An 86-minute guide to finding PMF | Rob Snyder (Author, The Power of Pull)

The theory behind a sales call is if you have pull, you're going to rip the thing out of my hands. So, I have a very specific structure of a sales call for getting into discovery and then transitioning out of discovery. >> How can people use this framework to help them come up with ideas that are more likely to actually be >> successful? One of the main mistakes people make is thinking that pull is a thing that a company has. It's a thing a person has. You're not selling to SpaceX, you're selling to the head of legal at SpaceX who has a project on her to-do list that they can't do themselves.

>> You have this idea of the Hail Mary approach. You're talking with people and they're like, "Oh my gosh, this is exactly what I need." A lot of the time >> that's not going to happen. That's also an opportunity to what I call throw the Hail Mary, which is is there anything on your to-do list that you would pay me to do right now? We're seeing if they try to buy. If they don't, cool, we've learned something. We can kind of keep iterating from there. If they do, okay, great. Now we've might have something.

Let's see if it repeats. >> Say you've actually found something, something [music] that is pulling and people are like, "I need this now." What comes next? >> Retention is super important [music] and it's not obvious. And so, what I recommend is

>> Rob, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. >> Hello, thank you. >> You are the author of The Power of Pull. I've got the book right here. You have a newsletter called The Physics of Startups. I don't think I told you this, but the way I learned of you is a very unusual way. Uh I have this Slack community for my paid subscribers and in the Slack, just in the past month, two different people started threads where they're like, "Lenny, uh you need to get Rob on the podcast. I have been reading his book and it's extremely useful to what I've been doing." And these are some founders, some product people. And I'm just like, "Well, who is this guy? I got to find out." And so, I reached out and uh that's how this came to be.

Essentially, what you've written in this book and what you do in your newsletter is you've basically created a very pragmatic guide to finding product market fit and basically going from zero to one and then one beyond. And to give people a reason to believe you, other than what I've already said about people saying how useful this has been, I know you've helped something like 50 different startups get from zero to over a million in ARR. Speak to just where this insight and and advice comes from.

>> Yeah, I did not expect to be writing a book or do anything like this. I I got punched in the face as a founder trying to go zero to one and then randomly figured it out and then a bunch of my friends started pulling me in to help their startups go zero to one and it's kind of got obsessed with this stage. It's super interesting, super weird. I feel like there's not a lot of good stuff written about it and and so I've just gotten strangely obsessed with doing zero to one as many times as possible.

>> I love that. I'm going to read a couple quotes actually from my community to reinforce the things you just said of why of what people have been saying about what you've done. And this is really unusual. There's like even though you just said there's not a lot, there is a lot of content for founders. Here's how to find idea. Here's how to find product market fit. So, it's really it it's a big signal to me if people are saying this is in particular extremely useful to them more than anything else out there. So, a few things that people told me in my community. One, I remember reading the first chapter of this book and feeling the weight lifted off my shoulders that I'm not some silly clueless outlier and that this is a normal part of the process.

Another, besides all the very tactical stuff, personally I've been I'm normalizing just how painful, lonely, weird it is to go through writing mark finding product market fit. Finally, we ran into the same zero to one traps Rob describes. Building based on what prospects said they wanted rather than what actually got them to say yes. >> Wow. You have very nice people in your community. That's that's uh >> That's true.

>> That's super kind. >> That's true. >> All right. Anyway, so there you go. Just to get people Okay, let's all pay attention. Um Okay, give us a an overview of the pull framework. >> Yeah, so the pull framework describes a person who will pull your product out of your hands. Um some someone who's weird not to buy your product. So we like know what pull feels like is it's the thing that's written about with startups. You know, it's the thing Startups will think of you, your newsletter had insane pull.

You grew like that, right? And everybody wants that. And most of us are in the situation where it feels like we are pushing. We're trying to convince people to care, convince them to buy. And there it's like kind of maybe working. And so pull describes a person who who'd be weird not to buy. The question is just like what causes somebody to pull a product out of your hands. And for that, I found a lot of the traditional descriptions of things, like when I was a founder, I went out and found hair on fire pain points, big problems, offered a differentiated solution that provided real value. We had design partners using our product every single day. And so I was like, okay, cool. Check, check, check, check, check. This thing's going to the moon.

And then tried to sell it and just got smashed into a wall for 2 years, pivoting around aimlessly, not having no clue why. And then we randomly pivoted, it took off, and I realized that it wasn't the thing that causes people to pull a product out of your hands. It's not pain points or value props or things like that. It it because realized that people can basically just say, uh yeah. Like great this you know, great that your product solves our pain points, problems, offers a ton of value, but I'm not going to drop my priorities to buy it.

And so I realized it's about priorities, a certain kind of priority, where somebody's trying to do something. They got a project on their to-do list, trying to do it right now, but they can't do it with their existing tools, methods, or options. In that case, they're like a coiled spring, right? Trying to do something, stuck, and you show up and just offer something that gets them unstuck. That helps them get that priority done. That's when they rip it out of your hands, and the pull framework is just an acronym for that.

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>> Let's talk it through the the acronym of pull, cuz that goes deeper into this idea. >> Yeah, so acronym p u l l. There's a p p project. They have a project on their to-do list. You can think of a project like a job to be done. It's um, you know, Bob Moesta, you had him on, he's amazing. Um, project is not like I want to buy recruitment software, it's I want to hire more employees, kind of thing. U is the second one is unavoidable.

This is the thing that I have to do right now. Why now? Why not later? There's some reason why you have to do it now. First L is list of options I consider for doing the project. Could be again, hiring somebody. Could be having our existing team do it. Could be using the tools I already have or the tools out on the market. And the second L is limitations. Why are those options not good enough for getting me getting my project done? Amazing.

>> So, the first two are really important there and then it's interesting these second two feel less important. I'm curious why they're so important. So, the first two are essentially like I have a problem I need to solve, a job to be done and this is an urgent problem. So, in a sense this is the hair on fire problem very concretely defined. Here's what hair on fire looks like. I have like a to-do my boss is waiting for me to do and it needs to happen now. It's not just like a general thing that I need to solve.

>> Yes. >> Why are the second two so important? This idea of other options and why those are not working? >> Yeah, so you can you can imagine a case where like a product team for example, um they have a really important thing that the that has been mandated down. They have a really important feature they need to build or something. There's an unavoidable project on their to-do list. But, they're going to do it themselves.

So, they don't need anything. They They won't buy anything unless they their existing options aren't good enough. And so, it really really is important that it's not just I'm trying to do something and I can do it myself or I can do it with a with a kind of category leader. I can do it with whatever tool is is out there. It has to be something where my existing options are not good enough. So, I am like stuck. I'm I'm blocked.

>> Let's do an example to make this even more real. What's like a product or a company that gives us a sense of what basically use this as a template. It's like a Mad Libs-y thing where you're just like p u l l and you fill it out. So, let's go. Give us an example. >> Yeah, so my friends are at a company called Jump, which is an AI note taker for financial advisors. Very interesting space. They did the same thing I did by the way. They spent 18 months just like hitting their head against the wall and then finally Sound Poll tried to sell and and figured it out. But what they found was that financial advisors have a project on their to-do list that is to minimize the amount of time they spend taking notes for client meetings and putting those notes into their CRMs.

It's a project on their to-do list. The U, the unavoidable, is if they don't take notes and put them into their CRMs, they could go to jail. Uh so they have to take those notes, but when they're taking the notes, they don't want to be doing that. And so so they want to minimize the amount of time because they don't enjoy doing that. It's just not a not a fun thing. So the list of options they considered to minimize the amount of time were uh you know, like a generic AI note taker. Your your kind of there's a list of of all of those out there, but those AI note takers were not good enough because they didn't integrate with the financial advisor's CRMs.

And it wasn't clear if they were compliant with the SEC's regulations on this. And so there's a list of options they they really couldn't use. And so when Jump showed up and found that poll, people ripped the product out of their hands. Well, I think one person literally said uh "This must be how Alexander Graham Bell felt when he invented the telephone." Like that's a weird thing to say about a product for financial advisors.

Amazing. That's a great testimonial to stick on our website. >> Yeah. Okay, what would be like a bad version of this? Like what would it look like if it wasn't if there wasn't Poll? >> Yeah, so fun conversation with the with the Jump team about they they said, "Okay, cool. Financial advisors, they have this project. You know who else meets with clients all the time? Insurance agents. So maybe we just go and talk to them." And it turns out they also have the project on their to-do list of minimizing the amount of time they spend taking meeting notes.

But the U isn't there because they don't have to they're not required to put meeting notes into their CRM. So their existing options, the first L, are not taking meeting notes, which they were already doing. And so, you can see the framework kind of doesn't fill out for them, or it doesn't There's not The force isn't there. They're fine. >> That unavoidable piece, I see why that is so important. And this is an example basically if Basically you need all four here. So, that's a good lesson here is all four need to exist for real pull.

In the first example that you do, to me it doesn't feel like it's like a to-do they just wrote down. It's kind of this general to-do. Just like generally save time. Is that an okay P for a project for to be a to-do just a Or is Or is it Was this like specifically every financial advisor's to-do list? >> Yeah, so there's a thing that I wouldn't say it's like actually something they wrote down on their to-do list, but it was like a thing they were doing all the time. It was a part of their workflow, and while they were doing it, they were trying not to do it. Like I think there's like a the action I'm doing right now on my calendar, and then the project is my intention while I'm doing it. And so, while I'm doing it, the project on my mental to-do list was like spend the least amount of time doing this annoying thing. Got it.

>> And so, if a founder or product team is listening to this and they're struggling with their product, it's probably one of these four is not there. >> Yeah, you need all four at once. If you find P without U and in the L, so you find something that somebody's trying to do kind of, but they're not actually trying to do it right now, and their existing options aren't good enough, what they'll do is they'll complain and they won't buy. If they have P and U, but their L's are good enough, they're going to say, "Yeah, that's exactly what we're doing right now, and working with Cloud Code on it. We're going to figure

it out." >> Something along these lines that you talk about is that this pull exists. It's like this thing that is already there, and you're just kind of this like I don't know, hunter looking for the pull and discovering it. Talk a bit about that. >> Yeah, this was super liberating when I like realized this because I always thought that I was incompetent. I wasn't good at convincing the market to want my product. And it was from that perspective of okay, I'm building something that's really valuable and people aren't buying. How do I convince them to want it to buy? And it turns out this pull, this project on their to-do list exists before and independent of me.

Which means I just have to go out there and find it. I don't have to convince people to have pull and it's like I haven't quite figured out how to do that, but I think it's very, very hard to do if it's possible at all. >> That feels very familiar. Just trying to convince people like this is so great. It's going to solve so many of your problems. Uh and I love these ideas. These like I just love how very specific and concrete it makes all of these general pieces of advice around finding product market fit, coming up with ideas. It just tells you exactly here's what it looks like.

Um something else you talk about, you mentioned this earlier, this idea that it it needs to feel weird for them not to buy it. That's like the sign that this is right, that it's like it's weird. Why aren't you buying this? Talk a bit about that. >> Most people most of the time are like fine. It would be weird if they bought our product given what's on their to-do list, given what they have, given their options. Like so it would be weird if they bought. But a person with pull is weird not to buy. They should actually pull the product out of your hands because they are like that coiled spring. And so if you talk to somebody who has pull, the conversation should basically go like, wait a second. You can do what?

Okay, how do we get started? Does the product exist yet? Like how do how do we get on board? Where basically every other conversation you have with somebody who doesn't have pull can have anything other than that. They can be enthusiastic and nice and say, "Wow, that's amazing. That's super interesting. That's totally the future of our industry. Wow, I can see how that would save us so much money." But they're not saying, "I need this right now." And that's how you know they actually have pull.

>> Those conversations sound very familiar.

Okay, so before we get into the kind of the whole journey of the startup process and how you can use this framework in that journey, anything else around just the general idea of the pull framework that's important to share? >> One of the main mistakes people make is thinking that pull is a thing that a company has. It's a thing a person has. Even if you're selling enterprise software, you're selling not to the company.

You're not selling to SpaceX. You're selling to just going to your Gen uh Gen able conversation. You're selling to like the head of legal at SpaceX who has a project on her to-do list that that they can't do themselves. >> Mhm, that is really useful. So, it's not like SpaceX needs this. It's like say Jen >> Yes. >> needs this. Uh and you're saying that that's often a mistake people make. They don't think about the specific person with the this need.

>> Yeah, yeah. It's it's super common to say we sell to right like mid-market private equity companies. It's like you don't. You sell to a partner or an operating partner in there who's specifically trying to do X, Y, and Z.

>> Awesome. Okay. So, through the lens of this framework let's go through kind of the key moments of an early-stage startup finding product market fit. So, we'll talk about coming up with an idea, getting your first sales call, closing your first deal, and then kind of scaling from there. So, let's start with coming up with an idea. >> Yeah. >> How How can people use this framework to help them come up with ideas that are more likely to actually be successful?

>> As a founder, I I have a notebook of ideas that are all like, "What if we built an API for APIs?" kind of thing. Like there there all these like product ideas. And the product ideas all sound unhinged. And so, I can never tell between product ideas. It's what's a good idea and what's a bad idea. Well, fortunately, the pull framework is a is a thing that's upstream of your product idea that says, "I believe there is a person who is trying to do X right now we and who's basically weird not to buy." And so, what I've found to be helpful is to use the pull framework to stake out a claim and say, "I believe for whatever idea I have, I believe this specific person is stuck. And so, I'm going to go and talk to them and see do they want to Do they try to buy from me even before we have a product? And so, for me the the idea of the the um the pull framework is is to come up with a hypothesis of who has pull

and then go and test that. And then the question becomes, okay, how do you find this pull idea, this pull hypothesis? What do you do for that? I have some fairly strong opinions on this. Like I don't think we take this stage seriously enough. Like if your life depended on it, how would Would you Would you be doing like 10 customer interviews for like 30 minutes on Zoom? No. You would go all out. You'd go in person. I have like a couple stories of friends who have done crazy things to go and like do the job with the potential customer to feel it firsthand, to find that pull firsthand, to maybe either built something that they would buy themselves or they've like embedded with people to find that like that moment when someone will act is like trying to do something and stuck.

>> Amazing. Uh so, the advice here is don't sit around and brainstorm. Don't uh just look for big markets and figure out where there might be something massive. What you're saying here is uh almost like this lens of if your life depended on it, then how would you find a problem that is likely to be a a real I guess have real pull. And what I'm hearing here is get like in the weeds, get your hands dirty. I get it. The way it's This reminds me of a quote um Non who is the head of product at Linear now, he just went to OpenAI described what he looks for when he's trying to find opportunities is he he describes it I want to feel the pain of the person the same way they feel the pain.

>> Yeah. >> Yeah. And what you're saying is the way to do that is get in there with people building thing. Is there an example of of of doing that? >> Yeah, so a friend from uh from school, he had no idea what he wanted to build. He had no product idea. He wasn't He didn't have my notebook. He didn't have any of that. He just said, "You know, I like serving small businesses. I like small business. I'd like to just find somebody I like to serve, and I'll figure out the idea from that." And so, he wrote out a list of industries that he thought might be interesting, and then he went and shadowed them and like worked with them for like rode along with them for days at a time. And so, he started with solar panel installers, and he hated them, and they hated him. So, they moved on to the next one. He eventually worked his way to like independent physical therapists. And he went and spent days with them, loved

them, they loved him, and it was like, "Okay, cool. What am I What is the pull here? What What What should I do?" And so, he watched over their shoulder days on end. He even tried to buy a physical therapy franchise to like was able to see the P&L and was actually considering it. And in that process, he came up with something. Like, "Wait a second. You're It looks like you're trying to do X and and are stuck there." And so, it's it's um firsthand experience is is what you what you should do there.

>> Awesome. So, like live it yourself and Live it. And is the reason you need to do that Is it part Is it because people would have discovered If it was easy, basically somebody else would have found the idea. Uh what Why do you think that is so important for approaching it this way? >> Yeah, I'd say I'll I'll I'll give two reasons. One is, you know, these things don't really emerge from a whiteboard. Like, it would be weird if his idea came to him that he eventually wound up finding from brainstorming. Like, think of how many different ideas he could have come up with. Um and it wasn't something that Like, it It was something he saw only by observing.

It's unclear that that would have emerged in an interview, either. Cuz the second thing is like more of a philosophical thing, which is you're building a company to serve this kind of person. The whole point of building a company is to serve somebody, to help them do something. And so, if you don't have first hand experience, how are you going to make the thousands of decisions it takes to actually build something that serves them?

>> And is the idea once you have this insight, say with this physical therapy company, you write it out through the pull framework to kind of pressure Is that Is that you call that the pull hypothesis? Is that right? >> Yep. >> So, talk about that. Just like say you have this insight, and I'm curious what you actually found with this physical therapy business, and how to kind of start to think about it through the pull framework.

>> Yeah, so you then take that and say, "Okay, this is This is the kind of idea. I believe this kind of person is This physical therapist is trying to cut some specific cost on their on their P&L." I can't actually remember what it was. Unavoidable for XYZ reasons, and um their existing options of getting a consultant to come in and do this wasn't good enough for some specific reason. It was too expensive. It was too slow.

Wrote out that pull hypothesis. And then what he did next was super important, which was he He showed it to that person and said, "Is this you?" Person said, "Oh my god, yeah. That's exactly the thing." Said, "Okay, great. Uh would you buy something if I helped you get this done?" Yeah, totally. Okay, great. And then he said, "I need to go talk to five other physical therapists, and just make sure this repeats." And then he did that, and they also pulled.

Which was the really important thing to make sure he wasn't just building a product for one person. >> What is it that he showed this company? Is it this for the four and bullet points with here's the project, here's the why it's unavoidable, or is it something else? >> Yeah, so I actually like recommend having two slides. Oh, one slide One slide is the basically the pull framework. You don't have to show them the pull framework cuz no one's going to understand it. You can just say, uh "Here's what I hear. You're trying to do X right now because of Y, and you've considered this, but it's not good enough for this reason." You say, "Is Do I have that roughly right?"

And then the second slide is a kind of conceptual overview of how I can help. So, it sounds like you're looking for a way to cut this line item that's faster than a consultant. We could offer that for XYZ with with Does that kind of fit what you're looking for? And you're looking for the first slide them to say, "Oh my god, yes." And the second slide, "Yeah, how does it work? How exactly How you know, how do we move forward?"

>> What I love about your stuff is it's like very plug-and-play pragmatic. So, we'll actually show a slide of the actual template you have people use to fill this out. So, the phrasing, I'll read it from this slide, too. Uh there's a project on your to-do like this is the project in your to-do list and it's unavoidable right now because of this and options you looked into are this and they're lacking for this reason.

Amazing. I love this. So, the idea is you have this little slide that you just create and to kind of run by people. And the idea is this is the hypothesis. And what does it look like when there's pull once you show it to them? Is it like they're ready to send you money? Is it their eye pupils dilate? What do you look for? >> Yeah, you look for a couple things. The The thing that really really matters is that they actually try to buy. They say, "Okay, cool. How do we get started?"

And they will do that I have a friend who was selling into He kind of pivoted around for a while, but he knew he found pull when someone an exec in pharma before he had a product said, "If you can do that, I will pay you right now." So, okay, that's the signal you are looking for. What you're looking for as well is they're leaning in. Wait a second, you can do what? What you're not looking for is kind of like leaned out enthusiasm. Okay, well, tell me more. Well, let me Yeah, we'll we'll think about it. Can you send more information so our team can review that?

Like, you know, and and any of those kinds of things anything that is not like, "Okay, how do we actually move forward on this?" is just not worth your life force going after. >> It's interesting how much body language and just like the physical experience of getting excited about an idea is is a sign that it is good. Uh I just had Josh Woodward on the podcast, head of Google Labs, and he's similarly like you see you see a twinkle in their eyes and their eyes just light up.

>> [laughter] >> And so interesting that that's a sign of a pull. >> Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's it's what you're seeing is is it weird for them not to buy right now? Are they like are they behaving as if it's weird for them not to buy?

>> Mhm. Is what's kind Is there like a lim- a like a You know, there's like the I will buy this I do like they say they will buy it versus a sign they will actually buy it. Is it the body language? Like how do you know they're serious about it? >> So, I call it a like a pull-shaped action. Not a good good uh term, but but a pull-shaped action is like I need this right now. How do Like I am pulling it out of you. How do How do we move forward right now? It is not like a oh, I could totally see us using this in Q4 kind of thing. That's a That's a not pulling towards me. That's a kind of pushing out into the future.

>> Like the urgency of like I need this now. There's always this advice of solve your own problem, which is just different from what you described. Is that a path you recommend or would you recommend against that? >> So, a friend's So, like Emily at a company called Clearly AI, she was in security engineering at AWS. And she found something there that she would have paid somebody to solve, but there was nobody out there.

And so in that case, it's solve your own problem. Yes, 100% where the solve your own problem falls kind of flat a lot of times is um it's a thing that you wouldn't have paid somebody to do for you, but you just think should exist. Right? If it's And so you have to be honest with yourself. I have done things where I've built things that like, oh, I think the world needs this. I ran into this problem, but if I looked myself in the mirror, I wouldn't have said, yeah, I'll buy this right now.

>> Along those lines, is this advice mostly for B2B SaaS sort of software or is this applicable to say a consumer app? >> So, I am mostly in the B2B space. But I have seen quite a few people. I've been kind of surprised that a lot of people from the consumer space have have used this as well. And someone sent me the story of like Spanx, which was basically she she did the same thing of of like selling one-on-one with people, seeing how they reacted to figure out all the different pieces of of what became Spanx.

>> Yeah, and she solved her own problem. Famous story. She tore off her pantyhose, or I think that's the story. Just I guess she needed it now. I think it was like, yeah, she's going to invent it. So, that's that's a cool example.

You [clears throat] have this We're going to talk more about this, but you have this idea of the Hail Mary approach. Talk about that. >> So, the Hail Mary So, we've been talking about the happy path here. You find something you're talking with people and they're like, oh my gosh, yeah, this is exactly what I need. A lot of the time, that's not going to happen. You're going to get that kind of lukewarm feel. And so, what I've tended to find is that's also an opportunity to what I call throw the Hail Mary, which is okay, this doesn't seem to be a thing.

Is there anything on your to-do list that you would pay me to do right now? Like that you would pay somebody to take off your plate. And that's just an open-ended Hail Mary. I've actually seen quite a few startups totally pivot and take off from the Hail Mary, which has been really interesting. There's one startup, they were trying to sell an applicant tracking system into governments, and they had a call with somebody and the person was like, yeah, that's kind of interesting, but after the Hail Mary question, yeah, what I'd actually pay you to solve is this like job description thing right now. And that became their first contract, that became their first customer, and they've grown super fast since then.

>> That's awesome. So, the advice here is just sometimes feel free to just ask, what problem can we solve for you? >> Yeah, and that like leads to how to think about sales. Well, I'll just give a little and we can dig into this if it's interesting, but like I always was kind of nervous to sell as a mega introvert and over-thinker, like it just feels like a lot of pressure. Um and it like I need to convince you to buy. And so, that question feels uncomfortable. But, if you kind of reframe it in your own head of, "No, I'm just seeing if they need help with anything that they are stuck on." And if they don't, that's fine. But, if they do, cool, we can explore if it if I can help. Then, uh it kind of changes your orientation towards sales.

>> I I am in the same boat as you, and that's a really nice way of thinking about it. I'm just trying to solve someone's problem. If I'm going to Why is it so hard?

Before we get to the next step, which is getting your first sales call, finding basically finding someone to talk to that you don't already know. Are there any anti-patterns or just kind of signals or just like uh traps people fall into when they're coming up with ideas? >> Yeah, uh infinite. But, the >> [laughter] >> But, the the main ones that I have seen that are like really, really brutal are feeling like you need to build it yourself first.

So, you come up with an idea, and you're like, "I don't think this is ready for primetime, or I think people have to see it to get it." And then, you go heads down and build it. Now, now with AI, you can kind of get that out of your system in a in hopefully a couple weeks instead of, you know, months or not. But, uh you do not You you want to face the cold wind of reality as soon as possible. And so, don't delay the customer conversations where you can actually find pull.

>> You're also not a fan of design design partners, which is Okay, so you work as a typically very standard advice to find design partners. >> Yeah, but I don't know. Maybe in some context it's helpful. I have yet to see it help be helpful. What I've seen in basically every single time I've seen somebody with a design partner is that you recruit a design partner who quote-unquote buys into your vision for the product, and they give a bunch of feedback and never buy from you.

They never buy, and you realize that all of their feedback was just like them playing Steve Jobs. And there's like, "I'm going to help this startup." versus "I have something I'm actually trying to get done. And if if you think about it like the people who actually have something really important they're trying to get done, they don't want to be a design partner. They just want that thing done.

>> I love that. Okay, so so your advice is don't set up a bunch of design partners and we'll go through kind of the process you actually recommend. Okay, so I guess just uh think about this coming up with an idea step. The core moment is some insight based on being hands-on, living with the people that you will be helping. The the term I've heard describe that to describe this idea um I think it was um uh a VC Floodgate that uses this. Um you're basically looking for an earned secret.

>> Yes. >> And your advice here is the way to find that earned secret. Either it's you have lived it at a company, say Amazon gave this AWS example, or you're on the ground working side-by-side with the people dealing with it and just looking for problems that they have. >> Yeah. Yeah. And you get like the method kind of doesn't matter. It might come to you in an ayahuasca retreat. Like I you get you could get that secret from anywhere, but the things that are most likely to actually work are like getting your hands dirty and and learning it from reality versus from theory.

>> So just to follow that thread, say there's like a pie chart of of the say 50 companies you've worked with where their idea came from, what would be like the biggest chunks of the pie chart? >> I'd say 10% um own experience, 90% going and getting firsthand uh like experience. And within that, it's been a bit of like some of them sold the wrong product to figure out what the right product was, um but most of them actually go and do the thing firsthand.

>> And then what percentage ayahuasca retreat? There's no room for that. >> 100%. That's That's mandatory as part of of me advising you. >> [laughter] >> It's the the pull hypothesis. Okay, sweet. Okay, so say at this point you've got a full hypothesis. There's a signs that maybe there's something really good here.

The next phase in my eyes is finding someone to talk to and sell it to. So basically landing a first sales call. Talk about how you go about landing that call. And what happens kind of and then we'll talk about actually writing the call, but before we get there just like finding people to talk to. >> Yeah, this is a fun one. So my goal is actually like I want to have two to three conversations per day with potential customers. But to get there you have to first get your first conversation. So you can do warm intros, you can do all that kind of stuff. We'll just talk about if you don't have any of that and you need to get people to talk to you cold.

The way I typically recommend founders start is to just reach out to your potential customers on LinkedIn or via email. And it's with a very specific kind of message that is not a hey, do you have XYZ pain points? Would you like to buy our game-changing solution? Like no template you get online is going to get you any responses except for like leave me alone. And so I call it founder magic kind of outreach at this stage which is basically like you're interesting, I'm interesting, let's chat and see.

And this is totally acceptable. Like I one of the startups that I helped, their message was uh hey, Snoop Dogg invested in us and I thought you'd find it interesting too. Would you be open to chat? That's a fun message. Everyone has their own version of that. Like everyone who listens to this or everyone who's a founder like has an interesting message you can send. And you don't have to convince them in the message to buy your product. You just get them to talk with you. This pull exists out there on their to-do list. And so the message doesn't do anything about that. It just It's just to get them to talk to you. So just say something interesting to cause them to meet with you.

>> Okay, this is really helpful. So your advice here is don't craft like a whole value prop pitch, problem identification, don't tell them how much pain you're going to solve. It's just like get their attention with something interesting. >> Yes. >> The Snoop Dogg example is awesome. Any other Any other examples? Any other kind of ways of thinking about what might be interesting to someone? >> There's There's been a variety of ones that I've seen. Um random ones that are like, "Hey, I dropped out of my PhD and I'm now working on something for a content marketers." Right? Like something something that's just kind of interesting enough there that's not super magical.

Um you can have There's a variety of different things I've seen from um I, you know, I was you know, Sam Altman's chief of staff. Right? That you know, if anybody sends that message, that will work quite well. It doesn't matter what the rest of the message says. I thought you'd be interested in open to chat. And so it's finding something interesting that's like worth a conversation with them. Yeah, I What I'd say is it really depends on your end customer, too, because if you're doing outreach to like, for example, HVAC companies, saying, "Hey, I'm Sam Altman's former chief of staff.

Thought you might find it interesting." They're going to say, "Buddy, I have no idea what the words in this message mean." So it could be like, "Hey, I was at my dad like I worked at my family's plumbing company in in high school and now I'm do working on this kind of interesting thing. Thought you might find it interesting. Would you be open to chat?" >> An implicit element of this is keep it very short. Sounds like it's just like a sentence or two.

>> Yeah. >> Okay. And then what's your take on AI emailing a bunch of people versus individually reaching out and thinking about some unique message per person? >> I have not seen AI personalization work at this stage. Usually what it does is it tells them something they already know about themselves and they're like, "That looks like Claude wrote it." And so I don't usually recommend that. I also don't I haven't seen personalization be super important here. The These messages that I like I said the entire message that I would send. You don't need to actually have a ton of personalization in it. Or like, "Hey, I'm going to X conference. We're going to be pitching.

Would you be open to chat?" Like something like that can be good enough without any personalization at all. All the examples you shared are very >> simple and don't have anything to do with them and just say something interesting, basically. Uh and what you what you don't recommend is is basically, yeah, the idea you're not trying to sell them immediately. Just want to have a call. >> Yeah. And on the call, we'll see if you have pull. If you do, you're going to turn it into a sales call. If you don't, nothing I do is going to change that.

>> [laughter] >> Okay. How many email/LinkedIn posts should you start with say you're just getting started to try to find some calls? >> Yeah, so I tend to start on LinkedIn because the kind of person who you and I like talk to, they have interesting LinkedIns. And so, if you're reaching out to someone, they're going to say, "Oh, okay." But so that's going to do a lot of lifting. You can just get started. And so, you can add 100 150 people on LinkedIn per week.

Go for that. Add 20 a day. And then message them when they accept the connection request. And if you're sending like if you're connecting with I don't know, let's say you connect with 100 people per week or you you send 150. Um my typical targets for that are like 30 to 40% of them should accept your connection request. And then of them 30 to 50 should percent should reply. And a subset of them should say yes. The majority of them should say, "Yeah, sure. Why not?"

>> Okay. That's an awesome benchmark. So, if you're not at that level, basically your interesting email is not is not working. You should find somewhere interesting. >> It's it's it's could be your profile if people aren't accepting your requests. Like they might look at you and say, "You don't look like somebody I should accept this request." Or it looks like you're about to pitch me, right? Or something like that. Or your message just isn't interesting if you're getting 30 to 40% accepts and then people aren't replying.

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>> So, say you've landed a call and you're going to do a sales call, say your first one. What is your advice for doing a great job on that on the sales call? >> Mostly two steps in a sales call. There's the pull discovery step, and then there's the kind of conceptual pitch of how we might help step. And so, the the theory behind a sales call is again, it's like if you have pull, you're going to rip the thing out of my hands. I don't come into this call like wired up ready to try to convince you to buy like super amp. No, it's just if you have pull, you're going to convince me to let you buy.

And so, I approach this with the vibe of just like leaned back, excited to chat. Let's let's see if I might be able to help you. And so, I have a very specific structure of a sales call that I recommend for getting into discovery and then transitioning out of discovery. Basically, that you start the call, "Hey, thanks so much for taking the time. I'm curious, I'm sure you get a bunch of people reaching out to you. Like, why did you take the call with me today?"

That's a chance for them to say, "You know, you mentioned AI agents and I've been thinking about this and I've just been waiting and I looked at your website I whatever it whatever it winds up being." And they they fill out the entire pull framework for you right there. That's ideal. And then you can say, "Oh, that's interesting. Let me Can I ask a couple follow-ups?" But most of the time they'll say, "I don't know. You reached out to me.

Excited to hear what you have to say." You say, "Great." You use what they have just told you and say, "Okay, great. That sounds like a great agenda for today's call. We can do that. Does that sound good to you?" Get their thumbs up on the agenda. And then you earn the right to ask them some discovery questions about their poll by saying, "Great. Okay, before we get to those items on your you know, on our agenda. Um do you mind if I ask you a few questions to better understand your context?"

And that way you've earned the right to ask questions. It does not feel like an interrogation to them because if it does, uh they're not telling you anything. >> Okay. A few tactical questions. One is just how long should you try to make this call? How long should your invite be for? And then where does where does a demo fit in? Do you recommend demo on this call or doing a separate call for that? >> Yeah, so this is almost always a 30-minute call on the calendar. Just um I've found that smaller calendar blocks, uh they don't see on their calendar and so they don't show.

Um and so 30 minutes and then iffy on doing a demo. So if you're super early, you probably don't have a demo to show. And so um but later on you might have a very short demo in in your first call. >> I I guess cuz I'm thinking about the Gen conversation I had and her advice is wait to do the demo, but that's an enterprise sales sort of product, not like an early stage just full hypothesis basis. >> Yeah, totally. Totally.

>> Okay, got it. What's a sign that the this meeting went well? Is it this kind of leaning in, pulling it from you feeling? >> Yeah, so so it's kind of you're able to surface poll or you're able to say, "Okay, you don't have poll at all. Help me understand why this isn't relevant to you. What is?" And so you come away with a either filled out poll framework of, "Okay, I understand this person's poll and they are trying to poll."

Or you understand why they don't have poll. >> How many of these calls should you do before you're like, "Okay, there's no pull here. Time to move on."? >> I don't have a hard like what I tend to do is if you have five calls and everybody's leaned back and you learn nothing, then there's a sign that something's wrong. If you have I've seen people do like hundreds of calls where they still don't they So, do five and then check in and see what you've learned from the calls. Was there any pull there? Did we learn anything interesting? Like I just started up I was just helping out. They had done like five calls into banking and they just felt nothing. But they got an intro from one of the people who said, "Yeah, this doesn't seem relevant to me, but you might consider defense companies."

And they got an intro into that. They know nothing about defense. And in the first conversation defense, the person's like, "Holy, are you serious?" And they're like, "Okay, maybe there's something here." And they changed their pull hypothesis. >> It feels like a big part of this of your of your framework and approach is to just like be brutally honest with yourself whether there's something here. I imagine a lot of founders are just like so excited and convinced this is real and your approach is just like here's here's a way to validate that and be really real with what's working or not.

>> Yeah, I think it's Thinking of it as we're selling to learn, not really to to like push something. Yeah, not not to push. We're going to learn and we're seeing if they try to buy. If they don't, cool. We've learned something. We can kind of keep iterating from there. If they do, okay, great. Now we might have something. Let's see if it repeats. >> The whole idea of calling this pull is so smart because you always hear product market fit is you're feeling pull. You feel the pull. This boulder's pulling you down. You're the wind is pushing you.

>> Yeah. >> Um and so not only is it this acronym of what you look for, but it's this reminder of what you're looking for is pull, something pulling. >> Yeah, and you can also tell like do I feel like I'm pushing right now? Do I feel like I'm convincing? That's a red flag that something either in your mind or in the conversation is off. And like, "Okay, cool. Let's figure out what that

is." >> Is there an example that comes to mind when you think about a good sales call, what that kind of feels like, looks like, what a pitch would be? >> Yeah, so so what you're trying to do is you're trying to get again, get the pull out of them. And so they say uh you know, "I'm trying to I'm trying to make a website, but one of those like you know, those typical point-and-click website design things are just like too much effort for me." Right? So you have something about pull there. You've kind of pulled that out of them. They they they've described that. And so the kind of interesting thing is that once you have pull, your pitch is like quite simple. You what you're not trying to do here is you're not trying to describe this massive product vision or your theory of the problem. You know that they're trying to do X but blocked because of Y. And so your pitch in that case is okay, so it sounds like you're

you're looking for something to make a website without all the hassle of a point-and-click thing. Is that roughly it? And you describe it in a really really small and simple way, not a really big way. You describe it in a small way and they say, "Yeah, that's that sounds like it. How exactly does that work?" Like tell me more. They're pulling more information out of you. And that's when you know you're like starting to be onto something.

>> And are you in your head thinking through the pull framework of these four points and just thinking through like, "Okay, is this actually a something they need right now and unavoidable? Are there What are their alternatives?" And kind of thinking through all that? >> Yeah, those are like actually the questions I will ask, too. Which is like um if I if they don't tell me at the very beginning when I say, "Why'd you take the call?" then I'm asking a question that's kind of like is there anything as it relates to I don't know, your QA process that you're trying to do but you've been unable to do with your existing tools, methods, team, whatever. Right?

And so that question has all the elements of pull in it so that they can then say, "Oh yeah, actually we've been trying to automate end-to-end testing but can't do da da da da da da with you know, with our existing tools." And so and then if they kind of give me some element there, then I have the framework in my mind and I know a lot of people actually have the framework in like a doc during the call and they're filling it out live and it's like, I don't think I have to you. And then you ask a question, you're like, okay.

But like, is it okay if you don't do that now? Like, can you Is there some reason you have to do this now or is this okay to do another time? And you're like scared >> to almost ask it. Like, it's not going to work. >> Oh, and the scariest one is to say, well, what if you I'm sure you've looked into other options, are they good enough? Right? And and to hear that one when they're like, actually yeah, we can do it ourselves and that's good enough.

But it prevents you from again, pushing a product the market doesn't want. >> And just spending years of your life trying to make it work. >> Yeah, there's a reason I look like I'm 60 and I'm 35, right? Like, >> [laughter] >> don't push >> great, Rob. You look great. Filters.

>> [laughter] >> Oh man. So this [clears throat] touches on a like we haven't actually addressed the specific challenge, which is that there's a lot you have to get over for people to decide to try something new and to buy something new. The status quo is generally fine. They have a so many priorities, they have so many things they're dealing with. Just like the bar to get over for people to be like, I want this, I'm going to buy it now is really high. And the idea here of this framework is to get over that hump.

>> Well, it's to find the people for whom stat the status quo is not okay, right? It's to find the people, you know, everyone says like change is hard and all this kind of stuff. Well, you're looking for the people who are already trying to change, who don't need convincing. >> There's this idea that your product has to be 10 times better than the existing solution for anyone to care. Do you feel like like how do you think about, okay, this is better. They tried alternatives, none of them do it.

Or some of them do it okay. Like how much better does this have to be for them to care or is it okay if it's just like, you know, just a little bit better? >> The example with with Jump, I think again, the AI note taker for financial advisors is a good one. How much better are they than the other generic AI note takers? Well, if those note takers don't get the job done and we do, they are infinitely better. They unblock something. And so that's kind of how I think about how stuck are they with their existing options. And so I don't know I don't know about 10x. Like I that thing that doesn't quite register in my head. It's really are they a coiled spring and how do they respond when I show up?

>> So I think about a company like Linear who competes with Jira. I don't know if you know. Do you know Linear? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> So just curious if it applies through this framework. So in my understanding Linear wins over Jira often cuz the experience is is just better. It's just like a beautiful smooth uh you know, well-crafted uh experience. And so they win a lot of customers because it just feels nice and engineers really like using it.

Do you feel like that works through the pull framework or is there something else going on there? >> Again, if we use the pull framework to to analyze that situation, what would have to be true is there is a certain kind of person who is trying to do their issue tracking, but like they are blocked from do they're trying to do something around issue tracking and something about Jira's experience is blocking them from doing the way such that Linear's way better experience is actually relevant to them. Right?

Like I've done so I've made the mistake of taking that analogy and being like, "Okay. So I can just come into a category with way better UX, way better experience and I'm going to crush it." And like try that in HR software and and uh I try I tried it in HR software and it turned out the user experience was not relevant to the buyer. And so they didn't have pull they didn't care that their systems look like they were still on cool ball or whatever it is. So it wasn't relevant there, but again the pull theory would say that basically in in uh the case of Jira Jira versus uh Linear that there was a kind of person who was kind of blocked by JIRA's experience.

>> And I imagine the stronger the pull, the faster all this stuff happens and grows. I know linear took him a long time to get and get people using it, to trust it, to switch. And so, maybe the pull would because of maybe there wasn't as much of that blocking and it's more of just like, okay, I can just move faster, be happier. Uh it took longer. Is that Do you find that just like the stronger the pull, the faster the company grows? Is that >> Yeah, I've seen a bunch of startups where like they go zero to whatever.

Like everyone now is going zero to infinity super fast. And and it's like not it's because they have found these like pockets of pull where people will rip a product out of their hands. Um and it's like people will see these AI pitches now and it's like, wait a second, it can do X and buy basically instantly. And I've seen I've seen that happen in like enterprise. I saw an enterprise deal close in like 2 weeks. And it's just like that thing did When I was growing up, enterprise deals took 18 months. Like what what the heck?

>> That's growing up. I like that.

>> [clears throat] >> Okay, so let's move on to the next step. So, at this point we you had your first sales call. Uh I imagine the next step is closing the deal and interesting cuz it's still early, you may not even have a product. What does that look like going from, okay, I want to buy it now. What do you What do you do next? >> Yeah, so it it it kind of going to depend on the size of the deal. But you want to come back with some sort of a concept and some sort of a plan. And so, uh examples of this. So, the pharma company that I mentioned uh earlier, the company selling into pharma, he showed up and just threw a Hail Mary on a on an intro to a pharma exec. Pharma exec was like, oh my gosh, thank you so much for asking. Our current market research is da da da da da. We're trying It's just so bad, it's so slow. And the founder was like, okay, I don't even have slides here. I'm just hearing this

for the first time. And so, it sounds like you're looking for faster market research that uh that looks like the current research you're getting, but kind of I don't know, like it it's just better in these kinds of ways. Is that roughly right? And the exec was like, yes, that's exactly it. And so the founder is like, okay, let's do this. What if I come back to you in a couple days with a kind of mock-up of what I think that could look like and then we can we can discuss if that fits what you're really looking for and then decide if we want to move forward. And so in that case, no slides, no nothing, goes and Vibe codes a kind of rough layout of what this would look like, get some feedback on it, says, okay, based on that, is there anything else you need to know to decide whether this is a fit that you want to bring into your organization?

Says, uh, like, yeah, what's the price? And then there's a there's a talk track you can use for price, but that's basically it. >> Okay, tell me more about this price talk track. >> Yeah. So, the interesting thing about the pull framework is that it can help you set the bounds for pricing. So, what's the value of getting the project done? Or what are the cost of the alternatives? So, uh, the the L's is what's the value of getting this market research faster? Or what is the cost you're currently spending with your, um, with your market research consultants?

Both of those can tell you, okay, the value of market research is like X, the cost with consultants is, I don't know, $50,000 per per year. And so, that gives me a rough boundary to say, okay, what if we charged $50,000 a year, the same price as your current market research consultants? It kind of gives a frame on price that, um, that makes it intuitive to your potential customers. >> Awesome. Okay. Um, so the way you've kind of written about this closing step, there's kind of like two parts. There's the fit of just like, is this a fit? And then it's just a bunch of project management to get the deal closed. Um, so we've spent a lot of time, I think, on the fit. The project management, is there anything there important to talk about?

>> Yeah, so this is the you did a great episode, uh, with Jen of great couple episodes with Jen on the like sales process. And so in bigger deals, enterprise deals, there's like the champion has pull and decides, yes, I want this. And then you have to do a set of like 17 demos, you have to genuflect in front of four committees. Like there's all of these things that you have to do. For smaller deals, you like don't have to do that kind of stuff. It might just be the CEO who's like, yeah, cool. Next step is you send me the Stripe link and we schedule an onboarding call.

And so the project management step will depend. My typical recommendation for project management in larger organizations is to have a conversation with the buyer, with the with the champion, to say kind of, okay, cool. This is the project on your to-do list. When does this need to be showing results by? They'll say, oh, definitely Q1 next year. Okay, cool. That's a forcing function. You work backwards from there to say, okay, given that we need to be live Q1, what are the set of steps that need to happen between now and then so we can be deployed and showing results by then? And that is a forcing function for all of the prop steps in the sales process.

>> Awesome. So, basically asking when do we need to show success for this to be a thing that you all roll out? And then working backwards from that. Okay. Um, at this point a lot of people would create basically design partnership arrangements where they're like, oh yeah, cool, we'll build this with you, we'll figure it out as we go, we won't charge you. Uh, per your earlier point, you are not into design partnerships. Uh, I imagine your advice here is just like sell it directly.

Don't try to give them to for free, don't set it up with some kind of partnership thing. >> Yeah. Yeah. Why Well, why shoot yourself in the foot? >> Mhm. And again, the reason not to is because it just you find that it doesn't lead to the best to stuff that actually sells and works building this kind of design partnership relationship. >> Yeah, if they're like it it basically takes something from I need to to solve this right now >> Mhm.

>> okay, now I'm helping you build your product. Like what are what are we doing here? So, it it's a negative signal to the most to people with who actually have pull and it's a positive signal to people who don't. >> Awesome. Okay, that totally makes sense. Like if there's pull, just go [laughter] with it. You know, I need to Yeah. >> Yeah, and you can sell something that's like, you know, you might not have a full platform ready. You can sell something that's more service-shaped early on. I've seen a bunch of startups do that where they sell, you know, "Okay, we're going to have an AI product manager who can do X Y kind Z kind of thing. For now, it's delivered by us while this thing is working behind the scenes." And so, you can kind of frame it so they're not expecting a full platform, that like enterprise grade platform ready next week. They expect something more service-shaped and you

kind of validate that there's real pull there and you figure out what the actual thing to build is while delivering it a mix of manually and automated. >> Okay, that's really interesting. That's come up a lot on the podcast, especially with go-to-market sales conversations, this idea of services being a great place to start, which historically has been a terrible idea because uh the fear is you never actually get to a place where you can automate it and you're just running a consulting business forever with terrible margins. So, you've seen this work, this idea of starting with basically humans doing the thing and then slowly building a product around it that increases margins.

>> Yeah, it definitely has downsides, right? You definitely can get stuck in a kind of service businesses kind of thing, but everything has downsides. Mhm. >> Awesome. Yeah, and the idea is AI kind of does more and more of the stuff. And part of it is you learn more and more of what what the problem opportunities are and things like that with people doing the work.

Okay. Um going back to price real quick, uh classically founders are afraid to ask for big numbers and throw out, you know, high prices, uh knowing that this stuff changes and you learn as you go. Any advice for that first price pitch of what number to throw out? >> Yeah, so early on I'm really more testing willingness to transact versus willingness to pay. And so, I don't care about pricing a ton in the early couple of customers. That said, I was just working with a company that said their first deal is enterprise and they've got a big demo day coming up. And so, they're like, how do we get the most possible revenue out of this so we can look like that for demo day? Totally valid thing to do. In that case, what you do is you throw out a number in a way that doesn't like get you slapped.

And the specific approach that I'd recommend for that is almost like using a case study as a hey, react to this kind of case study. And so, you'd say, when we talked to others, the way they everyone's kind of done pricing differently. Some of them have been, you know, it's been sometimes it's been a small project for 80,000, other times it's been up to a million in terms of right, and these are kind of the levers here. And some people a lot of people wind up in the middle.

You tell me, how are you thinking about this? And so, what you're doing is you're not like me on this side proposing pricing to you on this side. It's both of us looking at like an example, a kind of semi-real example of what you heard from others as how they think about this, and letting them them throw up on that. >> [laughter] >> Throw up on that. I like that. And now this case study concept is is actually an important part of this whole framework. I'm going to come back to it.

But, okay, so let's talk about the next steps. So, say you have the sales call, maybe you have two. What kind of comes next after this first batch of sales calls that you're doing? Yeah, this is where the paths might diverge. So, hopefully, you're right. And these people have pull. Great. You now have customers. Time to deliver and start repeating this and start figuring out how to automate things and and just systematize this. You're on the right path.

A lot of the times, you get kind of a weird set of responses. You you learn that the people you thought were weird not to buy are actually weird to buy. It'd be weird if they did buy. They're not behaving in a way where they have pull. And in that case, what I tend to recommend is you just analyze, you go back and review the calls, and you say, okay, did one actually have pull? Did zero? Like, what have we learned here?

And then you craft a new hypothesis and run it again. >> Got it. And I imagine most of the time it's not it's not there. And is that your experience or what's kind of the pie chart of yes success versus not at the stage? >> Yeah, I've seen like maybe once or twice where it was there uh from the beginning and that's magical. Like you feel like a hero when you when you get it right the first time. Uh a lot of times it is uh it is like we're so wrong and backwards that we don't know and so you just ask a Hail Mary a couple times and that gets you on the right path or you like do something crazy where a friend just uh like went to a conference and scheduled 20 meetings and just was like, "I don't know what to do. You tell me what to build you were something like that." I call that goblin mode where you just just going all out and doing unhealthy things to see like who will buy something from me right now to then

generate your hypothesis out of. >> Same way about goblin mode. This is amazing. >> Yeah, you know like when when dogs do the like get the zoomies, right? And they just like that's that's the thing I have in my mind for what goblin mode is as a founder where it's like >> is a good thing or not a good thing? >> It's a it's a break glass in case of emergency thing where it's and I think some founders actually operate like this all the time where it's like, "Okay, there's actually a conference tomorrow in Europe that has these potential customers there. I can't get them to talk to me. So looks like I'm going to get on a plane right now and go there."

Right? It's just doing kind of somewhat crazy things with the goal of getting in front of customers right now and yeah, like some people can do this all the time. Uh others like me who are getting old like I can I can pull this out once in a while. >> Get that goblin mode out sometimes. So the idea there is and you're saying this sometimes this can work just like going nuts just like going talking to everyone looking for these earned secrets.

>> Yeah, and one example of this like it's kind of a crazy example but a friend's building a company called Tira which does dental staffing for for dental hygienists. And he his version of Goblin mode was his parents went door-to-door to different dental offices to just get people to to talk to him about about being customers. And that worked. And so it's just like weird stuff like that can work. Amazing. >> Okay, so you say do a couple sales calls, say do five. Is that is that kind of the idea do like five and assess? Is that rough heuristic? Okay. So say to your point most times you'll find okay, this is not there's no pull here. Sorry.

What do you do? Do you go back to the beginning go hands hands-on with some other small business sort of thing or what do you recommend? >> Yeah, so different pathways there. Hopefully you've asked the Hail Mary question and you've learned something. There. That's like worth double clicking into. >> And the Hail Mary question is just like what is there anything that we can do to with yeah, right now that is a problem on your to-do list?

>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it's and so you've generated some new information that you can then use to like do another set of five. If not, then yeah, you just go back, get some firsthand knowledge, try it again. >> Awesome. Okay, so so this process is very straightforward. Have a pull hypothesis, fill out this template, schedule basically cold outbound with a surprising message that'll get people's attention think you're interesting.

Uh do five calls roughly, get a sense is there pull or not. If there's not pull, throw out some Hail Mary questions, maybe enter Goblin mode to look for something. Uh come up with another pull hypothesis, do five more calls, and repeat until you're like, "Oh wow, we've got this pull." >> Yep. >> And then you have a business. There we go. Off to the races. Okay. So say you

actually found something, something that is pulling and people are like, "I need this now." What comes next? What do you kind of the there's kind of like the building onboarding process and then just keeping them happy. What's that process like? What advice do you have there? >> Yeah, so I found that I didn't really have a good way to think about what happens after people buy. And so I felt like a dog who got a car and I just kind of like threw the software over the over the over the fence and like, good luck.

What I've learned since then the hard way obviously is that what retention is super important and it's not obvious. And so the way I think about like delivery post sale is that basically everybody who buys is guaranteed to churn until X in which case they are weird to churn. And all delivery is all everything is about figuring out what is X and how do you design a bullet train so every customer gets there. And so X is you might think of it as oh they're using the product or they have high NPS or whatever it is. It's almost never those things. Mark Roberge has this kind of leading indicator of retention which for Slack was like you sent 10,000 messages or 1,000 messages in your first X amount of time. If you hit that it's like it'd be weird if you churned. You're it's the leading indicator of retention.

For my startup we gave retention software to restaurants. If they got a notification that somebody was going to quit that they could prevent within the first two weeks after purchase they would like go insane. They would tell all of their friends about it and they they'd be weird if they churned. And so we just designed the onboarding process to that. And so what I recommend is once you have a couple people who are saying yes, don't just like throw the product over and like send them a login and pray. Go deliver first hand as well and you're going to learn a ton from that and keep asking the question like are you going to churn now? Are you going to churn now? Like what and try to find the moment when when they're like oh okay cool. I can't live without this.

>> I love how your mind works. Words these formulas and these templates and just everything is this and obviously it's not like this clean cut but it's really helpful I think for people to just think of it in these very structured ways to take these general ideas of what it looks like when things are going well and how to find an idea to just like okay here's what you plug in Talk about the specific thing. It's working, adjust. So, this is great.

On the churn piece, is there What's like a sign, okay, shoot, everyone's churning? Just like a sign of like, okay, they thought they didn't, but it's not working. Anything there of just like, what's the sign at this stage, okay, maybe it's not working versus it is? >> Yeah, so if everybody's churning, the It is unacceptable for you to not figure out why. And so, uh what I've actually seen is in a lot of cases, like for a lot of horizontal products, you're going to have a lot of like user drop-off.

The one one startup I know, like they they were a horizontal AI workflows product. Cool, join the club, right? But they found through being a horizontal AI workflows product that like one or two kinds of customers kept using it while everyone else was churning. And so, if a bunch of people are churning, 90% plus of your your customers are churning, first of all, I'm sorry. It sucks. It really, you know, you wake up at 4:00 a.m. every morning just sweating.

But in that, you often can figure out why. And is it something that you're doing, or is it something about them? And that can tell you, okay, who actually had pull that we can sell, deliver, retain. And and for like that horizontal workflows product, they found that freight forwarders were using it for one specific workflow. And so, they pivoted the entire company to focus on that. And so, they went from being this horizontal product with massive churn, low price, to a very premium product for freight forwarders.

>> There's no point at which you're like, okay, we figured it out, we're going to be a massive success. Like every moment of the startup journey is that uncertain moment. But what's great about this process so far is every month step you get, it's more and more certain. There's something here at least. And then there's like the in forever in doubt of like, how big can this get? I remember talking to the founder of Databricks, which is now like a bazillion trillion-dollar company, and um he said something like, even at a hundred million ARR, they were still very unclear if this was a thing that will last.

And I think that's very common. So, that's its like its own topic of just like >> That's nice to know. That's nice to know. Because everyone Yeah, everyone's like, "How will this become a big thing?" It's like, "I don't know. We'll figure it out." >> Yeah, it's just kind of one step at a time and and so

So, in this conversation, the final step in my mind is this idea you have of this um use user case study factory, which kind of takes you from things are starting to work to okay, now we can create a repeatable system that helps us grow. So, talk about that, what that looks like, what that's about. >> Yeah, so this is the thing that whenever I talk about, everyone just like everyone's eyes glaze over. And so, I haven't found found a useful way to talk about this yet. So, just pre-warning, I think it's the most important thing in in all of this, which is how do you think about your startup? What's your conceptual model for your startup? And like, you need to have a way to think about your startup to know how to grow it as fast as humanly possible. So, what winds up happening is you find somebody who has pull. You give them a product, a service, or whatever that they pull out of your hands. So, it turns out they

were trying to do X, their existing options weren't good enough for Y, and you offer Z that helps unblock them. That sounds a lot like a case study that you would feature on your website. And it's a helpful thing because okay, my job as a founder is not to produce 100 different case studies, totally different case studies, because that's not scalable. That's not repeatable. I'm looking to build one case study where a customer says hell yes before they buy and after they buy, and just repeat that a million times.

And so, that model helped me go from thinking that startups were a bunch of different things. I need to know all these different things to like, "No, a startup is just a thing that repeats one case study infinite times." And all the stuff that I do is to build a factory for repeating that case study. And if I do this right, there's a case study where customers say hell yes, and they pull themselves through each step of the factory. The steps are the pipeline step, how do we get people to talk to us, sales step, how do we turn potential customers into actual customers, and the delivery stuff of the case study factory, which is how do we get people who are customers to be weird not to churn.

And so everything we do kind of fits into this case study factory. And if you see this in your mind, it radically simplifies like a startup how it works, and then you can use like the theory of constraints. We're going to get really nerdy for a second from manufacturing to like look at your case study factory and say, "Okay, where is our Where's the bottleneck to our growth? Is it that we're not like we don't have enough pipeline. Okay, cool. If that's the bottleneck, then that's the only thing that matters right now. Let's solve that bottleneck, and then we'll move to the next one. The next one is our close rate is lower than it should be. Okay, cool. That's our bottleneck. Now we're going to go all in on that. And so it lets you go like the case study factory model gives you a way of thinking about your startup and knowing exactly where to focus at any one point in time.

>> It's a really interesting way to think about it where instead of we are trying to just get more customers closed and more deals closed. Instead, we're looking We're building a case studies. Like you almost like working backwards from what's the case study going to be of this company we're talking to. You say we're talking to SpaceX. Just like we want it to look consistent across all the companies we're talking to.

People talk about call this repeatable sales motions, but I like the idea of thinking of it like it's almost like working backwards from the press release, but for sales. What is the case study we're going to write about SpaceX? Okay, here's how we got them. Here's how we got sold them. Here's how we delivered it. And then here is just like create like consistent repeatable case studies that you will later be able to share.

>> And yeah, and exact and then and then what sales becomes is it becomes kind of like, "Hey, this is the case study that we deliver on. Is this relevant to you or not?" And it becomes actually like you you can show the case study to people. They say, "Yeah, that's actually what I want as well." And so it becomes this kind of tool and you can say, "Hey, you don't look like our case study. So it's probably going to be a lot of work and might not be a good fit." And you can use it for qualification, disqualification, and for people to understand what you do.

>> That's That's funny. There's this whole theme now of building software factories where, you know, product build itself. But, is that really another version of a factory you're building which is even a broader version of just the sales, the user, the case study factory. >> Yeah. Yeah, we don't make software here. We make case studies. >> So, is that is that is that your advice? Just like think of it that way? Like we make we make case studies here.

Yeah, it's interesting. And it's not like you need to actually share and write up a case study. It's just a mental model for how to think about what you're trying to build as a a sales go-to-market org. >> Yeah, totally. And and the good news is if you have the pull framework, then you just describe here's how we helped them and what they accomplished and you have a case study. >> Mhm. Amazing. Okay.

There's a couple things I want to touch on cuz this is the end of the process basically. There's a few things I want to touch on that came out of of the community and things you mentioned real quick. One is you you have this term hell yes customers. Say more about that. You mentioned it of like when you're looking for someone to buy it and then use it. There's this idea of they want them to be hell yes. >> Yeah, it's it's basically somebody who pulls the product out of your hands before they buy.

And then afterwards, they use it as if it is addictive. And so, they they might literally say hell yes, but what matters is they're weird not to buy and weird to churn and that process is mostly them pulling versus you pushing. That's your perfect fit customer. Your job is just to find more who are basically clones of them. >> Okay. The other kind of point I want to reinforce is you recommend no pilots, no point proof of concepts, no design partners. Just go straight to we're going to sell this to you and roll it out and it's going to be amazing.

>> Yep. And it like sometimes you're going to do that and they say, "Okay, but the way we buy here is we actually need to pilot it." Okay, cool. But, don't proactively >> I see. >> offer. >> Awesome. Okay. Another big question that came out of the community is from an external perspective, this feels like this is just for startups and founders. But, this actually applies for and we mentioned this at the beginning, but just to reinforce this point, for larger companies that are working on new feature, new business line sort of thing, uh talk about just if there's anything that you would think about differently through this process if you're at a mature company building a new product.

>> I'm I'm helping a couple companies launch their second product, and what they are doing is actually the founders are like, "Cool, we're doing it again. We're running it back." And the founders are taking this approach to existing customers cuz they're going to try to upsell them, and they are actually selling new features before they've built them. Another example at at uh existing companies is um I I can't share the name, but a company was a new product leader at a company was telling me, "Hey, yeah, the way we get our ideas, all of the ideas that have worked have come from sales calls where they said, 'Cool, yeah, you can do X, but could you also do this other thing for us?' And the products that came out of the customer in the sales calls asking for something that could do that project for them uh all worked, all the ones they >> whiteboarded never worked.

>> So, the idea here is you have a product, you're hearing you're basically look finding these little nuggets of this could be a thing, and what I'm imagining is then you go through this whole pull hypothesis step-by-step, just like put up the hypothesis, talk to five of your existing customers, look for that pull, uh see if they're going to actually buy it, and then kind of go through the same process. And an important wrinkle here that we haven't reinforced enough maybe is that it's the founders that should be doing this, especially in a startup.

But, it's interesting you said even at a mature company, if it's a new product, the founders ideally are doing that selling. >> Ideally, not always the case. There there are people who are who are doing zero-to-one stuff, but I just recommend if you are in that situation and you're a non-founder, really focus on trying to sell the thing and learning through selling because there's a lot of ways to get lost in zero-to-one.

>> Awesome. And then again, if things aren't working, uh there's this idea you shared of goblin mode of just like, "Okay, just try a bunch of stuff, talk to as many people, get on planes, go have 20 meetings, and just look for something. Yes. >> Yeah, Hail Mary, goblin mode, like all of these things are just the your break class in case of emergency. Time is really valuable and like staying stuck stuck is awful. If you're in this like pain cave of zero to one, it's like the worst time of your life and you just don't want to prolong that. So, just get on a plane, go to the office, go in person, do whatever it takes to find

something. >> Rob, we did it. We went through everything. That was amazing. Is there anything else that you think is important to share or anything you want to I don't know double down on before we get to our very exciting lightning round? >> Hopefully what's come across is kind of how simple this is. Pull a framework, show to people, see if they pull. There's a lot of ways to like overcomplicate this and there's a lot of ways where we try to solve every variable in our head in advance and I've found that just pull framework, sell, see if they try to buy, uh and think of less in that process, uh it will get you there.

>> Awesome. That sounds very simple and I think it's important to note like this is very actually not like it's hard to find an idea that actually works and this is all uh here to help you save a lot of pain and suffering and building and be kind of being uh disillusioned not disillusioned miss uh feeling like there's something there wasting a lot of your life and doing something that's not going to work. >> Yeah, think of it as like a you know, like a metal detector on a beach. Like this is just giving you a metal detector. You might not find metal where you're looking right now, but at least I'm not giving you a spoon.

>> At least I'm not giving you a spoon meaning wait, what is that? >> For the beach, right? Like it's a it's a metal detector. >> not Oh, I see. The idea of a metal detector versus looking through all the sand with a spoon. Wow, I love that metaphor. Uh and then sometimes you may find a thing that and then you will realize it's not worth anything. Yeah, okay, wow. That's a great metaphor. Well, Rob, with that we reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?

>> Let's do it. >> First question. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most other people? >> Oh gosh, the um my favorite one is the four-volume Nature of Order series by Christopher Alexander. It's a book on architecture, series of books on architecture. Best thing ever. >> Never heard that recommendation before. Those are my favorite. Uh favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

>> I have two favorite movies that we watch repeatedly. One is the Pride of the most recent Pride and Prejudice, and the second is the Penguins of Madagascar movie. Don't know why. >> The favorite We're on both ends of the spectrum there. >> [laughter] >> Favorite or most interesting AI product that you recently discovered or use or love? >> I've been using Muse, and it's like if it works for me, it can work for anyone.

>> Yeah, very hot right now. Uh amazing. Okay, favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life? >> Um uh life is what you make of it. >> Hm. So true. Final question. I'm curious to get your thoughts on this. So there's this idea of tar pit ideas. Uh so I had Dalton Caldwell on the podcast. He was a partner at YC, and he has this term tar pit ideas, which are ideas that people constantly have that are just terrible and don't work. And people keep having these ideas and they keep trying it and they're just like, okay, it does not work. Is there Are there any tar pit ideas you just find people keep coming to and you're like, don't do that. It's not going to work.

>> Oh, that's interesting. The the category is of ideas is to go after a space when there is already a clear winner in that space without any theory on being different. I just keep seeing that it's just like, oh wow, Lemlist just built a sales automation tool and they're bootstrapped and they're growing really fast, so let me just build the exact same thing as them or something very close. And you know, it's like, okay, but they they've already they've already won that or they've already they've already they've already done that thing. Um and so uh unless you're like, "Oh, but this kind of customer is unblocked, and so we're going to build something kind of different for them."

Those ideas almost always don't work, and you feel like you're going crazy because you're like, "Well, it worked for them. What am I doing wrong?" >> And I imagine everyone answers, "But it's better." And as we know, it can't just be a little bit better. And basically you're saying like, "Okay, but this is unblocking them." >> Yes. >> And it's better than all the other channels. They're just going to go with that thing. But I guess then, you know, this goes into a whole other conversation. Like, what if it's like two times better? And I guess your advice there is it's it's probably not good enough.

>> There are many things, right? You could give me a a 100x better printer for my house, and I won't buy it cuz I don't I'm not blocked. >> That's a great example. Oh man. Rob, we did it. >> We did it. Holy cow. >> it. Holy cow. Um okay, how can listeners be useful to you? That's our final question. >> Oh gosh, if you like the framework, use it. Tell other people about it. Um check out the book if it's useful. And uh reach out if you have any thoughts, ideas, or this is a kind of this is a theory, framework, model that is just in development. I still feel like I'm kind of scratching the surface on this. It's kind of like what I'm what I'm going to be doing for the next 10, 20 years. So if you have ways to improve it, like reach out and tell me.

>> Awesome. And your newsletter is an exact is exactly that. It's you just I don't know how often you're publishing, but just like, "Cool. Here's like another way to think about this. Here's a wrinkle here." >> Yeah. >> Uh just the idea of calling it physics of startups is is is an awesome idea. >> Thanks. >> So so we'll point people to the newsletter. Uh Rob, thank you so much for being here. >> Thank you. Bye, everyone.

>> Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.