Make your product irresistible: Rob Snyder on the PULL framework

Speaker A: How do you actually sell in a way that one, for somebody like me or somebody who's not a like natural salesperson feels natural. And two, how do you sell in a way that helps you figure out what pull is and if pull is real? People have pain points and problems and there are a lot of solutions that offer a lot of value and by default they don't do anything about it. Somebody will rip something out of your hands as long as it unblocks them them when it's not present. It would be weird if they bought from you. Not impossible, but it would be weird.

Speaker B: You don't want to build a business hoping that people will make weird decisions.

Speaker A: No, no, no, no. Like that was my dating life before I met my wife. But that's not you're listening to the Startup Podcast. This is an educational episode.

Speaker B: Hi, I'm Yaniv Bernstein.

Speaker A: Hi, I'm Rob Snyder.

Speaker B: Now you know the feeling. You do everything the books tell you. You interview your customers, you ship the mvp, you run the lean experiments, you've read all the famous books. Jobs to be done, the lean startup disruption and still nobody buys. Today's guest thinks he knows why, and his answer is perhaps a bit surprising. He says a lot of the advice we've all absorbed is quietly keeping founders stuck and the thing that actually works sounds backwards. Stop researching what people want and start trying to sell it to them. He's spent a decade with hundreds of founders building the case for it. Can't wait to get into this discussion right after the break. AI means founders can build faster and attract enterprise buyers sooner. That's great news. But don't let compliance requirements like SOC2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, uh, and other frameworks derail you. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta makes it easy to get ready for enterprise deals in days, continuously monitors your compliance so future deals are never blocked, and is backed by support. That's there where you need it every step of the way. With AI changing regulations and buyers expectations, banter have the fastest, easiest way to keep up. That's why fast growing companies like Ramp and Rytr get secure early. With Vanta TSP, listeners can get $1,000 off@vanta.com tsp that's V A N T A.com tsp for the startup podcast for $1,000 off. Welcome back. My guest today is Rob Snyder, a serial founder and a fellow at Harvard Innovation Labs where he runs a product market fit bootcamp for early stage founders. He's a recovering McKinsey consultant a, uh, Harvard Business School grad and an operating partner on the venture side. His own founder story is the one that started all this. He spent years doing everything right and was unable to sell a thing. The product that finally worked was an ugly spreadsheet with a three slide deck and no website, and it grew to several million dollars in revenue. The part that bugged Rob was that he couldn't explain why. What was the difference? He spent years since turning that into a theory and his new book, the Power of Pull. All of which, of course, makes Rob the perfect person to work out what demand actually is. Rob, welcome to the startup podcast.

Speaker A: So excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Speaker B: So, as I said in the intro, you argue that founders aren't stuck because they're lazy or stupid or not following the advice that they're getting. They're stuck because they've misunderstood two key things, and they're both about demand. How to find it and then how to serve it. Walk me through both.

Speaker A: So demand is this kind of tricky thing. We think it means wanting your product. And so as a founder, what I did is, is I went and did a bunch of customer research because I was looking for pain points and problems that would signal that they want my product. Turns out people can have pain points and problems and I can build a solution that solves them and offers a ton of value and they cannot buy it. And in fact, by default they won't buy it because people have pain points and problems and there are a lot of solutions that offer a lot of value and by default they don't do anything about it. They can keep going with their pain points kind of forever. Life, in a way, is a series of pain points and problems we really don't do anything about most of the time. And so the question is, what is demand? When people buy things, why do they buy them? That's where my rabbit hole kind of went very, very deep on this topic. What I came to is that demand is not wanting supply. Demand is not wanting a product. Nobody has ever or will ever want Salesforce or an erp, yet they buy those things. And so we have to think of demand as something that's totally separate out there, that causes somebody to pull supply into their world if it's fits what they're doing. So the question is, okay, what actually is demand if it's not pain points or problems? Well, the way that I've found to think about demand is close to jobs to be done. Uh, not. It's not quite. It's. It's something they're trying to do on their to do list. You know, like, what's. What are they prioritizing on their to do list right now? And that's a rough definition of demand, but there's a kind of demand that leaves them open to ripping your product out of your hands. And so it needs to be something they're trying to do right now on, um, their to do list. And their existing options are not good enough. If that's true, they would be weird not to buy whenever you're selling. That helps unblock them. If that's not true, they just won't buy it.

Speaker B: It's really interesting if you read an Econ 101 textbook, and I know you talk about this in your book a little bit, right? You've got that sort of clean supply and demand cur. And first of all, we all know that economics is a fairly abstract science on the theoretical side. But also perhaps that model works a bit better when you're dealing with very basic human needs and very basic commodities. Right. If I'm hungry and there is food, then maybe that supply and demand issue that you're talking about is not as acute. Although I'm sure you could still make the case for it. But yes, when you are talking about ERPs, there isn't this sort of natural organic demand saying, oh, I'm hungry for enterprise resource planning. No, you need to fit those things in. Now, I don't want to make this discussion too academic, but of course you are in a space where there is a, uh, fairly well established canon in the startup space. Right. You already mentioned jobs to be done. We of course have Eric Rees as the lean startup. Eric was on the podcast just a few weeks ago. We have April Dunford's obviously awesome. April is also on a couple of years ago. And so there's uh, all this stuff in my mind where I'm like, what you're talking about is adjacent to a lot of these things. So I guess I'd love to understand where you see some of those frameworks, what they're missing, and where they perhaps contribute to founders being stuck, uh, and how the way you're thinking about it contributes to that canon.

Speaker A: There's a lot of really good frameworks and a lot of, I think progress has been made in, um, thinking about startups. There have been a couple people who have recently gone very viral for saying we've made no progress in startup thinking. I don't know if you've seen, seen that work as well the way I would think about what I am trying to do is I am trying to find the most upstream thing, the thing that causes a startup to work. I see Lean Startup and specifically like the experiment, build, measure, test, I think those are the three things, um, from Lean Startup. That's a method of iteration. It doesn't tell you what you are looking for. What I'm trying to articulate is what's present in a customer that causes them to rip something out of your hands when five seconds ago they didn't know the category of software or the category of product existed. How does that thing work? And April Dunford's work is amazing too on positioning. It's very good for established products and services where you can look at the history and say, okay, based on what people have compared us to what we have won and lost, deals against who, who else they consider when they buy, how do we describe the category that we fit in and how we are differentiated? When you're really early stage, you don't have that data and so you still have to figure out what people will buy. And so that's kind of where April Dunford fits in. I would say my biggest gripe, the biggest thing that I argue against is the discovery interviews direction in startups. There's some, I don't know where it comes from exactly, but there's this theory that you have to go and interview your customers and get a bunch of design partnerships. I've seen that line of thinking and then wherever kind of pain points and problems comes from, those lines of thinking really just grab the wheel and steer founders straight into the iceberg because they all sound right and they lead down a path where you've done a bunch of customer research, come up with something that makes total sense, people are using your product as a design partner and then nobody buys it. And that's pretty much the default state that m. I would say the majority of my friends who graduated with me at HBS at the same time who went into startups, the majority of us wound up in that spot.

Speaker B: Yeah, that resonates a lot. And I think it sort of speaks to, I guess, a sort of revealed preference. And one of the things that you said earlier on that really resonates with me, which is that you talked about the fact that they have something on their to do list. That's one requirement. Yes, but then the existing alternatives can't be good enough. And uh, it's something we've talked about before, but it's really important. Right, because. And again, this is where I guess it sort of feels similar to jobs to be done framework, which is you are trying to accomplish a task on your to do list, you are looking at the set of available tools and you are dissatisfied with them. And that dissatisfaction I think is important, right? Because then again, this is something that April talks about in her book quite a lot, is the biggest competitor you have to someone buying or using your product is simply not doing anything or going to an existing tool. It's Microsoft Excel, it's whatever they have, right? And so without that dissatisfaction, it doesn't matter if your product is better. The demand isn't going to exist. Because humans are very change averse. There is a genuine effort required to switch from a way of doing things that you are already familiar with to a new way of doing things, from an existing tool to a new tool. And so if the existing tool is satisfactory and your new tool does not blow it out of the water, why would people even try it?

Speaker A: So the pull framework, which tries to articulate this kind of demand where somebody will rip a product out of your hands, has just come from my experience trying and failing to make my startups take off and make other startups take off, like advise my friends startups. And what it comes down to is they have to be prioritizing something right now. If they're not prioritizing something right now, it's not on their to do list. They can't delay it, they can't do something else. If it's not on their to do list, then what you're actually asking them to do is change their priorities on your behalf. You're basically following, fighting against their to do list, which is like never going to happen even if they have a problem, even if they like your solution, even if you add value. So they have to be prioritizing something. But just like you said, most of the time they're just fine with even a manual, clunky, slow solution. It's like not a big deal to them. They can't be prioritizing something, their existing options are good enough to them. In that case they would be weird to buy your product.

Speaker B: It also makes me think of sometimes you hear people say make sure your product isn't a vitamin, but a painkiller. And I think that addresses half of what you're saying again, right? Which is that okay, if there's no pain, then people aren't even going to consider, they're not even going to take anything off their to do list. But also imagine that you're a painkiller. But actually people are used to taking aspirin and your painkiller is different from aspirin and you need to learn new ways of using it. People are going to be like, yeah, well, you know what? Uh, aspirin's always worked for me. I'm going to keep using it.

Speaker A: There's so many of these kind of like folk sayings that we all believe, but we're not sure why we believe them or how they were loaded into our brain. Vitamins and painkillers is like that exact same thing for me. Build a 10x better product. It's like there you could, you could offer me a 10x better printer. I'm not going to buy it because I don't care. Right. There are so many things you could make 10x better that I don't care about. And I'm not going to change. I'm not going to. It's not relevant to my priorities. And so I'm really trying to fight against a lot of these sayings that we all have in the back of our mind that sound right and yet just feel. So they're just like actually wrong in practice, I would argue.

Speaker B: Uh, happy to debate this with you. I would argue that they're incomplete in practice because even having this discussion so far is, I feel each of them is, is telling you something true that you are trying to synthesize into a broader framework? Yeah, I think the vitamin and painkiller thing is true. Right. If there isn't a pain point, then you have no chance. Right. But it's not enough because, but like,

Speaker A: let's, let's, let's talk about that because I'm, I'm curious. Vitamins. So then why does anybody buy vitamins?

Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's a good question.

Speaker A: I think, like, I think actually the vitamin market is larger than the, than the painkiller. Uh, somebody can fact check on this. What I've found is that it doesn't necessarily need to be painful. It just needs to be that I'm trying to do something that I'm not currently able to do. And so in a lot of cases. So like, there's a startup called Jump. They're a startup that I keep coming back to because I think there's. Their story is just super interesting. They built an AI notetaker for financial advisors. Financial advisors, since the dawn of time have been taking notes manually for client meetings and putting them into their CRM. If they don't put it into their CRM, they might get audited by the government and they could get in a lot of Trouble, get, fines, get. I don't, I don't know if you can get disbarred, but whatever. Like, there are a lot of negative things, but since the dawn of time, they've been manually taking notes. They didn't really experience that as pain. That was just the way it was done. And yet the real project on their to do list was spend the least amount of time manually taking notes for to do it was just kind of like. But. But if you had watched them, you probably wouldn't see them being frustrated taking notes. It was just part of the job. But they were kind of subtly struggling against it maybe. And so when Jump shows up, someone literally said this must have been how Alexander Graham Bell felt when he invented the telephone. Like that was one of their early testimonials. And it was just, it was just amazing to see the kind of pet. Uh, I think of it as almost like there was water against a dam is kind of what you're looking for. And in their case, they wouldn't have described it as pain points to you up until. But, uh, and I don't think they experienced it as pain. It was just there was kind of pressure there and they provided an outlet for the pressure.

Speaker B: Interesting. So maybe before we go too much further, Rob, we should talk about your pull framework, because of course it stands for something. Uh, and I think as we go back perhaps into a couple of case studies, comparing them against how you bring all this together would be really valuable.

Speaker A: Totally. So the pull framework is an acronym, P U L L. It describes what we've been talking about up until now. Basically the situation where somebody's prioritizing something but stuck with their existing options trying to do something. And so the four pieces of the poll framework. P is project U is unavoidable. L is list of options. And then the second L is limitations. So there's a project on somebody's to do list that's unavoidable right now. They, they can't delay it, they can't do it another time. Uh, they can't do something else.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: This project has to get done right now. But they have a list of options for getting that project done. Those options have limitations that prevent them from getting the project done. When all of those are present, somebody will rip something out of your hands as long as it unblocks them. And I'd argue when it's not present, it would be weird if they bought from you. Not impossible, but it would be weird.

Speaker B: And you don't, you don't want to build A business hoping that people will make weird decisions.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, no, no, no. Like, that was my dating life before I met my wife. But that's not

Speaker B: so. I mean, what it sounds like you've nearly described. And again, I keep coming back to these other terms because, again, you're in a crowded space because. Because this is so important to every founder. If people won't buy your thing, you have nothing. And so a lot of thought has been expended on this. What you've described as pull sounds a lot like the mythical notion of product market fit. Right? You've nearly described the conditions that define product market fit. Because quite often, again, what you hear, and, um, it's super frustrating to hear as a founder because it's not actionable, is product market fit. You'll know it when you have it. And it feels like people are ripping the product out of your hands. It's like, great. That sounds delightful. How do I make it happen?

Speaker A: That was one of my frustrations early on, which was the. You'll know it when you have it. Cool. I know that I don't have it. What do I do now? And so this has been a quest to figure out like my startup journey was. I spent two years hitting my head against the wall doing a bunch of things that sounded right and made a lot of sense based on what I learned and read in the books, and none of it worked. And then when it worked, it was really weird and we grew fast, but it just, like, it didn't make sense. And so I've been trying to make sense of it. And so the pull framework is, I believe, as we talked about earlier. I think it's what's upstream of all of the other things. It's the thing that is out there in the world before your product exists independent of your product existing. That if it exists and you build a product that fits the poll that is out there, you will find product market fit. You will figure out, like, sales will be them buying more than you selling. Growth will be you clinging on for dear life rather than you pushing with all your might.

Speaker B: The term discovery, I think, is trying to get at that. And I think what you're talking about is discovery, too, but you are, uh, focusing on market discovery or demand discovery. Right? You're saying your job is there's an existing lock out there, and it's your job to figure out what the key looks like that unlocks it.

Speaker A: Pretty much exactly. Yeah. There's. And it's like, I feel like up until the poll framework came around, I Did not have a way to understand what the lock was.

Speaker B: A quick break to talk about domains. Here's the thing. If you get your startup domain right, you never think about it again. But get it wrong and it's a stone in your shoe for years. My previous startup was called circular, but circulor.com, of course not available. So we registered now circular.com and honestly, it was a bit of a nightmare. People couldn't find us, they weren't sure what we were called, they went to the wrong site. We kept debating internally whether to rebrand, we never did. And the distraction, well, it never stopped. I wish we'd known about tech. The top level domain created specific specifically for technology companies. When the dot coms were taken, we just added now to make something work. But if I'd looked at tech back then, I could have secured a strong, memorable domain. One that clearly told the world we were building a technology company. No weird prefixes, no creative misspellings, just circular tech. So learn from my mistake. Go to your favorite registrar, grab a banger tech domain that really tells the world who you are, and then forget about it. After all, you've got a company to build. So, Rob, let's make this concrete. You mentioned that pool stands for four things, right? Project, unavoidable, list of options, limitations, and that you need all four to experience this pull this product market fit. Let's maybe start by making it concrete with an example of a case where something was unsuccessful because one or more of those four factors was not sufficiently present. Mm.

Speaker A: I'll give you an example that has gone. We can start with the version of it that wasn't successful and then they figured out how to make it successful. And so we can talk about the before and after. There's a startup called Ruby. They are us, uh, startup. They're early stage, you know, kind of in the. I don't think I can actually give away their revenue numbers, but they are early stage but now growing fast. But you know, a year and a half ago they weren't growing very fast. They were trying to sell an automated data migration tool for B2B companies to do any sort of automated data migration. What they realized early on was that what some customers were trying to do was to rip and replace their competition. So if you're, if you're a sales leader, you're selling into a, I don't know, vertical SaaS company. They already have an existing CRM ERP thing that you are going to have to rip and replace. And migration takes a Long time. And so this offered a way to rip and replace your competition. Otherwise they would have to kind of do this manually. And if they did it manually, it took a while. Maybe they charged professional services, maybe it cost a lot. That seems like we have the pull framework there. I want to rip and replace my competition. P. The U is, well, if I'm a sales leader, don't I always want to grow revenue? Don't I always want to hit my, my sales target? We'll come back to that. The U was the weak link here. The list of options was, you know, keep doing this with a white glove manual thing that we charge for. And the limitations is our close rate is lower than, than we would like. That's the pull framework for them. The problem, what they found was that while sales leaders in theory always want to be increasing revenue, always want to be hitting their targets, that project was not always unavoidable, specifically because there were a bunch of other things they could do to hit their sales targets. And a lot of times they didn't have to do anything new or different to hit their sales targets. And so what they found was when they looked at their existing customer bases who bought fast, when most people like, weren't buying fast, they noticed a couple people were buying fast. And with that they figured out that, oh, actually the you. There's a specific situation when that sales leader is like, oh, I can't hit my number unless we increase our win rate of deals that require migration. Like, that's where they have to have had that realization. And in that situation, they will rip the product out of their, out of Ruby's hands. And that's how Ruby has grown very, very fast. After, you know, for a while it was, we're having 10 sales calls and everyone's nodding, everyone gets it, but only a couple are really pulling.

Speaker B: So, I mean, that does feel closely related to positioning, doesn't it? It's like, is it a change in the product or is it a change in your, your target market or is a change in how you talk about your product? I think it's an, it's an interesting, it's an interesting one. Yeah.

Speaker A: And it's super. This, this is interesting because it does lead to often you changing your positioning, but it's something that's up again. I, uh, keep coming to this upstream thing. It's the thing that's going to cause your positioning to work. I've, uh, been through a bunch of positioning exercises where the outcome of the positioning exercise made total sense and it did not Lead to hockey stick growth.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Same with category creation and all this stuff. There is something upstream that causes positioning, causes messaging to work. And that's what pull is trying to articulate. And so once you've filled out your pull framework and once you understand who actually has pull and what situation are they in, uh, what have they tried and why is that not good enough, then all the other stuff downstream is pretty straightforward.

Speaker B: And again, perhaps to what we were saying earlier, where pull shines is in its ability to diagnose the problem. It sort of brings together a number of these other frameworks. It seems like in this case the diagnosis led to a positioning fix. To do you have examples, maybe where the diagnosis led to product changes or things that are more fundamental?

Speaker A: I guess there's a startup called Campground and Campground was selling a all in one CRM and program management tool for volunteer and nonprofit programs. It's a mouthful, but think of it like, I don't know, Salesforce meets Airtable meets kind of all in one tool for volunteer programs. So they were having a bunch of sales calls and this is like the most infuriating place to be where people would come in and complain about whatever tool they currently had, Salesforce or Airtable or whatever. They would complain at length and that and they would see campground solution be like, oh, wow, you, this is way more streamlined. This is way better. And then they just wouldn't buy. Or it would take them like 6 to 12 months to buy. And what we realized when we listened to the sales calls, because when you listen to customers talk, they will often fill out the pull framework for you. They thought these people were saying, I want to run my programs better, more smoothly. I want the operations to go more smooth and my existing cobbled together systems are too clunky and there's just too much of that. It's just too annoying.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: That was their theory of what pull was that and that's what they spent most of the call talking about. But if you actually listened to the sales call, people would absolutely complain about their clunkiness of their system. But they would all say the same thing. They would all kind of come back to, yeah. And now that we're fundraising, our current reporting isn't cutting it. And so fundraise out of these systems isn't cutting it. And so we're struggling to fundraise and we've paid consultants to come up with better reporting for us, but it hasn't worked. And so they thought they had a total misdiagnosis of what the poll was and it's only once you have the pull framework in your mind that you can actually listen to what a customer is saying and say, wait a second. Their project is fix my reporting. So fundraising gets easier. And so when campground stopped trying to sell the all in one CRM thing and started selling a, I don't know, super easy reporting tool designed for volunteer and nonprofit programs so they can raise money much easily, more easily, their sales cycles went from like nine months to one month. They were able to charge like 5x more. And, and customers were saying, oh, like if you can actually do this, I'm going to give you all of my money. Like that was a verbatim quote there.

Speaker B: Yep. Having been involved with some not for profits, the irony is they are the most money obsessed organizations out there. Because it is so scarce. Yes, yes. Uh, and yeah, so it makes sense. So, yeah, so it's again, you've used this diagnosis tool and you've repositioned the product, but you've done more. In this case, you've said the product actually needs to do different things. We need to change our roadmap to make this the ultimate reporting tool that allows us to unlock fundraising. Now this might be a good segue, Rob, to talking a bit about the sales side of things. Right. Because another thing that you argue, uh, alongside the pull framework is that in a sense the right way to really do this discovery, if we're going to call it that, is not customer research or interviews, which you've already mentioned you're not a fan of, but to actually get out there and start selling. So tell us a little bit more about that.

Speaker A: What I've run into, and I've been a victim of this myself, is you can do 10 customer interviews, you can do a hundred, you can do 200 customer interviews and you will learn a lot of things and it's unclear which of those things are real or not. And worse, you or me will be really confident that you know what to build as a result of those interviews. And so in, in all of my experiences seeing a ton of customer interviews like this, the result is always something that makes a ton of sense. Seems totally logical. People will say it's a 9 or 10 out of 10 out of out of 10 out of pain points. And then when you try to sell it to them, it doesn't work. They don't try to buy from you.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, there's this aspect of human nature, isn't there? You could say people are nice, or perhaps it's more that they are, uh, Discomfort averse. Right. They don't want to tell you that your idea is stupid.

Speaker A: Yeah. And even if you do really good customer interviews where you don't even talk, you're going to learn about pain points and problems and stuff. And people can complain forever about those. You only know if it's real. If they try to buy something that unblocks them. Everything other than that is just talk.

Speaker B: How does that then apply to the, the practice then of these sales conversations? Is there a, is there a sort of a pull specific way of approaching these?

Speaker A: So I would say I was never a salesperson. I did not enjoy sales, I did not look forward to it. I did not go into startups to sell. I don't know how you are, but, but it wasn't a thing that I like, looked at as, oh, I want to become great at that. And so I kind of got dragged into sales kicking and screaming and I was not very good at it. I was terrible at it. Before we found product market fit, before we found poll, after we found pull, I think they bought no matter what I said. And so it's not clear. So what I've been focused on is how do you actually sell in a way that one, for somebody like me or somebody who's not a like, natural salesperson feels natural. And two, how do you sell in a way that helps you figure out what pull is and if pull is real? And so there's a sales script that I've developed, the sales process that I've developed around pull. And it's quite simple actually. It's basically two steps. One is have them tell you what their pull is and there are a couple techniques you can use for that. Second, uh, tactic is tell them what you do in a way that fits their pull and doesn't have a bunch of extraneous information in it and see if they try to buy it. And it's that simple.

Speaker B: Sounds simple. It's that simple.

Speaker A: It is that simple. And so the. We could, I could talk through the components of it, but it really is

Speaker B: like, I would love that.

Speaker A: Yeah. So let's say you schedule a call with a potential customer. We have to get them to try to tell us what their pull is. And so we'll call this segment one. Segment one. You start with. Hey, thanks so much for taking the call today. Curious. I'm sure you get a bunch of people reaching out, um, to you. Why'd you decide to take this call? Is there anything relevant to your business or your life that you thought this was relevant for? Your whole goal is just to get them to monologue about what's going on in their world. They will often give you what I call a hairball, which is a really long monologue that has things like problems, pain points, their sister's cat's name, like a bunch of random things in there. And what you're doing in your mind is you're trying to fill out their pole framework. And maybe they just say, yeah, so we're trying to fix our reporting. And oh, gosh, salesforce is just such a beast, and it's just so hard, and da, da, da. And so you just get one thing on their pull framework there, then you just ask the questions to fill out the rest of their pull framework. You mentioned you're trying to fix your reporting. Is that actually something you're trying to do now? Or is that something that's relevant, like, down the road? Uh, what have you tried so far? What have you looked into? Why isn't that good enough? And so what you're doing is you're filling out their pull framework. And then after you've filled out their pull framework, you know, are they trying to do something? Are they trying to buy something? And if so, what are they trying to buy? In that case, you just kind of summarize it back to them and say, so it sounds like you're trying to fix your reporting. So fundraising gets easier. You're actively fundraising now, so this is like something that needed to happen yesterday. You've tried a couple consultants. They haven't worked. So it sounds like you might be looking for something to fix your reporting, like, really fast that just plugs into your existing salesforce and other tools. I mean, you tell me, um, and what you've done there is you've figured out what they're pull, you've given them a conceptual description of something, and if they have poll, that, uh, concept just at a high level should be almost enough for them to say, yeah, that's exactly it. And maybe they'll say, yeah, tell me a little bit more. How exactly does it work? But what they're doing there is they are pulling for more information because it fits. You're not pitching them your vision. You're not showing them all the screens. You're not telling them that you have a collective 470 years of industry experience or whatever it is. It's just that simple.

Speaker B: Rob, I actually had a fun idea, if you're open to this. Now, I'm a startup founder. Uh, you've just written a book, Pull. I was wondering if you could sell me that book.

Speaker A: Oh, interesting.

Speaker B: Well, would you be up for that?

Speaker A: Yeah, let's try. Let's try. I'll try it on a sales call. We'll try it here.

Speaker B: Let's do it.

Speaker A: Cool.

Speaker B: Sell me a book. Yeah.

Speaker A: So is there anything in particular that you feel stuck on in your startup right now that you're trying to solve?

Speaker B: Yeah. So, uh, in fact, I also spoke to Mark Roberge about this. We mentioned that prior to the call, he gave me a bit of live coaching. I think that the real thing that we're trying to zone in on is that the sort of the activation and retention piece, we have really great feedback from users of our product who are actively using it. We also have tremendous top of funnel. Uh, we've built a great brand. We're very good at meta, uh, Facebook advertising, that sort of stuff. We get a lot of people coming, kicking the tires around our product, but bridging between the two is a challenge. And I guess I'm like, well, yeah, there are metrics and frameworks and ways to try to think about that. And yes, I feel guilty. I'm not doing more customer interviews and user interviews and that sort of thing. But beyond doing a bunch of experimentation, um, which I'm doing a lot of, really getting to the bottom of that diagnosis of how do we get people engaged with using our product, the people who are clearly responsive to the type of problem we're trying to solve for them. I think that's a bit tricky for us.

Speaker A: What have you tried so far?

Speaker B: Been doing a lot of, I guess you'd say, onboarding, refinement. So when we said, well, okay, perhaps the initial way we framed our product required a lot of upfront commitment before we delivered value back to the users. Or, uh, our hypothesis was that a lot of people were, like, just abandoning before they got to experience the value. So we've created all of these little breadcrumbs where we're like, oh, okay, uh, you know, we'll have sort of custom landing pages, and we'll give you a taste of some of the value before you even sign up and. And so on. And some of that has been quite encouraging. Uh, but we're still not where we need to be.

Speaker A: M. So you're. Let me see if I understand. I might have missed something here. It's. It's late us time.

Speaker B: So.

Speaker A: So you let me know, uh, where I'm wrong here. But it sounds like you are trying. So you have good top of funnel, but what you're really trying to do is you're trying to improve your activation. Basically how do we get customer. Get. Get people who visit our website to actually activate and become retained users. And you've tried a bunch of things as it relates to kind of like bringing the product forward and it's shown some promising results, but it's not making the jumps that you expect it to make.

Speaker B: It's not even about making jumps that I expect. Uh, I've heard about the concept of product market fit and what I hear is like you feel it when you got it and it's like people are ripping it out of your hands. And what I know is we're not feeling that yet. We have this large base of users and prospective users who we know are responsive to the problem. They are feeling a lot of challenges caring for their aging parents and they desperately want help. I think we have sufficient signal for that and we have a solution that can help them. But getting them to put more of themselves into it in order to get that value I think is where our challenge is.

Speaker A: M so maybe you tell me, is this more of a I need a tactic that's going to unlock this or I need to understand why they're not. Like, I need a way to think about why we have all these people who have a big problem.

Speaker B: I think it's more the latter. I really, you know, I like to sort of think about things from first principles. So a way of analyzing the situation and the data that we have as well that allows us to form a, uh, principled hypothesis about what is working and what's not working and what we should try.

Speaker A: Well, that I will say that is kind of exactly what the book is about. The book at a high level is a first principles way to think about what causes people to rip the product out of your hands. Again, I don't know if it's a fit for you and for your case, but it might be something that would help you bridge that gap.

Speaker B: Where can I buy this thing? Just shut up and take my money already.

Speaker A: Uh, oh, it's on Amazon. I don't know if it's in Australia. I think it's in Australia. One of my Australian friends sent me, uh, that he had pre ordered it, so if not, I will swim it over to you.

Speaker B: Okay, when is it actually available? On General release?

Speaker A: Uh, July 7th.

Speaker B: July 7th. I can't wait. I can't wait. This sounds like exactly what I need.

Speaker A: I hope so. I hope so anyway. Uh, yeah, but, but so like zooming out there, um, what I was trying to Do. In my mind, I was trying to fill out your poll framework and not, I was like, actively not trying to convince you of anything. I was just trying to understand what's the thing you're trying to do on. On the demand side and why. Why are your existing options not good enough. And then I said, okay, I, like, I don't know what kind of supply you're looking for. Are you looking for just like a tactic? Because I, I can't help you if that's the case.

Speaker B: Are you.

Speaker A: But are you looking for a way to think about this? And fortunately for me, you pulled the ladder. Um, but if you had pulled the former, I would have said, hey, cool, I don't have that. Like, I don't have a magic tactic. I do have a first principles book that kind of like, thinks about this, but that might not be a fit for you, and that's fine. I'm not trying to sell to you. I'm trying to see if you will rip something out of my hands. I will. I'm trying to see if you're going to try to buy. Me trying to sell and you trying to buy are two totally different things.

Speaker B: I don't come from a sales background, but I think it is somewhat of a truism that the best salespeople listen more than they talk. And, uh, that's definitely what you're advocating here. And the best sales call doesn't sound like a sales call. So I think what we're saying here is that because we have this framework, you can ask the questions. You're doing detective work. Right. And then I guess the bit where you need to be quickest on your toes is when you are, uh, on the call, you synthesize that back into a pitch that is customized for that particular person.

Speaker A: Yeah, that part is hard. Eventually, hopefully, fairly quickly, you get to something that's repeatable. Most of us in startups, we're trying to come up with something that is highly repeatable so that sales is easy. And we can hire sales reps who can make a lot of money helping us grow really fast. And so the goal is to not have to conjure this up on the fly every single time, which is quite hard. The goal is just to come up with what's the pattern of pull that we can kind of build an engine around.

Speaker B: And of course, people love to talk about themselves and they love to talk about their problems. And of course, the sneaky bit here is, of course, that you have Trojan horsed a customer discovery call into a sales call. So you kind of get the best of both worlds, don't you? You are learning about your customers, but you're immediately getting the validation of are they interested in buying your thing or not? Instead of staying in your ivory tower writing down notes and coming up with hypotheses, you're like, well, do they seem interested in buying genuinely? And I suppose you also, I mean this is a tactical question for you. I assume you would want to try to close some of these sales as soon as possible because again, there's a difference between saying, yeah, I'm interested in buying this and actually selling, signing a check.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'd say basically you discount everything other than them actually trying to buy it, trying to bring it into their organization, trying to buy it, whatever. The thing is, anything that is other than that is basically worth zero in your, in what should be your confidence in, in whether there is actually demand there. So if they say something like, wow, this is amazing, this would save us millions of dollars. That is not them saying, wow, I need to buy this right now. How do we get started?

Speaker B: Tell me if you agree with this. It seems like there's probably a signal that you can map back to the pull framework from customer segments or customer shapes that initially display interest in buying but somehow never get over the line. And those are the ultimate time wasters, aren't they? That there is some structural reason why their initial interest doesn't translate into a commitment.

Speaker A: That is one of the most common things that I see of startups, especially in the hundred thousand to million range. When they've got some customers, it's kind of working. But they've got a, they got some deals that take 12 to 24 months and others that take three weeks and they're just scratching and it's like, what the heck is going on? Well, what happens there? This is spark wise. In the book. They looked across their customer segments and like it wasn't clearly related to the size of customer, it wasn't related to the title of person, it wasn't related to. It just happened to be that one kind of customer had just gone through something in their job. They had just been required to you know, scale a uh, group training from 20 people to 2,000 people. And it was like, oh, okay, when that happens, people rip the product out of our hands. When that doesn't happen, our sales process is basically just waiting for that to happen. And so, so we had three week sales cycles and three weeks plus x months until that happens. Sales cycle, which changes everything about your growth dynamic.

Speaker B: One of our early enterprise sales at my startup, Vera. Uh, we got on a sales call with them in the morning and we were hoping to sell them a package for, let's say, X dollars. And at the end of the call they said, well, Our budget is 2x dollars, twice as much as we were hoping to get from them. And we were like, that's interesting. Let us come back to you with a proposal by the end of the day. And so, you know, the call was in the morning. My co founder Melissa and I sat down and spent 3 hours working up the perfect proposal for 2x dollars. We sent it to them. By the end of that day we had in principle approval and by the next day, uh, we had a signed contract. And so, yeah, there's an element of luck in any deal, Right. Where your value meets their need. Right. Again, it's that key in the lock. But if you are able to start to identify what it is, the shape. Right. The shape of the organizations where that lock hits you, uh, then suddenly you will find yourself getting a lot luckier.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's weird how that works when you kind of understand the things that caused the luck to happen. When it stops feeling like luck and just starts feeling, feeling like you're growing really fast.

Speaker B: But like you said earlier in your book, uh, it's nearly bewildering at first. We're like, God damn these other people who were just trying to get blood from a stone. They were really nice to us. We had lots of great calls and conversations and meetings and they brought their execs in and we still don't have anything signed. And then these people came in from left field and just gave us a bunch of money. What's the difference between the two?

Speaker A: Yeah, uh, that happened to me quite a few times. And the usual reaction is like, wow, you get off the call, you call your co founder, like, how cool was that? I wish that happened more. And then you just get back to doing the same thing you were doing.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And ah, it's like, no, that's a signal that's telling you something about what's causing people to buy that. You can then reverse engineer what pull really is. And that should lead to, you know, maybe it's you changing your icp, maybe it's just changing when you're talking to people. But it could lead to a bunch of different changes.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think this is really good. And like I said, I think from reading the book, but even more from having this conversation with you, Rob, what I've gotten is a sense of how this Fits as a sort of practical, usable tool, uh, within this space that every founder is obsessed with, but is a bit too much of an art and not enough of a science. Right. Which is how do I get myself to product market fit. And so I think this is a really valuable addition to that canon. And um, yeah, strongly recommend folks reading it before we wrap up. You're an operating partner at a venture fund. You've been a founder yourself. You've talked about staying sane as a founder. So we do have a lot of early stage founders. Listening to the startup podcast. What are some of the things that you've learned from being and advising and investing in early stage startups? And what's some of the biggest advice you would give to folks listening?

Speaker A: I basically, for two years straight, thought I was the stupidest person on earth and just getting stupider and worse at my job when the startup wasn't working. And then when it started working, I still felt like the stupidest person on earth because I couldn't figure out how to why it was working.

Speaker B: And so we now I'm stupid and lucky.

Speaker A: If I were smarter, we'd be growing way faster. And I don't, you know, I don't know what I'm doing here. I think being a founder is the greatest thing. Like it's, it's so difficult, but it is so worth doing. And so, um, you know, I graduated with a lot of people who left to make a lot more money than me for the first five, 10 years out of business school. And you look over your shoulder and it's like, I don't feel like they're working that hard. Why am I doing this when I could be making a lot more money elsewhere? It's like, yeah, but when you're building something, you're trying to create new value in the world, you are trying to bring something new into the world. And so yeah, you might like get your teeth kicked in every couple days and it might just feel super terrible, but it's worth doing and so keep doing it. So that's, that's thing one. It's just to realize, yeah, you could make money elsewhere, but you're going to like what you see in the mirror more if you stay in entrepreneurship. The second thing that I found is really liberating is realizing that pull specifically in demand generally is that upstream thing that we're all looking for and we don't control it. There isn't some magic formula to go out there and create demand and it's because of your incompetence. That you're unable to create, demand, or a quote unquote good product. There is something out there called poll. And as somebody who's stuck in a specific situation where they can't do the thing they're trying to do and they need help and you just have to go and find that. Once you find that it's just out there, then you can build something that serves that. But if you don't find that, nothing else you do matters. It doesn't matter how hard you work, it doesn't matter how smart you are. So just go find that thing out there and that will cause your business to take off. Don't put the pressure on yourself to create it, to conjure it out of nothing. That's been super helpful for me.

Speaker B: Uh, it's funny, I was listening to a podcast about mathematics the other day and the discussion was about how the work of coming up with a proof. It feels like invention, but it's actually discovery. You cannot make a proof happen that is not already true. I think that's kind of what you're saying here.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's right.

Speaker B: One last thought to leave people with. Because you talked about the pain cave, you've talked about feeling stupid. And I think every founder, or most founders, let's say those who are not sociopaths, hello to our sociopathic listeners, go through that moment of self doubt. If someone's in that pain cave, what's an actionable thing? You've talked about some of the sort of psychological side, but like, what's one thing that perhaps they could wake up tomorrow and do differently, or just something actionable that they could do to bring themselves closer to pull.

Speaker A: So there's the old Steve Blank, uh, quote of like, get out of the building. I actually think that, I think that's a great quote. And if you are stuck kind of sitting, uh, I call it the pain cave. When you, when nothing's working, you're not quite sure why, you're not quite sure what to do about it. You're not going to solve that at a whiteboard. You're not going to solve that at your desk. You have to go find somebody. And so, uh, what I tend to do is I say, hey, go, go find a potential customer and convince them to let you shadow them for a day. And just do that and try to find pull there and try to talk to them about pull, but go. And don't interview. Go just observe them and try to find pull in person firsthand.

Speaker B: Get out there, touch grass. And I think the Grass in this case is probably, ah, a potential customer. Um, but don't actually touch them. That could get you in trouble. Rob Snyder, your new book is called the Power of pull, published on July 7, 2026. You can pre order it now where, uh, good books are sold and of course buy it after that. But pre orders are great. Let's get this one on the bestseller list. Are you active on social media? Where's the best place where people can follow you? And of course you also, I understand, do too some consulting so folks might be interested in working with you. What's the best way to get in

Speaker A: touch so you can find me? I'm active on LinkedIn and I have a substack as well. The physics of startups. I do some advising. I run some sales trainings for startups as well. You can learn more about that@robsnider.org and just reach out on any of those places. If I don't respond the first time, just reach out a second time because I get a lot of messages and I don't mean to not respond.

Speaker B: Fantastic. Well, Rob, thanks for being so generous with your time and your knowledge. I've learned a lot. I'm sure everyone listening will too. Have a great evening. That's the pod. This episode of the Startup podcast was brought to you by Warp Development. I know a lot of you rely on dev agencies to help build your product. Problem is, a lot of these agencies suck. Ask me how I know. I've been looking for one that I can really endorse and I have finally found one. Warp Development are, uh, the powerhouse behind kids. Countless successful startups and Enterprises for over 22 years. They have over 100 experts who don't just code, they solve business problems alongside you. From custom software to AI consulting, Warp Development delivers results that move your business forward. And they're in your time zone. They have offices in Australia, the United States and South Africa. So you get local support with global expertise. Are you ready to build something that matters? Visit warp development.com that's warp development.com and mention the startup podcast for a free consultation.