What "Good" actually looks like for a startup
In this interview‑style YouTube episode, host SPEAKER A and startup advisor Rob Snyder discuss the practical standards that define a “good” early‑stage B2B startup. Snyder introduces his “case study factory” model, treating a startup as a manufacturing system that produces a single, repeatable case study. He outlines six concrete metrics that founders should meet: (1) a clear, repeatable case study that makes it “weird” for the target customer not to buy; (2) pipeline volume targets – 3 first‑meeting weeks for >$100 K deals, 10 for $25‑99 K, 15 for <$25 K; (3) pull – at least 60 % of first meetings must contain a purchase‑shaped action; (4) close rate – 50 % of pulled meetings should convert; (5) cycle‑time – 90 days for large, 30 days for medium, 14 days for small contracts; (6) a leading‑indicator of retention, defined as a metric (e.g., usage threshold) that, once hit within a month, makes churn unlikely. Snyder explains how to diagnose bottlenecks, use “founder magic” to achieve pipeline numbers, differentiate true pull from mere interest, and run a weekly reality‑checking ritual (automated call‑review metrics) to stay on target. He emphasizes the need for tough‑love standards, the importance of early customer interviews to craft the case study, and the value of concrete, measurable standards over vague notions like NPS or ROI. The conversation also touches on common objections, the role of sales vs product‑market‑fit, and practical advice for founders who fall short of the benchmarks.
Chapters
Hey Rob, welcome back. Good to see you, man.
How you doing?
I'm doing great. And I am a couple chapters into The Power of Pull, your book. You are officially a published book author, and I gotta say it's really good. We won't dwell on this for long, but even as somebody who has been exposed to your ideas, like for a couple years, been hosting, literally hosting a podcast with you for a year now, it isn't like, it's so, it's well-written. The case studies are super thoughtful and thought-provoking. If you could see my copy, there's like a bunch of notes in the margin where I'm like, oh, this is where this applies. Like, I, on one page, I like rewrote my outbound based on a comment that you, that you made. So it's, it's really good. And I don't know if there's anything you want to add on the book. We just want to start by saying congrats on, on publishing it.
Yeah, thanks. I'm excited to read it too. AI generated the whole thing, so we'll—
Yeah, it does have a weird hallucination there at the start, but after you get over that—
You haven't gotten to the romance novel or the romance section yet, have you?
Anything can be a romance novel if you believe in yourself and try hard enough. Well, hey, I'm— this is a— this is a great post. I don't want to dwell too long on anything up front because this post is worth talking about. Essentially what you've done here is laid out the standard for— I mean, one of the hard things about entrepreneurship, as everybody knows, is like it's hard to tell if you're doing a good job or not. Or— and what you've done is like kind of put a stake in the ground here to say if you're a founder, if you're, you know, either going zero to one or if you're growing your business, this is what you should be expecting and this is where you should expect yourself to be performing from pipeline, from closing, from, from having a case study. Like we'll get into each of these elements. But I think that it's going to have obvious applications for founders who are listening to this to be able to like at least get a sense like, where am I underperforming? Where are my biggest gaps compared to the dozens of startups that you've worked with? So with no further ado on that, on my end, Rob, why is this on your mind? And, and you know, how is this useful for folks?
Yeah. Founder that I think that we both met in the past weeks basically asked for this, saying, came in saying, hey, I, in January of this year, I thought we were like on track. I thought we were headed in the right direction. And then now I'm realizing we're actually dying. And if Somebody, and I was like, okay, well that sucks. And that's really tough. And I've actually seen that happen a lot. And so we had a chat about it and I was like, okay, what would you have wanted to know 6 months ago? Or what would have, you know, I assume 6 months ago you think you're good. Like, what could I have said then that would have smacked some sense into you or something? Or would anything have broken through? And his response was, that, yeah, I want, I wish somebody had told me what good looks like, like what I should be expecting here. And I realize as I've been talking to other founders, like there's a bunch who are in the stage where they're like, okay, we just raised a pre-seed and we want to hit metrics to be able to raise a seed or skip the seed and hit Series A. And like all the metrics and all the stuff out there that I've seen, at least it's like, okay, there was always the SaaS napkin. Which you've never heard of, but it basically just said like, you know, to raise a Series A, you have to be at $1.5 million ARR or whatever. Like there are like kind of things like that, which are the outcome metrics. And then there's Sean Ellis, who's a great, great thinker on growth. He wrote something about product market fit, which is like the rule of 40, 40% of your users would be disappointed if your product no longer existed. It's like, okay, cool. Those things are like useful, but those are often like the last step. And, and if you're just focusing on those, you're not focused on the entire like business as case study factory. You're not focused on the factory metrics. And so, so yeah, I was like, all right, cool. I, I'm just gonna draw a line in the sand. I assume a lot of people will disagree with this. And I designed it in a way that it is Something that people in sales will generally disagree with. We're going to get a lot of comments from people in sales about it. And, but, but that's for a purpose. This is not about sales. This is about product market fit and what good, what good looks like, what top tier like actually winds up looking like. And so it's right, like not, it should be a slap in the face. It should be a wake-up call. It's going to be very, very hard to hit these metrics., but it's the tough love that I wish somebody had given me when I was kind of floundering around in pink because there's nothing worse than realizing 6 months later or 12 months later that, oh, I, I wasn't where good is. Like I wasn't where the bar is. Nobody told me and I would've spent the last 6, 12 months totally differently because of it.
Yeah. And, and also recognizing where in the, where across the, across the factory you're really massively or underperforming or something like that. You know, you write out, let's jump into the factory and lay it out in a second, but there's something else that you write super early in this. You say, I meet two kinds of early-stage B2B startups. Number one is the promising startup that has the chance to become an outlier. They don't wanna miss their chance, but they aren't sure if they're doing everything they need to do to nail it. And two is the startup that doesn't realize they're dying. It seems like they are on a path to hypergrowth, yet they very much aren't. Uh, can you, like, what's, uh, uh, what's going on between those two? Like, what do they, what do they look like? And why is that distinction between the two jumping out to you?
So the interesting thing, and I don't know that I can convey this like effectively, is those, these are often present in the same startup, which is kind of interesting. It's, it's like, hey, yeah, we've got customers, we've got traction, but maybe we don't have enough to raise our next round. And so we realized that way too late and would have done things differently. Sooner, like if we, if we had known this sooner. And so, and then there's the kind of startup where they're, one of the most common things I see is that people think that what they're doing is good enough. Yeah, we're growing month on month, we're adding new customers, but it's, we're kind of hacking it together and like, it's not, we're not building a kind of machine. We're not building a factory that enables us to do do better and better and better month on month. We're not really compounding. And so, right, like we're a couple of unfortunate months where we don't get referrals or where we don't get like thing, like just lucky away from hitting a wall.
Yeah. Yeah. And that's the, I imagine that can be like a really confusing place to be. It's like, am I, when, before you hit hypergrowth, it's like you don't know actually that hypergrowth is coming. And so it— you might actually be in a spot where, where that's sort of the next step where it might not be. Well, why don't we jump into the factory itself? You already— you already outlined what the, you know, the context was on the founder. I'm going to— I'm just going to run through the 6 steps that you outline in the factory and then we'll jump into each step. One is the repeatable case study. 2 is pipeline, 3 is pull, which you define as a customer trying to buy. And then you have close rate, which is interesting that you separate those two. I want to dig into that in a little bit. Then you've got cycle time, which is, you know, essentially the amount of time it takes to convert from, I guess, first call into, into a sale. And then you've got success rate. Rob Snyder, what would you add on how to think about startups as a factory or anything you want to hit at a higher level before we, before we dig into these individually. Yeah.
So my most important and least understood contribution to the world is the case study factory model, which like every time I start talking about it, everybody just tunes out. Like, just, I don't know. It has the worst messaging problem. It has the worst, but it's the most useful thing. And so if you, if you look at a startup as a case study factory, that you can basically apply manufacturing concepts to know exactly where to focus, what's not working. And what to do, and it is amazing and I can't communicate it. And so if you want to try to watch me communicate it, the notes on The Physics of Startups, that 3-hour lecture is, um, worth doing. Maybe I'll record, uh, maybe I'm just going to try to record another thing on the Case Study Factory exclusively trying to, and this is totally against pull, but trying to convince you that this is a concept you should understand. You know, totally anti-Pull, but I think it's that important anyway. But if you view a startup as a factory or as like a system that produces case studies, okay, there are 3 machines in the factory. There's the pipeline system. How do we get people to meet with us? There's the sales system. How do we turn those people into customers? And then there's the delivery or success machine in the factory, which is how do we make people not churn. And if you look at it as a, just a factory, right? Well, you could produce a bunch of different case studies through the factory that all kind of look different. That's a lot of variation to put through a factory. You can't really scale with a ton of variation in a factory, a ton of unmanageable variation. That's where the single case study comes in, where it's okay, no, we're just producing one case study of this basically identical, which allows us to scale. And for it to be totally repeatable each step along the way. What, what success is post-sale looks generally the same across all of our customers. What the sales process is, da da da, like all of those things become roughly standardized so that we can repeat and scale and scale. And once you have the case study, you're like, oh wait, how does this factory work? Well, the first part of a case study is the demand side. It's trying to do X but blocked, therefore we show up, right? And so you realize the entire factory, and I'll shut up in a second, the, The entire factory is powered by customer pull. So if customers have demand, if they have pull, they will pull themselves through the factory. If not, you have to try to push them through your factory. And guess what? They have legs, they can walk out, and they tend to if they don't have pull. And so that— this brings all of the concepts together. End scene.
I'd say instead, as you're thinking about the video, it's It's not to convince people that they should care about it. It's more like for the people that already think that it's important and they want to better understand it. It's like that's— or maybe you're just going to— you're going to proselytize and shout into the abyss, man.
I am shouting into the abyss.
We're standing on the mountaintop. And, you know, one other, other concept in there that's going to be important throughout this is the bottleneck. And, you know, an element that's important for as you're thinking about a continuous system is where is the bottleneck in the system? Because the end result is going to be constrained by that single bottleneck. And so we'll talk a lot of that is in, in this particular post and in each of these elements. Why don't you already give a little bit of an overview of the repeatable case study? Let me, let me read some things that I thought kind of like distilled this down to the essence. You, you wrote it and the way that you write this blog, maybe before jumping into the elements, is there's each of these 6, 6 steps in the process where you've said this is the standard that you need to hit. And so that the— we'll walk through each of these and it'll be like, okay, you should be able to think, is, is this the number that I am hitting or not? Like it should be pretty black and white is kind of the goal and like a little bit intentionally provocative. But also if there's no, you know, if there's no line that you have to cross and say whether you're across it, then it just makes it super easy to avoid it. But going to the, the standard for the repeatable case study, you must have one repeatable case study. The case study articulates exactly who you sell to and exactly how you describe your product. If you don't know these things with extreme clarity, you don't have a repeatable case study. And then this is a part that I really liked. Your one case study must be written in a way in a way where it would be weird if the person in the case study did anything other than buy your product right now. I want to double-click into that one because it's an important one that you flesh out a little bit. Can you kind of go off on what, what are you getting at with it would be weird if the person did anything other than buy your product right now?
Yeah. So that's a way to say the case study must be based on the pull framework, because if you have a case study where it's like Hey, they wanted to hit their revenue goals and therefore they considered, right, buying a CRM. They considered all this other stuff, but they chose us because we helped them hit their revenue goals. Right. That's, that is way too abstract. A person in that situation has infinite options to hit their revenue goals. And so it wouldn't be weird if they didn't choose us. We have to design a case study so it is Weird if they don't choose us, because if it's not weird, if they don't choose us, then when we talk to them, they're by default not going to buy. And so we're going to have a— everything downstream, the entire factory is going to suck because if you're selling to people who probably won't buy, well, guess what's going to happen? Probably won't buy. They have a bunch of different options. They could do other things. They don't have to buy your product. And so that's a, that's the key thing that I see people messing up here is, um, you know, you get into like ways to the, you, you sell to people, you, you define your ICP as people you would like to sell to, right? I want to sell to enterprise and you know what? I want to sell them AI for workflow automation, right? Cool. Those are ways to describe your product and ways to describe your ICP, but your ICP wouldn't be weird not to buy your, your product. So you don't have a repeatable case study. You show the case study. To one of these people, they should try to buy. That's the, that's the bar. They should almost be unable to not buy. That's, that's the bar that we are shooting for here.
Yeah. And how do they, how can somebody recognize either side that their case study is, you know, maybe somebody is like, I'm actually not sure if I hit that standard. How can they know? Okay. Like actually it's too vague or it's not weird. It doesn't meet the weird to buy standard. Or if or it, you know, on the positive side, how can somebody feel confident that they've got that case study and that's no longer the thing that they need to be focusing on?
Yeah, I guess there are two. One is you could show it to me, right? And I'm happy to just roast it. But the second is the true serum is showing it to a potential customer who you think fits that criteria and seeing what they do. And so, the customer conversation is always the best test of this. Hmm.
Gotcha. Yeah. And, uh, the, like the standard you're looking for there is like, did they buy weirdly fast or something like that? Yeah. Like you've, you've talked about like these other instances. Um, is there, uh, and so what would you say if a, if a founder doesn't have that, what should they do? Like maybe listener is having like a, a small internal crisis about not having the level of clarity on this that they should, like what, What would you say they should do?
Yeah, so this is the first bottleneck, right? If you don't have this, nothing else matters. Nothing downstream of this matters a ton. You have to go find this by any means necessary. And this is where goblin mode comes in. This is where, right, like you're going to think, oh, maybe I could do some customer interviews to figure this out. It's like, yeah, you could, maybe you could, but, uh, in practice it won't work. So go in person with potential customers, figure out what they are actually struggling to do, see what they would pay you to solve for them right now. And like build it from, from in-person, first-person. If you already have customers and you have people who've bought weirdly fast, oftentimes it's just, we don't understand why they bought weirdly fast. We don't actually understand why they bought or what they think they bought. And so we have to go back to them and like reverse engineer that. You can, Bob Mesta's Jobs to Be Done interviews, which you can find on, on YouTube. Um, those are good ways to basically do a documentary film of their lives up until the moment that they bought. And you can say, oh, okay, it's actually not X, it's Y. Here's actually our repeatable case study. And whenever you do that, you're going to come up with like something that looks like a case study and you have to ask yourself, okay, did they buy because like, could they have not bought from us? Did they just buy because they hadn't heard of Cursor or Claude Code or whatever? Right? Did they buy for a bad reason or did they buy for a good reason? Right? Would a reasonable person in this exact situation be weird not to buy our product or did we get lucky with them? And so that's, that's kind of the way to handle the repeatable case study.
It reminds me of one of the examples, the case studies you have in your book where I forget which one it is. I think it's maybe even in the intro, but you basically say they started out with— it was like ERP or it was very broad. It was a platform. And they were like, actually, the case study was a specific feature that was embedded in it. And so it, you know, getting clarity on the case study, it clarified the product that they actually needed to sell and probably eliminated a bunch of extra work that they were doing around things that weren't connected to that, to the, to the real pull that customers had. Why don't we jump into the next one, pipeline? And we've got real numbers for people. I feel like we get— you get that pretty frequently from founders that are in the community or in general. These are— this is where you set it and you break it down into 3 buckets. One is big contracts, which are above $100,000. A second one is moderate contracts, which are $25,000 to $99,000, and then small contracts, which are under $25,000, like more or less probably. And for pipeline, the standard that you set is for these big contracts, you're looking for 3 first meetings per week per person selling. For moderate contracts, it's 10 first meetings per week per person selling. And for small contracts, it's 15 first meetings per week. I'd love to hear how— where— how did you come up with these? Like, where, you know, and why? Why is it different between the 3? Just like, go off on pipeline here.
Yeah. I mean, this is— again, this is Consider this V1. If somebody comes with like a really good reason why this is wrong, I'm happy to, happy to hear you out. Um, it's, it's based on what I've seen from a bunch of enterprise, uh, sales teams, like a, a bunch of like enterprise, enterprise startups where like an enterprise startup, you're, if you're selling to like the Fortune 500, getting like 10, 15 meetings a week is a lot for that. And like it's, it's something where it's like, okay, cool. That like sometimes I've seen that happen, but 3 to 4 first meetings a week, 3 to 5 is like pretty good. Like that's, that's, that's pretty solid, especially depending on close rates down, downstream of that. But it's just like, it's hard to get VPs of Fortune 100s to meet with you, like way harder than getting, you know, like a owner of a restaurant to talk with you. Uh, and, and so it often requires like a little bit more. So, uh, you know, that, that's, it's just kind of like based on what I've seen work and not work. Um, and then again, like the, the boundaries here, I put very hard boundaries. Like if you're at, if you're selling a $98K deal, you go from 3 meetings per week to 10 meetings a week. Okay. Like, but we had, we had to put hard numbers in here somewhere. Um, the, the main thing is just that, like, you know, think of it as a couple meetings a week for enterprise, 2 meetings a day for like a midsize initial contract, and then 3 meetings a day for small contracts. And, and like my the, the one company that I just kept thinking of as I was like working through, there are a couple companies that I kept thinking of when I was coming up with this, but Tabs is a really good example. They sell into finance teams at like scale-ups and large companies. And before they had a product built, each of their co-founders, they had 3, I think, I think there were 3 doing outreach. And each of them was scheduling 3 to 4 meetings per day with potential customers. And so that's just like, that's what good looks like.
Yeah. And what's the, let's say that a listener does not have whatever bucket they fall into, they're somewhere short of that standard. What should their action be? Or like, what should they be thinking about?
Figure out why you're not there. It's almost always that you are not doing outreach, that you're below the standard, or you're doing outreach that Um, if you read it from like the normal human perspective, it's like, why would anybody respond to this? And so, uh, it's like you can founder magic your way to these numbers. Like if you're, if you're an early stage founder, you can founder magic your way to these numbers where the message, if you're sending a message that's like, hey, we're building the next gen AI deliverability platform for da da da da da, right? People would be weird to meet with you. If you're saying, if your first line in your LinkedIn outreach message says, hi name, Thanks for connecting, smiley face, right? It would be weird if anybody replied to you. And so it just stopped.
Yeah. I use the emoji that has the 3 hearts around the face and, uh, I get, I get pretty good. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. And it is this the, are these the numbers after they've established their toll booth? Is it, is it like they're building to this?
No, no, no, no. These are, these are, this is just the standard. Like this is, and, and, um, And so if you are like, if you're at the, if you're basically after the idea stage where you have an idea, maybe you will like have, okay, cool. It's time to get 5 to 10 meetings scheduled per week to start figuring out if this is a thing, right? That's what, that's what Tabs was doing. They used the 3 to 4 meetings per day to help them figure out what Poll really was and how they should message their product and how they should sell it before it was actually ready for prime time. And, um, And so you should be doing this early. You can do this with founder magic. You can totally do this with founder magic. And then after you're like, when you're scaling pipeline, when you have a toll booth, which we've talked about before, this should be way easier because you've found a way to get people who are, who have pull to be weird not to meet with you. Great. Cool. That's what all of the like fastest growing startups do.
Yeah. Love it. Um, let's hit the next one, uh, which is pull and the standard that you set for pull is Does somebody try to buy, like in the meeting? Is there a, is there a buying action? And what you say is the standard is 60% of first meetings have pull. Can you explain what is that? What does that mean? Like how, what is it? If somebody like leaves a meeting, it's pretty binary. Yes or no. What are they looking for for there to be a yes, even if it's not like you mentioned on these enterprise accounts, it's like these can be weeks or even months long, the sales cycle. And so it's not a, not a purchase, but, uh, what do you, what are you meaning here by, you know, they try to buy or they have pull?
Yeah. One of the, one of the main things I see when startups actually get founder magic up and working and like you get 15, 20, 30 meetings a week is that you meet with a lot of people who have no pull. And so like that, that just like, that's a, winds up kind of wasting your time in a way. It's, you start with a dirty pipeline and you have to clean it. And so what you, Like, what does it mean to clean? Like, it doesn't mean that they agree to a demo because you, like, begged them for a demo. It means they actually had pull defined by the pull framework, and ideally they pulled. They, they said they initiated a purchase-shaped action. If it's enterprise, it's like, cool, this seems to fit exactly what I need. Could we schedule another call tomorrow or next week where I can, I can ask you a couple specific questions, right? It's them initiating the next action.
Yeah. And in a recent post you talk about why this can be confusing. So maybe just a recap real quick, Rob Snyder. What do people mistake for pull that is not pull? And how does that— is that different from like real quote unquote pull?
Yeah, very high level. Anything other than them saying, cool, this seems to fit. And either like, how do I pay? Like, how do we sign up for it? If it's a small deal or okay, cool. We need to do XYZ to evaluate this so that we can bring this into our organization. Those are like them trying to buy shaped actions.
Yeah.
Anything other than that, which can be anything from, wow, this would save us a lot of money to, oh, this would totally solve our pain points and problems. Right? Like those kinds of exclamations. Are just words. They are not purchase-shaped actions. They are not them initiating actions. If you hear those things, it's like, okay, that's interesting. So what do you think? Is this something you actually want to bring into your organization? Like what, what needs to happen? And they, and like it often, right? If it feels like you're convincing them to take the next step, if you're twisting their arms, you're trying to persuade them, that's a sign that there isn't pull there and yeah, cool. You might, you might still convince them to buy. You might still, like, you could still close the deal, but it, like, it's not weird if you don't.
Yeah. And the, and I think the, uh, mental change for me on that one has been looking at it as a gift. Like learning that somebody doesn't have pull leads to corrective actions earlier in the outreach and, and the presentation and everything like that. Um, and so not trying to take the optimistic, but a somewhat, uh, skeptical view of do they actually have pull? Let's go into the next one. Which is close rate of your sale. This is what you write: of your sales meetings where there is pull, the standard is a 50% close rate.
Okay.
Help. Basic question. If they've got pull, why are half of them not, you know, not closing?
Yeah. And this one we might actually segment out by enterprise, moderate, small eventually. I just, I just don't know. I don't know yet if that, if that's the case. But like, if somebody has pull, they have all the causes of purchase. They have the causes of purchase, but they still, like, it's still possible that even though it would be weird for them not to buy, they might not buy because there might be something that, like we talked about before, prevents them from buying, right? It could be that, right, our pricing is too high, or, right, this person who's the champion just like gets run over by the CFO because something else happened. Like there are kind of, endogenous factors.
Hmm.
If I, if I'm using that word right, I'm not actually that— it sounded way cooler in my head, but it's a great word.
Yeah. We're going to go with it.
Well, we will pretend it means what I think it means. And so, and so yeah, like in theory, if they have pull, you should, they, they, they should buy 100% of the time. And so I'm, I am making a discount here because, right, if you think of, there are things that cause people to buy. And there are other things that cause people to not buy. Just because the things that cause them to buy are present doesn't mean that things that cause them to not buy are not present.
Hmm. Interesting. Yeah. You've talked about, you know, some of the ones that come to mind are selling into small, like really small businesses. Like this is probably, it's probably less than, I don't know, it's not a huge ticket price, but like if the sale is happening on the first call, like I imagine the standard is like this is going to be much closer to the try to buy standard. And, and then, you know, you've talked about other ones where they get clarity, their pipeline eventually becomes so good that they know within a couple of minutes or questions whether they're going to buy. And so there's probably still some dirty pipeline stuff going on there. But the case study is so clear and the value proposition for the— I think I just like made an infraction by saying value proposition, but the, the project that's on their to-do list is so clear that that rate is probably a lot higher.
Um, yeah. And what, but, but what I'll say is like, so we've seen Jump, for example, which sells into, um, financial advisors, which are often small, right? They buy in one call and they have a very high, they have very high close rate in the like earliest PMF days where it was just like insanely high. But then we've also seen companies, um, that sell in enterprise security, right? And, and what they do in the first, in, in the first call, they, they, as they've kind of like iterated towards these standards, They've, they really strongly disqualify in the first part of the first call. And so they know as well in the first part of the first call of like, is this a project that's actually on your to-do list? Is this, is this actually a priority right now? If not, cool. Give you your time back. When XYZ happens, when this becomes a priority, we can talk then and like, let's do it so that they can focus on helping the people who actually have pull, help them buy so that they can have a like a very high close rate.
Yeah, yeah. Let's hit the next one, cycle time. And here's the standards that you have there. For large contracts, which again is above $100K, you have 90 days. For moderate contracts, $25K to $99K, you have 30 days. Small contracts, which you have beneath $25K, 2 weeks, 14 days. Also, I really like, let's hit that in a second, but I really like what you wrote after that. I could include caveats here for pilots, trials, land and expand motions, long legal reviews, etc., but that would make the standard something you can wiggle out of. Also, hitting fast growth often means creatively designing these things out of your sales process. And so I think everybody can come up with the, oh, the reason why my, you know, I'm a special snowflake and whatever, but it's like, actually, this doesn't apply to me.
And it's like, yeah, that's a That's a super common thing that I think we're gonna hear a lot of after this comes out, which is like, yeah, this, but these are great for other kinds of businesses, but it doesn't apply to me because we have to do a pilot. And it's like, okay, cool. Then explain to me the startups that I've seen that thought they had to do pilots and then just designed those out of their sales process. Like, cool. That they were also selling to big insurance companies in Europe, or they were also selling to, right? Like. Chief information security officers. They were also selling to whatever it is, like name, name your industry. And it's like, it's, it, we, we so often will view these kinds of things as immutable. I think I'm using that word right. Immutable, uh, uh, characteristics of reality versus as design problems. Hmm. These are design problems. Like you can figure out a way, or lovable, for example. Right? They don't have a long onboarding thing. They had a, they, their innovation was we put a text box on where you, where you type in what, what product you want. And then you, we kind of like, you know, we, we collapsed the entire space of things so that you can get to value super fast. It's like, okay, cool. That, that exact shape of thing might not be possible in your situation. That doesn't mean nothing creative is possible in your situation.
Yeah. Your feedback to me early on was What is something that somebody could pull a credit card out and purchase from you? Because my contracts are typically above $50,000. And so it falls into some of the law and could be a lot larger. And so you were like, okay, what is the thing that is going to— that's going to make a purchase really fast possible for the people that want to buy from you? And so and that gets again to just because you're— or my in this case sales process is the way it is right now doesn't mean that's what it has to be. And a lot of it is really under, under your control and how you sell and the first, first purchase, things like that are, are among those things. Anything else you'd add on cycle time? Maybe the difference between large, moderate, and small contracts or anything you, you tease out there?
Yeah. I mean, like, uh, again, people, we're gonna get objections to this. I'm, I'm, I'm curious to hear objections, but, um, what I'll, what I'll say is that, um, large contracts, you often have to demo to like multiple different people or, or it can't just this person here. Can't just approve a $150K contract themselves without talking to anybody, without going through a process, without some sort of AI committee reviewing it. And it's like, okay, cool, fine. Those tend to be longer. I thought, yeah. Yeah. And so 90 days, great target. Go for it.
Yeah.
And it's probably the case that, okay, if you're, if you're at like 270 days, like, okay, there's really something there that, you know, it's also, it's also like, I know a startup that sold a $3 million contract or something like that for their first contract. It's like, okay, cool. That didn't close in 90 days. It's a much bigger contract. We're not gonna include standards for all of those. But, but like, you know, there is in theory wiggle room, in practice there isn't.
Yeah. Yeah. Um, and let's hit the last one real quick before we wrap. Uh, it is success rate. And so what you write is, I see far too many 12-month 12-month contracts where in month 11, the founder gets blindsided. And you also write about your leading indicator of retention and the standard that you set is on the leading indicator of retention, which is 95% of new customers hit whatever the leading indicator of retention is within one month of purchase. One, can you, can you define real quick for us the leading indicator of retention? And then get into— I'd love examples of like how, how do startups like hit that within a month instead of 11 months or 6 months or like, you know, a year or like whatever it might be.
Yeah. So leading indicator retention actually comes from Mark Roberge, HBS professor now and Stage 2 Capital investor, VC investor. He was the guy at HubSpot and like the mark of product market fit is customer retention. It's not acquisition because you can acquire a bunch of customers who all churn immediately. And so clearly you don't have product market fit there. But the challenge is a lot of people in B2B will sign like 12-month contracts. And so, uh, you don't want to wait until month 11 to figure out if you've got product market fit or not, because that's kind of late to course correct. And so he came up with the idea of the leading indicator, customer retention, which I think he saw from like Slack and a couple others. I'm trying to remember the examples he used. There's probably Superhuman and like a couple others, which are more of the PLG ones where, okay, at Slack, if a team sends more than 1,000 messages in the first X amount of days, then they're like highly likely to not churn out of Slack. Like that's an example of a leading indicator of retention. And so the way to think about leading indicators of retention is just to— this is a bitter pill to swallow, but if when somebody buys your product, They are guaranteed to churn 100%. They are going to churn until something happens. X, we'll call it X. Um, after which it would be weird if they churned. Okay. X is that leading indicator of retention. It is, you know, sending 1,000 messages in Slack between your team or whatever that was. So it's, it is right. It could be, um, getting a report that shows that Oh, actually your turnover has gone from here to here now. Or it, it can be a variety of different things. And, uh, the question is just what is it for you? I would say I have yet to meet a startup that knows X when I meet them.
Hmm.
Except for maybe some later stage ones, but that's, that's a separate thing. Like early stage startups, pre-seed, seed stage, X is like not even on our minds. It's like a, it's a mind-bending concept because we often think it's like usage. Satisfaction or net promoter score or something like that when it's none of those things. And so it's, it's like a very, it often becomes a very specific metric.
Yeah. It feels like those like, uh, NPS and stuff got into people's heads at some point as a universal standard, but it's a, you know, total red herring in most cases. Um, uh, probably, I mean, in a similar way to like ROI being the reason people buy or like there's, you know, some of this like mythology.
Yeah, it's all these things. I don't know what to, all these things that like sound right, man. They just, they sound so right. And then they don't, they like don't quite work in practice and it's not clear why it's like, yeah, I feel like it's the, I don't know, pre-Copernican, like we're in the pre-Copernican world, just calculating epicycles on these things. And it's like, well, but if they have a net promoter score of this and 7 other things, then they're successful. It's like, no, that's, it's probably none of those.
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, one of the things I've appreciated about your writing is like, how can we know in advance, like, what is actually predictive, what is causal? And it's not, you know, it's not ROI, it's not, it's not NPS.
And to be clear, sometimes it might be like actually could be sometimes, but it is not by default.
Yeah. Yeah. Let's hit real quick actions to take before we wrap this up. You write about a weekly ritual where you say founders should stare reality in the face and ask, What do I need to change this week? How would, you know, how would you recommend or how do you work with founders to structure that? What should they be doing? Like what, you know, what should founders be doing with these standards?
This was actually a founder's idea in our Slack where he said, okay, cool. So based on this, what I'm going to do is I'm going to have Claude set up an automation to look at how many meetings I had last week and then use your call review skill to say how many of those had pull. And that's, and then I'll just look at that in the face every single week. And then figure out what to do about it next week. And something that's that simple, I actually am going to include with this a Claude skill that honestly totally vibecoded it. Uh, it's, it, uh, so it may or may not work, but it's free. So you get what you pay for. And it, uh, it will do this in theory for you where if you plug it in, most startups have like a brain or like a content, like a, your own file structure, your own repos. You just plug it in there and it will and just say, hey, every week, run this against my calls and, and it should tell you, it'll tell you something.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've, I like the simplicity of it in part because it's like it'll just make it clear what the actions are. And I think the biggest mistake I know I've made where I've lost the most, the longest amounts of time is that I didn't take the time to actually think about like where my, where my bottleneck was or something like that. And just like something that's If I'm constantly reminded by it, I will do something about it. But if I avoid being reminded about it because it's uncomfortable or it makes me feel like a failure or something like that, then I'll just continue avoiding the thing that's most important for my business. Um, Rob Snyder, anything else you would add on, uh, you know, reflections on these standards or things you'd like from the audience or anything on your mind?
Yeah, I'd say, I don't know that these are right. They're, they're based on what I've seen from a bunch of startups. They might be wrong. You might say this is, this is nonsense. You need a standard. Like we, we do need a standard so that we can have some line in the sand of what does good look like and am I there? Because otherwise, just like you said, it is, this job is so easy to make wildly complex in our heads. And when you make it wildly complex in your head, you can spend a lot of time theorizing or like what-ifing and That will prevent you from making progress. So the whole goal here is to scope down what matters. By scoping down what matters, you're going to be capable of doing it. It's gonna be uncomfortable. It's gonna suck. It's gonna require you asking your customers, for example, on, on the success side, like, are you going to churn? Right? It's gonna, it's gonna require you to ask those really uncomfortable questions, but you have to do those. If you don't want to wake up 6, 12 months ago wondering what if. And so I don't like, I have done that. I've done that so many times in my life. It is the worst feeling. And I just, the goal of this is tough love that helps you have those conversations, focus on the things that matter now, not wish you had 12 months from now.
I love it. And we'll, we'll leave it at that. I'll put the links to Rob Snyder, a reminder, a quick reminder, the book, Highly recommend it. The Quad Skill, which is open source, highly recommend it. You've also got for folks that are hip who accidentally made it this far in the podcast, there is a— Rob Snyder course that basically it's, you know, essentially your old PMF camp or something similar to that. Not old, it's refreshed content, but it's related to PMF. Anyways, I'll shut up. But it's a great professionally produced course that you did with, with some folks that they can get on your website. Anything else you would, or, and obviously folks that wanna work with Rob Snyder to just reach out, anything else you'd add before we, before we break, Rob Snyder?
There are currently 2 reviews of the book on Amazon, which is getting me to the point where I'm gonna stop checking Amazon. But if you would, if you wanna make me feel like I didn't waste the last 2 years of my life on this book or 3 years of my life on this book, I would just beg for an Amazon review, ideally a 5-star one. That'd be nice. Thank you.
Awesome. Perfect. We'll, we'll make sure that link is in the show notes too. All right, cool. We'll catch everybody next week. See y'all.
