have to embrace the cold reality that the default state is that nobody wants our product. That's the default state for most people, most of the time. That default state only gets violated selectively, only when certain things are true. And it is basically only true when somebody is trying to accomplish something right now but blocked, and what we offer can unblock them. And so that's the only— and this, that state, them wanting to accomplish something, needing to accomplish something right now but being blocked, that exists out there in the world. That is not, that's not something that has anything to do with our product. It's out there. We don't control it. We find it. And if we offer something that unblocks them, that enables them to get where they're trying to go, they will rip the product out of our hands. If anything other than that is the case, right? They're trying to accomplish something and their existing methods or options are good enough, they would be weird to weird to buy our product. Or if they're not trying to accomplish anything, or not anything relevant that we could help with, they would be weird to buy our product. They would be insane. And so the default state is people would be crazy to buy our product. Pol specifies when people would be weird not to buy our product. The very few kinds of times, the very few kinds of people, so that we can build something people actually want.

Yeah, I love that. I remember that. It's like there's two natural states of man and states of life. One, like, was it Thomas Hobbes? Like, life is brutish and short or something like that. And the other one is that nobody wants to buy your B2B SaaS product. But if it's in the way of specifically something they are trying to accomplish and it helps them do that, you know, that's I think at this point I've been so indoctrinated into your way of thinking about things that I forget how I thought about that previously. It's like, it's just such a different, you know, now when I talk to people, it's my mind is running through questions around what it's like, what is the project that they are specifically trying to accomplish? How do I identify that? How do I understand it? What fits that? I think, you know, if you would've asked me a couple years ago, my thought was much more oriented toward what, how do I get them to buy this thing that I have? And they are, they're so different that it's like, like I feel stupid for having taken the original approach because it, you know, after being exposed to this, it feels like obvious that that's just the wrong way to think about this.

And well, and that's, so that comes back to the, everything we have been taught and all of our intuitions lead us to the like, here's what I've built, how can I get you to want it, right? And it goes from the product to the want.

Yeah.

Where what Pull does is it totally inverts that and says, forget about the product, what are they trying to achieve? Right now? What are they trying to accomplish right now? And are they blocked such that they will buy something that fits their need? And it's such a— right, like, I actually find it hard to jump to, like, articulate this in a way that makes me be able to meet people where they— where you were a couple years ago, where I was a couple years ago, and bring them to this. And so, uh, yeah, that's, that's, uh, that's— anyway, that's a separate thing.

Would actually be interesting if anybody, or if our listener wanted to go into the comments on YouTube or Spotify or, uh, on your Substack and say like, what, how, how would they make that bridge? Like, what would you, what do you say to a friend or to a colleague, um, that's like, this is, this is what that difference is to me from before to now with a pull approach.

I actually, I would love a story, like a way to tell a story about this that redpills somebody on it, like through, through the process of telling us. That would be amazing. So please, uh, please help there. But let's talk more generally about this, this kind of like week's thesis.

Yeah. Oh, um, you go ahead. So, uh, so evolutionary selection pressure, what, what you outline really in the first half of this blog is how pull is reflected in all parts of a business. As you, as you mentioned, pull is, or a startup is one thing, it's not a collection of many different things. And basically how pull refines, or it selects winners, and then it refines and hones winners over the time, or it eliminates them. Could you, could you go deeper into this, this concept, Rob?

Yeah, so the important pieces here are that basically pull determines— it like defines the shape of what people want. And if we fit the shape of what people want, they will buy. If we don't fit the shape of what they want, they will not buy and we will experience pain or frustration. That pain or frustration causes us to change things until we fit pull. And there are many different ways, but this happens across the entirety of our business. It happens— it's most visible in the sales process because we literally see people not understanding what we're talking about. Or we feel the pressure of them ghosting, or like on our website, we just see people clicking and not know, have no idea what they're doing. But it also happens in the product or post-sale, in onboarding and all that kind of stuff. It happens everywhere. And so you can, if you see this thing of like, okay, cool. If we fit pull, we earn the next step. We live another day with this particular potential customer. If we don't, we die in this situation. And when, when it doesn't work, it sucks, it hurts. And which causes me to write like, I don't want to be in that situation, so I'm going to make changes until we fit pull. Then you can see that pull is operating as an evolutionary selection mechanism, essentially. Like, it, it's basically the thing that we are evolving towards. In every single part of our business. And when the business winds up working, it's because it fits Pull. And it's as if Pull is generating the specifications for it. It's basically generating everything about our business. And our job is just to, like, make the pieces. It's, it's to to interpret the selection pressure we face, to understand what pull really is and make each piece of our business fit.

Yeah, some of these are reminding me of previous conversations we've had about the aerodynamics of sales, and it's like, that's maybe one example of how going through sales causes you to evolve to a, in that case we talked about a more aerodynamic way of of discovery, of demo, of selling. And then, yeah, also, well, there's— I'm a great—

also the product, right? Like when we're talking about the product, like remember, remember Turbo Pump, right? What they do is they say, they basically say, okay, here is the pull we think you have, and I'm going to, in the fewest words, Concepts, visuals, show that we are a thing that fits your pull.

Yeah.

Right? And this is all, right, like, if we zoom out and think about every piece here, it's all in service of evolving towards fitting pull.

Yeah. And that pull being, the word service there is actually the other one I was trying to access. But you know, you wrote, and it's been probably a year or something, like half a year, that you wrote about the service element of a startup and to think about a startup as a, like a vehicle that serves customers rather than a vehicle that creates things and delivers them to customers. Like there's a, it's a, yeah, maybe a nuanced difference there, but in this case, like, that you're talking about the evolutionary selection, it's like, the deciding mechanism is the customer, and your ability to adapt in order to serve that customer is the thing that determines your survival. But why don't we hit a couple— you outline, you pull in a bullet, excuse me, a bulleted list. You outline a couple of the ways that pull is generating everything in a business. Why don't we just kind of like rapid-fire hit a couple of those and see if you've got a couple sentences to go into? And then in the Substack post, these are linked, and so go into the Substack And if there's one that you want to understand better, just like click into the article. The first one is, defines your ICP, your ideal client profile.

Yeah, so if— the way we typically define an ideal client profile, or ideal customer profile, is we're like, who do we want to sell to? Right? Which assumes that I have product and I'm going to convince you to buy product. And like, that occasionally works, but it works by accident. Because your ICP that you have defined has some Venn diagram overlap with people who actually have pull, who are the ones who buy. If we come from the pull perspective and say, okay, most people would be insane to buy our product right now, but a small subset would be weird not to buy our product when they are trying to accomplish something and blocked, then we just define our ICP based on the people who would be weird not to buy our product right now. Basically, pull defines our ICP. We do not. Or, right, we can define our ICP however we want, but if we want those to be people who actually buy the product, then it just has to be who fits pull. And anytime we deviate from that, we have uncomfortable conversations that don't convert into customers because they just don't have pull.

I love it. I love it. Yeah, definitely guilty of choosing my ICP and then trying to retrofit it. But how about the second one?

Excuse me.

Discovery framework in sales.

Yeah. So, so, okay, we defined our ICP. How do we get— we get people to talk to us in a sales call. We are told that there is this thing called discovery where what we are supposed to do is discover things. We're supposed to ask questions and get words in response. Usually, the way that we do that is to try to convince them of something, or just like learn interesting facts about their business or their—

My favorite way that you've described this is like, it's basically like, you start discovery, you ask them questions, they spit out something that doesn't fit what you wish they would've said, and then you say, "All right, that's great, here's my product." And you basically just, it's like, let me show you that I'm moderately interested in your business, and then, get into the pitch, which I actually want to do.

Yeah. My favorite red flag in discovery, when I hear these words out of a founder's mouth, what I know they are thinking about discovery wrong, which is this phrase, "That's a lot of very useful context." If you find yourself saying that in a sales call, you are doing discovery wrong, and you know you're doing discovery wrong because you're learning just factoids about their business, about their structure, about their team, whatever. Like you're just not learning anything very useful. And so we actually don't know what we're looking for in, in discovery calls or in sales calls. Like, that's the big thing that I really— I realized I didn't know what I was looking for. I was looking for pain points. I was looking for problems, but again, people can have plenty of pain points. They won't buy unless they are trying to accomplish something and blocked. So all we have to figure out in a discovery part of a sales call is What is their pull if they have any? And so I literally use the pull framework. I have it pulled up in my mind. Some people have it, you know, in a doc during a sales call. And as the person kind of like spits out why they're on the call, they fill out the pull framework and play it back to them. Make sure I understand it, because only once I understand this can I offer you something That fits it.

Yeah. And what's the connection there to the evolution of the business with the discovery? Is it that your discovery evolves as your understanding of the ICP and like what their project is?

Yeah. So the way that that evolves is, well, first, if you don't figure out what the buyer's pull is, you will pitch something that doesn't work by default. It would be weird if it did. And so your discovery process has to evolve to figure out the buyer's pull. Over time, you sharpen your discovery questions. One of the, one of the companies I helped, they know with 3 questions, 90% certainty if somebody will buy based on the response to those 3 questions over time. So they evolve These questions evolve, but they are all in service of helping the buyer articulate what their pull is right now so that we don't pitch something that will experience selection pressure.

Yeah, yeah. Let's get into supply or what to sell. How does it, yeah, how does pull generate that?

Yeah, so let's say that someone says, actually I have an example here. Right now I'm trying to get visibility into when and where my AI features are failing, but my current hand-rolled AI evaluation system is, you know, missing too many errors and it's really hard to maintain. Right? I'm trying to get visibility, but my current hand-rolled eval system is missing too many things and takes too much time. Okay? If we pitch anything other than, "We offer a new kind of AI eval system that gives you full visibility and is easy to maintain," they're not going to understand what we're talking about. They're not going to think it fits what they need. And so their pull defines our description of our product. There are infin— if you don't, if you let's, let's throw away Paul for a second and say, how do you describe your product? There are literally infinite ways, all of which sound logical and basically none of them will work. Only one will work. And they're true.

Like they're, they're not, um, you know, they're not actually factually wrong ways of describing. It's the way that you choose to describe it can either reflect the thing that they are directly trying to accomplish. Or it can be a distraction that confuses the customer.

Exactly. Exactly. And then, okay, cool. So once we have this description of the product that fits the customer's pull, they now have an expectation in their mind of what it's going to do for them and kind of how it's going to work, which we then go through in a demo, right? Or whatever, in the rest of the sales process. They know what they're trying to achieve. They have this expectation for the product. So Obviously, if we don't deliver on that post-sale, they're not going to be happy. They're going to churn. They're going to— and that's another form of selection pressure. So everything is kind of evolving towards pull. And if it doesn't fit the buyer's pull, then we experience pain and we experience non-pulling product out of our hands, non-fast growth. Which we, which like, you know, is our pull is to get to there.

Yeah, yeah. Let's hit the next one. Defines the post-sales expectations.

Yeah, that's what I just talked through, right? If it's, right, like, that AI evals example, right, has to be, has to give them full visibility and easy to set up and maintain. That's what it has to do, right? Like, if it doesn't do those things, it doesn't matter. How nice our pilot was, how well we communicated, how technologically advanced the product is. Well, da da da da, like none of that actually matters. What matters, it doesn't matter what the dashboard looks like. It like, none of that stuff matters. It matters if it helps them get full visibility and easy to set up and maintain.

Yeah, and this is the bastion against scope creep and against like unnecessary You've written about feature development. All right, let's, let's hit the next one. How your company evolves, or unfolds is another word you've also used for that.

Yeah, so I've previously talked about startups unfold. This is a concept from Christopher Alexander where you could basically imagine a startup in one line. We have a hypothesis of we're gonna sell this thing to this person who's trying to do this thing, right? Like, and here's what our product is. And what I've found is that basically we start there, wherever we start, it is slightly wrong. And we kind of can't see into the future on this. What just happens is we try to sell and it doesn't quite work, and so we change one of the variables of our business. Maybe it's, oh, we're changing the ICP slightly, or changing what we think the project on their to-do list really is. And then we look and we're like, oh, wait a second. If we change the project on their to-do list, the rest of this doesn't make sense. And so we have to change everything so that it's coherent. And as we change everything so that it's coherent, we have a kind of like evolved next line on the spreadsheet. It's like, okay, cool. And like, that's how businesses evolve and unfold. Well, turns out that is the process of evolution towards real pull.

Yeah, and that one thing you, you said earlier there is like, it's an— I don't know, I don't remember your exact words. Basically, it's, it's unknowable in advance. Like, it— these are— it's obvious in retrospect and completely like unobvious, like whatever the opposite of that is, um, inaccessible, um, until we can only do what works today.

Yeah, and only try to figure out what works today, and then the process of continually figuring out what works today, the business evolves into something that over time can grow very fast, that can be defensible, that da da da da da. But I see all of these, like, people out there talking about how business works, how you have to have this kind of like long-term vision, you have to have this kind of all this other stuff when it can only— it has to work right now.

Yeah, yeah. In my previous consulting life, it was all the roadmaps that we would, you know, lay out, and then you would, if you dared to look back, which we often tried to not do, it was almost never, you know, never unfolded that way. How, let's hit maybe one more, how it causes the speed of your growth.

Yeah, so last week we talked about the intensity of pull, and it just turns out that the intensity of pull times the magnitude or the number of people who have pull right now defines how fast you're gonna grow. That's it. If there is more— if buyers have more intense pull, they will exert way more effort to purchase. Your sale, your close rates will be much higher as a result, and the amount of effort you have to put in to close is much lower to close each particular deal and get them set up. And so this is why startups that find intense pull grow extremely fast, and all that matters is finding intense pull and like shaping your business in response to it.

Yeah, yeah. Well, Rob, why don't we talk about what actions founders can— should take now with this, with this context?

Yeah, I mean, I think the key is to, again, what we always talk about, just focus on pull, but actually treat anything that does not feel like pull as a signal of selection pressure. Hmm. Which is, it's basically reality telling you the design constraints for your business. And your job, and that could be, Right? If you're on a sales call and it feels like you're pushing and persuading, that's a super common one. If you feel like you're convincing somebody, if you feel like you're trying to get them to want this, really good signal that there isn't pull there, or you haven't found it, or something is off. And that, plant a red flag, come back to that and analyze why. Every single thing that you experience that is not them ripping it out of your hands, not 5 out of 5 intensity pull, is a chance to go back and figure out what is pull and why are you experiencing selection pressure and what ways do you not fit. And this is a really hard thing to do, but it is the thing to do.

And that can, that can be not just— or let me tell you how I interpret that, Rob, and then you tell me why that's wrong. On the one hand, it's understanding what their actual pull is. Like, what is the project they're trying to accomplish? There's another kind of level to it, which is, am I talking with the right person? Who's like, either whose pull I'm trying to serve, or, you know, if not, is it that I need to change the way that I'm serving it, or is it that I need to actually have conversations with different types of people.

Totally. So yeah, you— which— what you're going to know is where are you experiencing selection pressure. What you're not going to know based on that is exactly where in the system to fix, to change things, right? There are two different arts there, which are like, okay, where am I experiencing selection pressure? Oh, people are ghosting after our first call. What people will tend to do is they'll like, um, uh, they will tend to focus on that as the kind of like core thing, but that's often not the core. It's often, oh, we're talking to the wrong person. This person actually didn't have any pull. And so no amount of kind of like urgency or free trial offers or anything like that is going to change that. Yeah. So first thing is identify where there is selection pressure, where you're experiencing it. It's almost always pull, right? Like that's, it's almost, the root cause is almost always, there's just not strong enough pull here or we're not fitting the pull they have.

Yeah.

That's like always, almost always the root cause. And it might, that might then say, okay, but who actually does have pull right now?

Hmm. Yeah.

And what do we do about that?

Yeah. Yeah.

And then like there's, there's this other case where it's like, okay, we have some people who have bought fast, Other people who have not. I feel like some people are a 5 out of 5 on the intensity scale. Others are like a 2 out of 5 on the intensity scale. Cool, that's a very useful thing. That's actually very common. And that's actually a lot of startups bring me in at that point, 'cause it's like, if only we could just have more of these people, but they're indistinguishable from these other people. What the heck is going on here? It's like, if you go back and look, watch the sales calls and try to interpret and maybe even go back and talk to them and then compare. You will see that person A and person B are actually, while they look superficially identical, they are very different. And those differences are salient, and those differences are what you will unfold towards if you want to grow super fast.

Yeah, yeah. Maybe one more note on this one. I've really enjoyed the founder sales call teardowns that you've been, you've been doing in the in the founder community. They— my favorite part of those is typically early on in discovery, trying to understand what is the actual pull before, like, because you're just watching another founder do it, so you're actually, you're not super invested in their product. You obviously want them to succeed, but you don't have like all the emotional investment and the time and the deep knowledge. You can just kind of in a more, yeah, like more accessible way than when I'm selling my product, see like this is okay, here's the signal for what they are actually trying to accomplish. And your feedback to founders is typically like, there it was, it was right in front of you, but we miss it when we, like when we're, and I'm thinking about a call I had earlier this week and while, you know, something that you said today actually triggered a thought like, oh, that was the moment that he told me what his project was and I just missed it. And so, Yeah, it can be really helpful to get outside perspectives and see other founders selling and stuff like that.

Yeah, I've actually found that is one of the key things to do. If you actually want to see this, watch it in somebody else's sales call because it is very easy to first see it in somebody else's call before you can untangle it because we have a lot of emotions tied up in our own sales calls.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, totally. And yeah, all the history, everything that you're bringing in that's loaded into it. Why don't we hit a couple mailbags? We've got our listener was prolific with some of their comments. Let's see, I'm going to pull up, maybe start with a couple. One of them is from Shruti. I'm at R-A-J-A-G-O-P-A-L, Rajagopal. I'm sorry, I'm mispronouncing that, but was a really interesting comment. We describe our products from the wrong end: broad, future, technical. All things that feel impressive to us. Customers are trying to accomplish something right now, and they're not evaluating your vision. They're evaluating whether you understand their problem. Here's the part that I thought was really, really interesting. The tell is how you describe it at dinner versus in a pitch. The dinner version is almost always pull first. You start with the problem because that's how humans tell stories. The pitch version adds the tech, the moat, the 5-year vision back in. Somewhere in the preparation, it stops being a conversation and starts being a performance. The customer was never confused about what they needed. They were confused about whether you understood it too. Is there anything that jumps out there, any reactions, Rob?

Yeah, love it, love it. I think it's not just like we pitch backwards. We literally think about startups backwards. We are taught to think everything about startups. We are taught backwards, upside down, whatever you want to say. And that's the— right, like, that's basically the consistent thing we keep finding everywhere we look here and everywhere we talk about. Discovery, we think about it backwards. Sales, we think about it back. We think our job is to convince them to want our thing, right? And, and to find pain points and problems and all that, right? It's just Everything is backwards and upside down. And once you realize that, and you have to get rid of these kind of like poisonous ideas, then you can just focus on pull right now and ignore everything else.

Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Um, let's hit one from Forever Skeptical One. Hey, Rob and team, is there any way you could go into how to price something like in the customer software agent space or "Any space where the scope or product isn't clear, as it's a service business, not product business. Though even for product companies, I would like to know your take." Yeah, so pull defines the bounds of pricing.

I actually— this is something for a future conversation, but there are basically— pull, remember, two forces. I'm trying to accomplish something right now. What's the value of accomplishing that thing? The value of accomplishing that thing sets basically the upper bound of pricing. So if I'm going to be able to raise, you know, $10 million in funding, if that's what I'm trying to do, well then, in theory, this is worth $9,999,999, right? Like, it's— that's the, like, upper, upper bound. Of pricing. That's not the only bound of pricing because then there are the other options that I consider that aren't quite good enough. So I might get a consultant to help me and that consultant would charge me $50K. I might use a software that costs $20K, right? And so I have to triangulate across these different things. I make sense of pricing by the upper bound of what's the value And you know, there's the kind of like 10-to-1 thing on value often where it's like, well, we get you 10x value, right? That sometimes makes sense, often doesn't. But it's— but those are like the bounds that we triangulate across, and that's how customers make sense of this in their brain.

Hmm, yeah, when I've seen the way that you structure like the pricing page on, you know, on a— in a deck, that's a lot of it. It's like, here's how to think about pricing.— and like developing a framing, as you mentioned, it might be tied to revenue, it might be tied to cost savings, whatever it might be. It might not, actually. And, you know, you listed some of the other like parallels and ways to do that.

But the thing to know there is, again, this is based on pull. Pull is the source of truth. You're either going to be doing it based on the value of accomplishing the project— revenue, cost savings, whatever— or the costs of the alternatives, and sometimes both.

Yeah, yeah. And value not always being like revenue, like projects are often like different, differently shaped from that. Maybe one more here. I've also— this was on the Exponential Pool podcast episode from DJ Jussi. J-U-S-S-I. I don't know, Jesse maybe. I've also faced each of these levels, 1 through 5, going from like basically no pull to extreme pull, selling the same product to the same ICP. Should I expect all clients to be on the 4 or 5 side?

Yeah, that's a good question. We talked about that a few minutes ago. The same ICP, are you sure? Did you define the ICP? Because if pull defines the ICP, then they should all be 5 out of 5. And so, let's say, like the way to figure this out is to look at the people, they're gonna look identical to you. They're both VPs of marketing at a 10-person company who da da da, right? Like, and the company just had, both of these companies just raised their Series A and da da da, right? Like, they look the same, but they're not the same. They can't be the same. They didn't behave the same. And so your job is to look at the 1s or the 3s, look at everyone versus the 5s, and figure out what is it that's different. Based on that, you can decide what to do. And it might be that you're like, listen, there aren't enough 5s here, so we need to kind of change our poll, or we kind of need to do— there's a lot of different things you could do based on that. The first thing is to actually diagnose why a 5 is a 5 and why a 3 is a 3. It is not random luck.

Yeah. And then maybe let's hit one more from Dr. Radford. And we reference this in the— for anybody unfortunate enough to listen to the entire last podcast, but this comment was in response to the Infomercials podcast and Substack. Dr. Radford wrote, if car sales were like tech demos, you would try to get someone to buy a car by explaining how When you push one pedal, the engine creates power, which turns the wheels, propelling you forward. Then when you push another pedal, that same system squeezes the brake pads to slow the tires. Then you go on to explain how all the buttons work, the radio, temperature controls, windows, etc. By minute 2, the person's eyes have glazed over and they're ready to go. Instead, of course, real car salespeople talk about things like, you can fit all your kids and their stuff in it. And it can haul a boat, or it has all the latest tech. I thought that was— it's such a clear distillation of the value of taking a pull approach to describing your product versus a, uh, in particular in the demo, uh, like a technical exhaustive approach, uh, that's more about celebrating and explaining than it is about like serving the actual, uh, pull.

Yeah, I mean, I really love this one and, and I think there's just something really funny about imagining a car salesperson going through like a tech— because it's not just like what Jason was describing there was basically like, uh, uh, right, like just the like how it literally works part. But we also do a bunch of other dumb stuff that is like not just how it literally works. Like back in 1893, humans were walking on their feet. And this was a huge $20 trillion problem and da da da, right? Like, and you could just kind of like see it going in that direction too. And you're like, oh wait, they just want to put their kids in the car, right? Yeah. They just want— yeah, they just want to take their kids from point A to point B. They don't want— they don't— what they don't want is to have a car that breaks down all the time. That's why they're at Honda, right? Like, that's— those are the kinds of things And so describing the product in the context of pull is like the only way that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, Rob, anything else we want to hit before we leave off for the week?

So one thing I wanted to let folks know is that we are planning the last cohort of what I'm now calling the Physics of Sales. PMF Camp if you're an OG here, but Physics of Sales, where I bring together a small group of founders and we go through basically the physics of sales by watching a bunch of sales calls, dissecting yours and dissecting all the different pieces of yours. You can see a bunch of other founders doing it. There's a small group of that. This is the last one before the book comes out and we have a small number of seats. So reach out to me ASAP if you would like to be included in that. The same is true if you want me to advise your startup. We are getting prepped for a book launch, and so people are kind of starting to reserve me for Q2 into Q3. If you want my help figuring out all the different pieces of sales, product market fit in your business, reviewing your calls and whatnot, please reach out ASAP so that I can potentially do it.

And is the way to do that through the form? Should we put your email in the notes? Like, what's the best way?

Yeah, we'll put the— there are many ways to contact me. You can reach me on LinkedIn, you can reach me on email. There's probably a form somewhere too. So if you reach out in some way, shape, or form, I will find you.

And there's also— Send a carrier pigeon.

Yeah, send a carrier pigeon to New York.

Awesome. All right, well, we'll catch everybody next week. See y'all.