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

Rob Snyder is the author of The Power of Pull and writes the newsletter The Physics of Startups. He has advised more than 50 startups on growing from zero to $1 million in ARR, drawing on his own experience as a founder who spent two years pushing a product the market didn’t want before accidentally stumbling onto what actually works. In this episode, we walk step by step through his framework for finding product-market fit, from coming up with an idea to closing your first handful of deals. We discuss: 1. The PULL framework: Project, Unavoidable, List of options, Limitations 2. Where the best startup ideas come from 3. Tactics for cold outreach and running your first sales call 4. Why Rob advises against design partners 5. Goblin mode: what to do when nothing is working 6. How to apply the PULL framework inside larger companies — Brought to you by: WorkOS https://workos.com/lenny—Make your app enterprise-ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more DX https://getdx.com/?utm_source=lenny&utm_medium=sponsorship&utm_campaign=q42026—Engineering intelligence for the AI era — Where to find Rob Snyder: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rsnyder1 • Newsletter: https://thephysicsofstartups.substack.com • Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Cic56E1UEbU25P3v14Vkq • Website: https://robsnyder.org — Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Rob Snyder (01:13) The PULL framework: what makes customers buy (07:30) The “PULL” acronym (09:44) How Jump found pull with financial advisors (13:53) Why pull is discovered, not created (16:10) Selling to a person, not a company (17:13) Finding startup ideas through firsthand experience (22:34) Testing your pull hypothesis with two slides (26:41) Recognizing real buying intent (27:24) When solving your own problem works (29:02) The Hail Mary question that can unlock a pivot (31:01) Common traps to avoid (32:50) Quick recap (34:46) Landing your first customer conversations (39:18) Outreach benchmarks and diagnosing what isn’t working (41:27) How to run your first sales call (46:56) Successful pitch tactics (49:59) Does your product need to be 10 times better? (54:08) Closing the deal (01:00:41) Using the PULL framework to set pricing (01:02:22) Revising your hypothesis and going into goblin mode (01:06:56) Designing onboarding to make customers stay (01:09:28) What churn can teach you about your ideal customer (01:11:37) Building a repeatable case study factory (01:16:15) Applying the framework inside established companies (01:20:03) Lightning round and final thoughts — Referenced: • The PULL framework: https://thephysicsofstartups.substack.com/p/the-pull-framework • The ultimate guide to JTBD | Bob Moesta (co-creator of the framework): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-ultimate-guide-to-jtbd-bob-moesta • How to find work you love | Bob Moesta (Jobs-to-be-Done co-creator, author of “Job Moves”): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-find-work-you-love-bob-moesta • Jump: https://jump.ai • Linear’s secret to building beloved B2B products | Nan Yu (Head of Product): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/linears-secret-to-building-beloved-b2b-products-nan-yu • Josh Woodward on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshwoodward/ • Clearly AI: https://clearly-ai.com • Emily Choi-Greene on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilycg • Spanx: https://spanx.com • Floodgate: https://www.floodgate.com • Snoop Dogg on X: https://x.com/SnoopDogg • Jira: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira • Linear: https://linear.app • “Sell the alpha, not the feature”: The enterprise sales playbook for $1M to $10M ARR | Jen Abel: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-enterprise-sales-playbook-1m-to-10m-arr • How to close $100K+ enterprise deals, step by step | Jen Abel: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-close-100k-1m-deals-step-by • Teero: https://www.teero.com • A guide for finding product-market fit in B2B: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/finding-product-market-fit • Retention is the hard part: https://thephysicsofstartups.substack.com/p/retention-is-the-hard-part • Mark Roberge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markroberge/ • Ali Ghodsi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alighodsi/ • Pride and Prejudice: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0414387 • Penguins of Madagascar: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1911658 • Muse: https://muse.ai • Lessons from 1,000+ YC startups: Resilience, tar pit ideas, pivoting, more | Dalton Caldwell (Y Combinator, Managing Director): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/lessons-from-1000-yc-startups • Lemlist: https://www.lemlist.com — Recommended books: • The Power of Pull: What You Need to Know About Customer Demand to Build a Successful Startup (and Why Most Founders Get It Wrong): https://www.amazon.com/Power-Pull-Customer-Successful-Founders/dp/1541705955 • The Nature of Order, Book One: The Phenomenon of Life: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BHLGZHHD • The Nature of Order, Book Two: The Process of Creating Life: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe: https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Order-Book-Two-Creating-ebook/dp/B0F2SMKQT8 • The Nature of Order, Book Three: A Vision of a Living World: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F2SS62LG • The Nature of Order, Book Four: The Luminous Ground: https://www.amazon.com/Luminous-Ground-Building-Alexander-Christopher/dp/B00CB5JTI6 — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. — Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. To hear more, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com https://www.lennysnewsletter.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=show-notes-no-free-preview-language

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  How can people use this framework to help them come up with ideas that are more likely to actually be successful?

• 0:18Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  You have this idea of the hail Mary approach?

• 0:37Speaker 00

  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 might have something. Let's see if it repeats.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Say you actually found something, something that is pulling and people are like, I need this now. What comes next?

• 1:07Speaker 00

  Retention is super important and it's not obvious. And so what I recommend is.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Rob, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

• 1:19Speaker 00

  Hello, thank you.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  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. 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, you need to get Rob on the podcast. I've 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 gotta find out. And so I reached out and that's how this came to be. Essentially what you've written in this book and what you do in your newsletter

• 2:01Speaker 01

  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 advice comes from.

• 2:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I did not expect to be writing a book or doing anything like this. 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 just 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.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  I love that. I'm going to read a couple of 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'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 his 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 found I'm normalizing

• 3:36Speaker 01

  just how painful, lonely, weird it is to go through finding product market fit. Finally, we ran into the same zero to one traps Rob describes, building based on prospects that they wanted rather than what actually got them to say yes.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  Wow. You have very nice people in your community. That's, that's.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  That's super kind.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  That's true. That's true. All right, anyway, so there you go. Just to give people, okay, let's pay attention. Okay, give us an overview of the pull framework.

• 4:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the pull framework describes a person who will pull your product out of your hands. Someone, someone who's weird not to buy your product. So we like know what pull feels like. It's the thing that's written about with startups. You know, it's the thing, startups that take up. 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 would be weird not to buy. The question is just like, what causes somebody to pull a product out of your hands?

• 4:53Speaker 00

  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 two 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.

• 5:34Speaker 00

  It, because I realized that people can basically just say, uh, yeah, like great, this, you know, it's 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.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  And the pull framework is just an acronym for that.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Repli, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, SCIM, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand up market ends up working with WorkOS. And that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer

• 7:04Speaker 01

  or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise-ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise-ready today. Let's talk it through the acronym of pull, because that goes deeper into this idea.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, so acronym P U L L. There's a 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, you know, Bob Moesta, you've had him on, he's amazing. 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 a 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.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  And the second L is limitations. Why are those options not good enough for getting me, getting my project done?

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Amazing. So the first two are really important there. And I'm, it's interesting, the 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.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Why are the second two so important? This idea of other options and why those are not working?

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you can, you can imagine a case where like a product team, for example, 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. That'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 blocked.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  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? I basically use this as a template. It's like a Mad Libs-y thing where it's just like P U L L and you fill it out. So let's go, give us an example.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  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 found pull, tried to sell 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 jig.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  So they have to take those notes, but when they're taking 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 not, not a fun thing. So the list of options they considered to minimize the amount of time were, you know, like a generic AI note taker, you're, you're kind of. There's a list of all of those out there. But those AI note takers were not good enough because they didn't integrate with the financial advisors 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.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  And so when Jump showed up and found that pull, 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.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Amazing. That's a great testimonial to stick on their website.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Okay, what would be like a bad version of this? Like, what would it look like if it wasn't, if there wasn't pull?

• 11:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, so a 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 does it, there's not, the force isn't there. They're fine.

• 12:24Speaker 01

  That, and avoid a little piece, I see why that is so important. And this is example, basically, basically, you need all four here.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  So that's a good lesson here is all four need to exist for real pull. In the first example, that to do, to me, 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 the, or is the, was this like specifically every financial advisor's to do list?

• 12:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it was 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.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  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 Ls are good enough, they're gonna say, yeah, that's exactly what we're doing right now. And working with Claude Code on it, we're gonna figure it out.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:05Speaker 00

  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.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  That feels very familiar, just trying to convince people, look, this is so great. It's gonna solve so many of your problems. 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.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Something else you talk about, you mentioned this earlier, this idea that 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.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 15:58Speaker 00

  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.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Those conversations sound very familiar.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  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?

• 16:20Speaker 00

  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, Genable 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.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  That is really useful. So it's not like SpaceX needs this, it's like, say, Jen.

• 16:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Needs this. And you're saying that that's often a mistake people make, they don't think about the specific person with this need.

• 16:59Speaker 00

  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 is specifically trying to do X, Y, and Z.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  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 I want to 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.

• 17:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  How, how can people use this framework to help them come up with ideas that are more likely to actually be successful?

• 17:38Speaker 00

  As a founder, I have a notebook of ideas that are all like, what if we built an API for APIs kind of thing? Like, there, there are all these like product ideas. And the product ideas all sound unhinged. And so I can never tell between product ideas, 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, who is 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.

• 18:19Speaker 00

  And so I'm gonna go and talk to them and see, do they wanna, 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?

• 19:02Speaker 00

  No, you would go all out. You'd go in person. I have like a couple of 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. And they've either built something that they would buy themselves, or they've like embedded with people to find that like, that moment when someone will, is like, trying to do something and stuck.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Amazing. 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, and how would you find a problem that is likely to be a real, I guess, have real pull? And what I'm hearing here is, get like in the weeds, get your hands dirty, like get it. The way, this reminds me of a quote, um, Non, who was the, had a 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, I want to feel the pain of the person the same way they feel the pain.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  And what you're saying is the way to do that is get in there with people building things. Is there an example of, of, of doing that?

• 20:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, so a friend from, 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 wrote 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.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  What am I, what is the pull here? 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 and 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 firsthand experience is, is what you, what you should do there.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Awesome. So like live it yourself and.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  Live it.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  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. Why do you think that is so important approaching it this way?

• 21:45Speaker 00

  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. And it wasn't something that, like it, it was something he saw only by observing where it's unclear that that would have emerged in an interview either. But I'd say 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.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  And so if you don't have firsthand experience, how are you going to make the thousands of decisions it takes to actually build something that serves them?

• 22:33Speaker 01

  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, you call that the pull hypothesis. Is that right?

• 22:44Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  So talk about that, just like, say you have this insight and I'm curious what he actually found with this physical therapy business and how to kind of start to think about it through the pull framework.

• 22:52Speaker 00

  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 and L. I can't actually remember what it was unavoidable for XYZ reasons. And 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 said, 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. Would you buy something if I helped you get this done? Yeah, totally. Okay, great.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  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.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  What is it that he showed this company is that this, the four bullet points with, here's the project, here's why it's unavoidable or is something else?

• 23:57Speaker 00

  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 because no one's going to understand it. You could 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, 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.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  We could offer that for XYZ 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?

• 24:44Speaker 01

  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. 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 the 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 pupils dilate? What do you look for?

• 25:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, you look for a couple of 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.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  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? It's just not worth your life force going after.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  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. I just had Josh Woodward on the podcast, head of Google Labs, and he's similarly like, you see a twinkle in their eyes and their eyes just light up. And it's so interesting that that's a sign of a pull.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  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?

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Is what's, is there like a limb, like a, you know, there's like the, I will buy this idea, 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?

• 26:55Speaker 00

  So I call it like a pull shaped action, not a good, good 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.

• 27:24Speaker 01

  Like the urgency of like, I need this now. There's always this advice of solve your own problem, which is different from what you described. Is that a path you recommend or would you recommend against that?

• 27:34Speaker 00

  So a friend's, so like Emily, 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, a hundred percent. 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.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  I ran into this problem, but if I looked myself in the mirror, I wouldn't have said, yeah, buy this right now.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Along those lines, is this advice mostly for B to B SaaS sort of software? Or is this applicable to say consumer app?

• 28:27Speaker 00

  So I am mostly in the B to B 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, um, like selling one-on-one with people, seeing how they reacted to figure out all the different pieces of, of what became specs.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and she solved her own problem famously.

• 28:52Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Just 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 was going to an event. So that's, that's a cool example. You have this, we're going to talk more about this, but you have this idea of the hail Mary approach. Talk about that.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  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, uh, uh, 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.

• 29:48Speaker 00

  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.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  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.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  That's awesome. So the advice here is just sometimes feel free to just ask, what problem can we solve for you?

• 30:16Speaker 00

  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. 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 I can help. Then it kind of changes your orientation towards sales.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  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. 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 traps people fall into when they're coming up with ideas?

• 31:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, infinite. But the, 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 prime time, 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, in hopefully a couple of weeks instead of, you know, months or not. But 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.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  You're also not a fan of design, design partners?

• 32:01Speaker 00

  Oh, no.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Which is, okay, same work, because this is typically very standard advice to find design partners.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. The, I don't know, maybe in some contexts, it's helpful. I have yet to see it 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 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.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  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 to 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, to describe this idea, I think it was a VC floodgate that uses this. You're basically looking for an earned secret.

• 33:21Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  And your advice here is the way to find that earned secret, either it's, you have lived it at a company, say Amazon, you 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.

• 33:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. And you get, like, the method kind of doesn't matter. It might come to you in an ayahuasca retreat. Like, 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.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  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?

• 34:06Speaker 00

  I would say 10% own experience, 90% going and getting firsthand, 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. But most of them actually go and do the thing firsthand.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  And then what percentage ayahuasca retreat? And there's no room for that.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  100%. That's, that's mandatory as part of, of me advising you.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  That's the, the pull hypothesis. Okay, sweet. Okay. So say, at this point, you've got a pull hypothesis. There's 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 running the call. But before we get there, just like finding people to talk to.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  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 intrus, 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

• 35:46Speaker 00

  like, leave me alone. And so I call it a 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, one of the startups that I helped, their message was, 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

• 36:28Speaker 00

  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.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  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?

• 36:55Speaker 00

  There's, there's been a variety of ones that I've seen. Random ones that are like, hey, I dropped out of my PhD and I'm now working on something for content marketers, right? Like, something, something that's just kind of interesting enough there, that's not super magical. You can have, there's a variety of different things I've seen from, 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 interesting, open to chat. And so it's finding something interesting that's like worth a conversation with them. Yeah. What I'd say is, it really

• 37:38Speaker 00

  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. We'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 doing, working on this kind of interesting thing. Thought you might find it interesting. Would you be open to chat?

• 38:06Speaker 01

  An implicit element of this is keep it very short. Sounds like it's just like a sentence or two.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  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?

• 38:21Speaker 00

  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.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  All the examples you shared are very simple and don't have anything to do with them. And just say something interesting, basically. And what you, what you don't recommend is, is basically, yeah, the idea, you're not trying to sell them immediately, you just want to have a call.

• 39:10Speaker 00

  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.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Okay. How many emails slash LinkedIn posts should you start with? Say, you're just getting started to try to find some calls?

• 39:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I tend to start on LinkedIn because the kind of person to 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. 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

• 40:11Speaker 00

  say, yeah, sure, why not?

• 40:13Speaker 01

  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 some more interesting.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  It's, it's, it could be your profile. If people aren't accepting your request, 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 deadening 30 to 40% accepts, and then people aren't replying.

• 40:37Speaker 01

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• 41:27Speaker 01

  So say you've landed a call and you're gonna do a sales call, say your first one. What is your advice for doing a great job on that, on the sales call?

• 41:37Speaker 00

  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, uh, the theory behind a sales call is, again, it's like, if you have pull, you're gonna 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 ant. No, it's just if you have pull, you're gonna convince me to let you buy. And so I approached 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

• 42:21Speaker 00

  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. Whenever, whenever 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 of 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. 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.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  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 pull by saying, great, okay, before we get to those items on your, you know, on our agenda, 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.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  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?

• 43:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. So this is almost always a 30 minute call on the calendar. Just, um, I've found 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.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  I guess, cause I'm thinking about the gen conversation I had and heard vices wait to do the demo. But that's an enterprise sales sort of product, not like an early stage, just pull hypothesis phases.

• 44:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally, totally.

• 44:20Speaker 01

  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?

• 44:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, so it's kind of, you're able to surface pull. Or you're able to say, okay, you don't have pull at all. Help me understand why this isn't relevant to you. What is? And so you come away with a, either filled out pull framework of, okay, I understand this person's pull and they are trying to pull. Or you understand why they don't have pull.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  How many of these calls should you do before you're like, okay, there's no pull here. Time to move on.

• 44:56Speaker 00

  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, and 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 at a startup, 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. 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 in defense, the person's like, holy, are you serious?

• 45:41Speaker 00

  And they're like, okay, maybe there's something here. And they changed their pull hypothesis.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think it's the thinking of it as we're selling to learn, not really to, to like push something. Yeah, not, not to push. We're, we're gonna 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've, might have something. Let's see if it repeats.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  The whole idea of calling this pull is so smart because you always hear product market fit is you're feeling pull. You're feeling pulled as boulders pulling you down. The wind is pushing you. And so not only is it this acronym of what you look for, but it's this reminder, what you're looking for is pull, something pulling.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  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.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  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?

• 47:03Speaker 00

  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, um, 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. So you have something about pull there. You've kind of pulled that out of them. They, they've described that. And so the kind of interesting thing is that once you have pull, your pitch is like quite simple. 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.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  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 on to something.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  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, or are there, what are their alternatives and kind of thinking through all that?

• 48:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, those are like, actually the questions I will ask too, which is like, 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. 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.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  And they're filling it out live and it's like, I don't think I have the 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?

• 49:26Speaker 01

  And you're like scared to almost ask, you're like, oh no, it's not gonna work.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  Oh, and the scariest one is to say, well, what have you, I'm sure you've looked into other options. Are they good enough? Or, and, uh, to hear that one, uh, 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.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  And just spending years of your life trying to make it work.

• 49:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. There's a reason I look like I'm 60 and I'm 35, right? Like, don't push.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  You look great, Rob. You look great.

• 49:56Speaker 00

  Filters.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Oh, man. So this 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 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 gonna buy it now is really high. And the idea here of this framework is to get over that hump.

• 50:25Speaker 00

  Well, it's to find the people for whom 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.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  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?

• 50:57Speaker 00

  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, 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?

• 51:28Speaker 01

  So I think about a company like Linear, who competes with Jira. I don't know if you know, do you know Linear?

• 51:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  So just curious if it applies through this framework. So in my understanding, Linear wins over Jira often because the experience is just better. It's just like a beautiful, smooth, you know, well crafted 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? Is there something else going on there?

• 51:59Speaker 00

  Again, if we use the pull framework to to analyze that situation, what would have to be true is there's a certain kind of person who is trying to do their issue tracking, but like, they are blocked from, 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 gonna crush it. And like, try that in HR software. And then I tried

• 52:42Speaker 00

  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're still on Coolball or whatever it is. So it wasn't relevant there. But again, the pull theory would say that basically, in the case of Jira versus Linear, that there was a kind of person who was kind of blocked by Jira's experience.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  And I imagine the stronger the pull, the faster all this stuff happens and grows. I know Linear took them a long time to get people using it, to trust it, to switch. And so maybe the pull, because of, maybe there wasn't as much of that blocking and it was more of just like, okay, I can just move faster, be happier. It took longer. Is that, do you find that just like, the stronger the pull, the faster the company grows?

• 53:29Speaker 00

  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. 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, two weeks. And it's just like, that thing did, when I was growing up, enterprise deals took 18 months. Like, what, what the heck?

• 54:06Speaker 01

  When I was growing up. I like that. Okay, so let's move on to the next step. So at this point, we, you had your first sales call. I imagine the next step is closing the deal. And it's interesting because 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?

• 54:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's 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 examples of this, so the pharma company that I mentioned earlier, the company selling into pharma, he showed up and just threw a hail Mary 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, that looks like the current research you're getting, but kind of, I don't know, like, it's just better in these

• 55:05Speaker 00

  kinds of ways. Is that roughly right? And the exec was like, yes, that's exactly. And so the founder is like, okay, let's do this. What if I come back to you in a couple of days with a kind of mockup 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 in five codes, 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, 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.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  Okay, tell me more about this price talk track.

• 55:51Speaker 00

  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 costs of the alternatives? So the Ls, so what's the value of getting this market research faster? Or what is the cost you're currently spending with your, 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

• 56:34Speaker 00

  of gives a frame on price that, that makes it intuitive to your potential customers.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Awesome. Okay. 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. So we've spent a lot of time, I think, on the fit, the project management. Is there anything there important to talk about?

• 56:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is, you did a great episode with Jen, a great couple of 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

• 57:38Speaker 00

  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 steps in the sales process.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  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. At this point, a lot of people would create basically design partnership arrangements where they're like, okay, cool, we'll build this with you. We'll figure it out as we go. We won't charge you. Per your earlier point, you are not into design partnerships. I imagine your advice here is just like, sell it directly. Don't try to give them to, for free. Don't set up some kind of partnership thing.

• 58:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. Why, well, why shoot yourself in the foot?

• 58:43Speaker 01

  And again, the reason not to is because it just, you find that doesn't lead to the best, to stuff that actually sells and works, building this kind of design partnership relationship.

• 58:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, if they're like, it basically takes something from, I need to solve this right now. So like, okay, now I'm helping you build your product? Like, where, what are we doing here? So 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.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Awesome. Okay, that totally makes sense. Like, if there's pull, just go with it.

• 59:15Speaker 00

  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 gonna have an AI product manager who can do X, Y, 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.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  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 the fear is you never actually get to a place where you can automate it and you're just definitely 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?

• 1:00:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, it definitely has downsides, right? You definitely can get stuck in a kind of service businesses, kind of, but everything has downsides.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  Awesome. Yeah. And the idea is AI kind of does more and more of this 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, going back to price real quick. Classically, founders are afraid to ask for big numbers and throw out, you know, high prices, knowing that the stuff changes and you'll learn as you go. Any advice for that first price pitch of what number to throw out?

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  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 set their first deal as 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.

• 1:01:38Speaker 00

  And so you'd say, when we talk to others, the way they've, 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've heard from others as how they think about this and letting them, them throw up on that.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  Throw up on that. I like that. I know this case study concept 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. 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?

• 1:02:31Speaker 00

  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 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?

• 1:03:15Speaker 00

  And then you craft a new hypothesis and run it again.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Got it. And 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 this stage?

• 1:03:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've seen like maybe once or twice where it was there from the beginning. And that's magical. Like you feel like a hero when you, when you get it right the first time. A lot of times it is, it is like we're so wrong and backwards that we don't know. And so you just ask a hail Mary a couple of times and that gets you on the right path. Or you like do something crazy where a friend just 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, or 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.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  Say more about Goblin Mode. This is amazing.

• 1:04:14Speaker 00

  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-

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  And this is a good thing or not a good thing?

• 1:04:25Speaker 00

  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 a 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. Others like me who are getting old, like I can, I can pull this out once in a while.

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  Get that Goblin Mode out sometimes. So the idea there is, and you're saying this sometime, this can work, just like going nuts, just like going talking to everyone, looking for these earned secrets.

• 1:05:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. And one example of this, like it's kind of a crazy example, but a friend's building a company called Tiro, 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.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Amazing. Okay. So say you do a couple of sales calls, say you do five, is that, is that kind of the idea to 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?

• 1:05:56Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  And the hail Mary question is just like, what is there anything that we can do to, yeah, right now that is a problem on your to-do list?

• 1:06:10Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:06:24Speaker 01

  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. Do five calls roughly, get a sense as they're pull or not. If there's not pull, throw out some hail Mary questions, maybe answer Goblin Mode to look for something. Come up with another pull hypothesis, do five more calls and repeat until you're like, oh, wow, we've got this pull.

• 1:06:52Speaker 00

  Yep. And then you have a business.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  There we go. Off to the races. Okay. So say you've 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?

• 1:07:12Speaker 00

  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 the 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 like 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're 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?

• 1:07:57Speaker 00

  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 Rubers has this kind of leading indicator of retention, which for Slack was like you've sent 10,000 messages or a thousand messages in your first X amount of time. If you hit that, it's like, it'd be weird if you churned. 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, it would be weird if they churned.

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  And so we just designed the onboarding process to that. And so what I recommend is, once you have a couple of people who are saying yes, don't just like throw the product over and like send them a login and pray, go deliver firsthand 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.

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  I love how your mind works, where it's 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, 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 did, but it's not working. Anything there, just like, what's a sign at this stage? Okay, maybe it's not working versus it is.

• 1:09:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, so if everybody's churning, the, it is unacceptable for you to not figure out why. And so 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. 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 customers are churning. First of all, I'm sorry, it sucks. It really, you know, you wake up at 4:00 AM every morning just sweating. But in that, you often can figure out why.

• 1:10:26Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  There's no point at which like, okay, we figured it out. We're going to be a massive success. Like every moment of the startup journey is a uncertain moment. But what's great about this process so far is every step you get, it's more and more certain. There's something here at least. And then there's like the in forever 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 he said something like, even at 100 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 like its own topic of just like.

• 1:11:26Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just kind of one step at a time. And so, so in this conversation, the final step in my mind is this idea you have of this 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.

• 1:11:53Speaker 00

  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 a useful way to talk about this yet. So just pre-warning, I think is the most important thing 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.

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  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

• 1:13:21Speaker 00

  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 step 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 is 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.

• 1:14:06Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  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're almost like working backwards from what's the case study going to be of this company we're talking to? 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 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 the idea is just like, create like consistent, repeatable case studies that you'll later be able to share.

• 1:15:03Speaker 00

  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. And they said, 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 it might not be a good fit. And you can use it for qualification, disqualification, and for people to understand what you do.

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  That's, that's funny. There's this whole theme now of building software factories where, you know, product build itself. But there's a really another version of a factory you're building, which is even the broader version of just the sales, the user, the case study factory.

• 1:15:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, we don't make software here. We make case studies.

• 1:15:48Speaker 01

  So is that, is that, is that your advice? Just like, think of it that way?

• 1:15:51Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  Like we make, we make case studies here. Yeah, that'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 sales go to market work.

• 1:16:02Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  Amazing. Okay. There's a couple of things I want to touch on because this is the end of the process, basically.

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  There's a few things I want to touch on that came out 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 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.

• 1:16:34Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:17:12Speaker 00

  Yep. And 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.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  I see.

• 1:17:22Speaker 00

  Offer.

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  Awesome. Okay. Another big question that came out of the community is from an external perspective, this feels like this 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. 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.

• 1:17:46Speaker 00

  I'm helping a couple of 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 because they're going to try to upsell them. And they are actually selling new features before they've built them. Another example at, at existing companies is, 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

• 1:18:29Speaker 00

  could do that project for them, all worked. All the ones they whiteboarded never worked.

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  So the idea here is you have a product, you're hearing. You're basically 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 poll, 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.

• 1:19:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, ideally, not always the case. There are people who are doing zero to one stuff, but I just recommend if you're 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.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  Awesome. And then again, if things aren't working, there's this idea you should have 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.

• 1:19:38Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah. Hail Mary, Goblin Mode, like, all of these things are just your brake class in case of emergency. Time is really valuable and like staying 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.

• 1:20:04Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:20:14Speaker 00

  Hopefully, what's come across is kind of how simple this is. Pull 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 and think less in that process, it will get you there.

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  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 here to help you save a lot of pain and suffering and building and be kind of being disillusioned, not disillusioned, miss, feeling like there's something there wasting a lot of your life doing something that's not going to work.

• 1:21:05Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  At least I'm not giving you a spoon, meaning.

• 1:21:19Speaker 00

  For the beach, right? Like.

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  Oh, I see. You're not. Oh, I see. They have a metal detector versus looking through all the sand with a spoon. Wow. I love that metaphor. And then sometimes you may find a thing that, and then you realize it's not worth anything. 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?

• 1:21:42Speaker 00

  Let's do it.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  First question, what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

• 1:21:49Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh. The, my favorite one is the four-volume Nature of Order series by Christopher Alexander. It's a book on architecture, a series of books on architecture, best thing ever.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  Never heard that recommendation before. Those are my favorite. Favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed?

• 1:22:07Speaker 00

  I have two favorite movies that we watch repeatedly. One is the pride, the most recent Pride and Prejudice. And the second is the Penguins of Madagascar movie. Don't know why. We're in both ends of the spectrum there.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  Favorite or most interesting AI product that you recently discovered or use or love?

• 1:22:26Speaker 00

  I've been using Muse and it's like, if it works for me, it can work for anyone.

• 1:22:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, very hot right now.

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  Amazing. Okay. Favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life?

• 1:22:43Speaker 00

  Life is what you make of it.

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  So true. Final question, I'm curious to get your thoughts on this. So there's this idea of tar pit ideas. 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 doesn't work. Is there, are there any target ideas you just find people keep coming to and you're like, don't do that. It's not going to work.

• 1:23:15Speaker 00

  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. Lemless 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, they've already, they've already done that thing. And so 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?

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:24:09Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  And it's better than all the alternatives. 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.

• 1:24:20Speaker 00

  There are many things, right? You could give me a hundred X better printer for my house and I won't buy it because I don't, I'm not blocked.

• 1:24:28Speaker 01

  That's a great example. Oh, man. Rob, we did it.

• 1:24:33Speaker 00

  We did it. Holy cow.

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  Did it. Holy cow. Okay. How can listeners be useful to you? That's our final question.

• 1:24:40Speaker 00

  Oh, gosh. If you like the framework, use it, tell other people about it. Check out the book if it's useful and 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. This is 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.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  Awesome. And your newsletter is exactly that, is 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.

• 1:25:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  Just the idea of calling it physics of startups is, is an awesome idea. So, so we'll point people to the newsletter. Rob, thank you so much for being here.

• 1:25:21Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:25:22Speaker 01

  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.