The reward is harder work (life after PMF)

Hey Rob, here we are with emergency, emergency Friday recording. If anybody was, hopefully we haven't just ruined everybody's Friday. By everybody, I mean listener or 3 listeners, whatever.

3 people were waiting for this podcast and they're like, what the heck is going on? I'd probably have, my whole Friday's ruined.

Yeah. Well, anyways, we had a plan, we recorded something and then we scratched it and, and Rob put together a, an interesting, I would say we're back in like this almost the spiritual realm of entrepreneurship with this one, but why don't you, the post is called The Reward is Harder Work if You Think Pre-PMF Ain't Easy... Rob, why don't you give us the context on this one?

Yeah, so this is actually something that I've been thinking about for a while, specifically as I keep lifting heavier and heavier weights and just, not looking forward to it and not, and then I just have the voice in the back of my head, which is, which is the, the trainer's voice, Mark Ripatella, who's just like, you have to do the 5th rep, you must do the 5th. And so I just have that in the back of my head like, all right, well that, that's terrible. And so that's been in the back of my mind and it's a super, it's a, it's the, the process of lifting increasingly awful weights has just, we talked about this last year about the simple thing about hard things or the hard thing about simple things or something like that. And it's, it's just been this like interesting thing of just how much of what we need to do is actually quite simple and it is exceptionally difficult to do.. And so what I observe is like, we create a lot of, we create a lot of useless work to avoid doing the simple hard things. And then once stuff starts working, we kind of think it's going to get easier and it doesn't. And it was really, it like came, I, it came to a head this week when I was at breakfast with a founder friend who we both know, and he's been through the program, he's gone through it. He'd like been trying to push an HR tool onto a market that didn't care, and he'd just been grinding it out for years on this. And then kind of randomly in February, things turned. He like, he just kind of found Poll in an adjacent space with kind of the same product, but kind of a different product. And he's gone from like, bootstrapped, was like, he was like drained his retirement account with like very little revenue to, you know, like a million run rate now, like 90 days later or whatever. And so the growth has been awesome, but, but I was like, okay, cool. And I, I knew what the answer was gonna be.

Um, uh, but, but I was like, but I asked him, I, I was like, was it the, the bags under his eyes or like what told you what the, yeah, yeah, no.

Uh, uh, it was, So I knew what the answer was gonna be because I know the answer to this question and it's always the same answer. But I was like, oh yeah, it's, I'm sure it's a lot easier now, isn't it? And he was like, no, it's so much worse than before. And I thought it was bad then. And so like we talked about this and I was like, you know what, given that I'm writing this on a plane last minute, why not just write about this?

Yeah. And let's hit two of those things. One, what happened? How did, in case the listener is in the February version or the January version of that startup where it's like, I don't know, there's like some revenue or something like that. You mentioned he found an adjacent vertical or an adjacent, is it like a category or a sector or something like that? Like how did he take a product that wasn't really working and then what changed? Like how did he find the pull that led him to take off?

Yeah, so it was, um, just from a couple of anecdotes. So one of his, like, kinda customers, one of his customers had bought and was using it, but they weren't, they, they like, they kind of needed something slightly different. They liked it. They were really glad. And he was trying to sell it to other people, but it wasn't quite right. Um, and then he got into a conversation with, you know, like a CHRO of a, I think it was like a plumbing or HVAC company who was like, oh no, you're thinking about it totally wrong. It's not about X, it's about Y. And then he was, he was also trying to sell outside of plumbing and HVAC into, you know, all sorts of HR departments in different places. And it's like a recruiting tool, hiring tool. Um, and in all of those other places, they didn't re— they weren't like structurally understaffed. In plumbing and HVAC, they are structurally understaffed. So if, if you sell anywhere else, there's like a significant chance that they were kind of okay as is with what they were doing. In the plumbing HVAC space, they were definitely not okay with what they were doing, but they didn't have good enough options. And so, so there he had the fit, but he was just, until he talked with that CHRO and got slapped basically into, into like, it's not X, it's actually Y. Yeah. Like until then it just didn't work. It, it kind of like, it was, it was all grinding. It was, you know, some people weren't prioritizing it, others were prioritizing X and he was pitching Y and so it wasn't landing.

Yeah. Is there, is there a generalizable lesson about that in terms of the, either the way he had the conversation or the outreach and how specific the outreach is or something like that? Like, what do you take away from that?

So, um, I take a, so I take away that you have to find somebody who's going to tell you the truth. And so most of the way that we sell and approach sales and approach sales conversations, they don't feel comfortable telling you the truth. And so you have to find somebody who's willing to tell you the truth, what the real project is, what they're really trying to do. And, and that person actually has to have pull because someone, anyone else who tells you the truth, it's just, yeah, I don't have any, I don't have pull, which is useful, but it's not going to, it's not going to cause you to take off. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, let's hit the transition. So you wrote about the reward is harder work. What is it? Why does it get harder? Like as somebody that hasn't gone to $1 million ARR in, in 90 days, what, what happens? Like what's the—

It's just like you, you go from a, uh, you go from where like only one thing matters and that thing is existential and terrifying to where like a bunch of things feel like they matter. You have to keep customers happy. Happy, you have a bunch of feature requests you have to understand, you have to bring on new team members, you have to figure out, oh crap, do we need to fundraise now? And you gotta probably talk to VCs, which is always fun. And then you gotta do, you just like all, like all of these, and there's like a bunch of fires. And on top of that, you have that fear that like, oh gosh, we could go, we could go back to zero. Or I could kick a load-bearing wall and this could all come crumbling down. And so like all of that is happening and it's, and it's compounded by like, oh, I could lose a customer. I could do da da da, right? Like this, something could break here. And so there's all of these reasons why it just gets harder. The, it goes from there being an obvious constraint to the constraint isn't necessarily super obvious and could be a bunch of different things and you could approach it a bunch of different ways. And so, uh, yeah, and it basically, it's, it is universally the experience of at least of like, like people like us where when it takes off, it gets more stressful. It gets just increasingly more stressful.

Interesting. And was that, I'm guessing that was your experience at, uh, sort of—

it was, it was, and you don't think it's possible for it to get harder.

Yeah. I remember talking to you and that, I don't know, it was like 2021 or something. I think it was in the middle of the pandemic. Yeah. And you were like bloodshot eyes. Like I think you were living at the, um, at your wife's family's lake house or something like that. But it was like, it was like 15 hours a day of back-to-back calls. And it's like, it was something crazy like that.

And it was just, you know, just think things just like keep not working. You can't fix them. You can't figure out why they're not working. It's, and it's just, it's just like this constant and you, you're like, you're, there are fires burning everywhere when you actually like hit product market fit and it's, it's so difficult.

Do you, do you advise founders when they hit that point or how do you, do you work with them? Like what do you, how do you help them with that?

So it's basically, um, there's a really good quote. I don't know where it's from, but it's called Let Small Fires Burn. Um, and so what you, what you need to do is you need to have a conceptual model of your business. I use the Case Study Factory as that model. And so you just have to figure out what the constraint is, because if you attack the constraint and just kind of keep everything else steady, like don't drop any balls, but attack the constraint, then the business will improve. If you don't attack the constraint, then you can do a bunch of stuff. You can work 80-hour weeks and the business doesn't get that much better. Yeah. And so you, Yeah.

What's an example of a constraint that you attacked?

Uh, yeah. So, so an example was we had a bottleneck around onboarding customers. Uh, it was basically like we would send over a link for them to self-onboard and then they wouldn't, and it would be like going on for weeks and weeks and we'd kind of keep following up and keep following up. And so that was the constraint, cuz if they didn't onboard, they were going to churn by default. And, and so, um,. And so that, okay, that's the constraint. Question is, how do we make it such that they, it would be weird if they didn't successfully onboard. Turns out we had to add an onboarding session where not only like we had to take over their computer, onboard them, set them up with all the defaults, launch the product with them in that onboarding session. And then, and like, and then that bottleneck was solved. If we had done anything else other than that, that, that it would've just, we would've just kind of run off a cliff there.

Yeah. And how did you know that was the fire that, uh, like, 'cause there were, uh, what, what were, what were other fires that were burning at the time?

Oh, there's just so many other fires. I don't, hiring, like what, it's just, I, I can't, I don't think I can arti— there's so many product fires, product, like we, we just couldn't ship a product they could log into. Like we didn't have a website. Like I, we could, I could go down the list of other things that were, were not working. Um, uh, it was, uh, we, we had like one person doing sales and that person was leaving. That person had quit. Like, like, so it was, it was all of those things all at once. And it was like, okay, cool. This is the constraint. If we don't solve this, everything else breaks.

Yeah.

And, and then it was like, okay, cool. We need to immediately ship a fix to this. Then we need to immediately move to the next thing. And then it's, it's just like whack-a-mole with constraints. Uh, and now, now, uh, the good thing is we had found Pull. So basically once you've found Pull, attacking the constraints is a matter of roughly getting out of your own way so that you can actually serve the pull you've found. Versus, right? Like what I've seen is a lot of people, they don't really find pull. And so everything they do has to be perfect. It has to, like, I have to perfectly convince this person to buy. I have to, right? Like, and I have to wrangle all of this. And so you don't really have the chance to do this. Yeah.

That's, that's super interesting. And it ties to the way that you talk about in sales, um, describing your product as small as possible. Like that should be a line trying to pull and then delivering on such a smaller surface area that, uh, in maintaining that and developing it ends up like the, the worst case scenario is you've, you've described something big, something in the big is where pull is, but you don't actually know it. And so maintaining the entire thing becomes the work.

Yes. Yeah. And, and you're pushing them to adopt it and implement it and you're not sure if they, right. And you're not sure are they not using it because they don't like it because they don't need it because they don't value it, or even if they are using it, will they renew on it? And so you have all, and you're getting feature requests, but you're not sure why. And they're different feature requests from different customers. So yeah, you just like, if you have, if you're not super clear on what pull is, this phase when you're getting traction is horrible. Unless you're an idiot, in which case you're like, yeah, I'm ki— which I have been an idiot. And, and I'm like, yeah, I'm killing it.

They're loving it. Actually fondly with appreciation and a certain degree of envy for, for not overcomplicating the business. But, well, I love it, Rob. We're going to keep this one relatively tight. Anything else you wanted to add? You know, there's the, to the spiritual part of it, you write about just loving the work and what, what was it like the reward for the reward is harder work, but if you love the work that it is, then it actually is a reward in some ways. Yeah.

So this might actually wind up being next week's post. The, so the analogy I use in here, there's a couple of different things that I think the deadlift analogy I think is a really, really useful one, which is that like when you deadlift 405 pounds, your, your personal record, you get to celebrate that for exactly 3 seconds, random, random, random.

We're just gonna choose a random number. I don't know, like 405 pounds, 405 pounds, 4 plates.

When, when you do that, you get to celebrate for 30 seconds and then you get to dread because the next weight you're gonna lift is 410 pounds. Now the interest, and, and so like, That's kind of how it's like when, whenever you do something in a startup, whenever you like achieve some level of success, it seems like the next step is always harder. And that it's just, it's just like stepping up in weights, right? That, and in the same exact way, you are stronger now. You have adapted to be able to handle the heavier weights and in the exact same way, the more success you find, the heavier weights you lift, the more excuses you have to not lift the heavier weights, to not do the harder work, to just go on autopilot, to just coast. And so I think that's, that's an interesting thing that I have observed. And in my view, so I don't know how this, I have yet to figure out how to enjoy this in, in weights and deadlifts. I, I, I go to bed worried.

Uh, what your wife is like, why are you drenched in sweat? And you're just like shaking, staring at the ceiling. Yeah.

Are you having nightmares?

No, I just don't wanna go to sleep. Well, like a, a kind of nightmare. Yeah.

I go, okay, I'm not asleep yet. But, um, uh, but what I know in startups is that Um, if you're just thinking about the financial outcome, the strain will crush you. Most, a lot of founders who build really successful companies, like, have this massive chip on their shoulder, which is also probably not super helpful, uh, or like, like, mentally, quite helpful for building a successful company. Uh, what I've found is the thing in startups that causes you to enjoy the harder and harder work is the desire to build something awesome that serves the customer perfectly. And it's that aspiration that makes it worth it. And like, there are other things too. I want to build a great team. I want to do dev, like those things, but those are downstream of the main thing.

Yeah. Yeah. As somebody who has put the, I want to build a great team before that, I want to serve the customer. That's a really bad mistake that you eventually, you eventually end up paying for. Um, anything else, Rob, we want to add on this?

So the last thing, I didn't write this in this one, but, uh, like when you think of it this way, then there are basically only two constraints in the business. There are two, there's whatever the, the active constraint is in the business is, is a is a real constraint, right? The onboarding process is a real constraint, but the, there's an ultimate constraint. There are two ultimate constraints. First one is pull, just like that's an external constraint. To what extent is there demand in the market? And guess what the second constraint is? It's the founder's willingness to attack the constraint. The founder's ability to attack the current constraint. It's just those two things.

Hmm. And by attack the current constraint, um, you—

I mean, whatever the constraint is in the business, if it's the onboarding—

in the factory that—

in the factory. Yep. Yep. There's the external constraint, which is pull. Yeah. And then there's just the founder's, the founder's ability to get back under the bar.

Yeah. That's fascinating. That actually reminds me of like the Elon Musk, uh, in mythology or like the real stuff. I, I don't know. I'm, I haven't worked for SpaceX or Tesla or, or Starlink or any of this. But you know, what they say is as soon as he identifies the constraint, he just goes and does that. He sits there with the person on the, you know, at the computer or on the floor and it's like he's just moving constraint to constraint across massively valuable businesses.

And he does this at like some, he just like does it. I, I'm not the kind of person who's gonna be an Elon Musk. Like I've already, I'm accepted and everyone's like, yeah, we know.

Yeah. Breaking, breaking news everybody.

But, but at But you, if you, if you look at him and you're like, I just, I don't think I could physically work 120 hours every week. Like, you don't have to. I don't think you need to grind that hard. Yeah. If you're building 7 different companies that are all trillion-dollar companies, maybe you do. But like you, me, we don't need all, but we just like, if, if you think about it in terms of how often do I actually attack the main constraint in my business? Yeah. And how doggedly do I attack that constraint? The answer is not like once every 3 hours in, or once every 2 hours in an 8-hour working day or a 10-hour working day. It's like, if we're really honest and we look in the mirror, it's like, eh, once every 2 weeks, maybe once every week. Yeah.

And so simmer. Yeah.

Yeah. You just let it simmer. You kind of delay it. And so you don't have to be Elon Musk level crazy. You just have to be willing to attack the current constraint.

Why do you think founders do that? Like I'm reflecting on me and thinking like, why do I, why is my instinct not to? Because the experience of it is after you've attacked it, it's so obvious that you should have been doing that. And like, it's such a relief, but beforehand there's some amount of procrastination. I'm not really sure. I'm not really sure. Like what, Is it the uncertainty? Like, why do you think, uh, founders have this kind of like block?

I don't, I, we could probably apply the pull frame to like, you, you don't do it because you don't have to. Um, you, you can, you can delay it or you perceive, you, you perceive that you cannot do it. You can delay it or that something else, something else will come and save you or something like that. And so that's how, that's how I feel like it is with me where it's like, It's okay if I don't do this right now. And I think like Elon again is just psychologically incapable of not attacking the thing right now. And it's like, you know, that's, that comes, that comes with its own baggage, but it's quite effective.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, my, mine for, you know, the one easy one that comes to mind for me, it was like the thing I needed to be doing was fixing my outbound back and I put that off for 2 months. Like I, I knew it early November and I put it off until January and everything that's going on in my business is because I actually figured that out. Not, not haven't totally figured it out, but like got it somewhere closer to that not being the constraint. And it's like, golly, I wish I would've started that earlier. So anyways, I imagine listener can, uh, has like something on their mind that they like kind of know, like this is the constraint in my business and I haven't, I haven't figured it out yet.

Tech, tech, the business. The business won't improve unless you find pull and you attack your constraints.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, a quick reminder that Rob's got a book coming up here in 6 weeks. Is that publish date?

7 weeks.

7 weeks. And we'll leave the link to preorder. There's, in the next, I don't know, week or two, we're going to come out with like some cool preorder stuff that we've got packaged. Rob. Anything we want to add on that now, or we, uh, we leave folks hanging for a week?

Pre-order it and save your receipt. Which, or go, you can just get the receipt off Amazon or Barnes Noble or whatever.

Yeah. Don't, uh, do not pre-order and then immediately delete your Barnes Noble account and, uh, and all requests that they permanently remove it from the internet. Uh, cool. And then, uh, yeah, well, awesome. Maybe we leave it at that, Rob.

Sounds good.

All right. Take care, everybody.