Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - An 86-minute guide to finding PMF | Rob Snyder (Author, The Power of Pull)

Starting point is 00:00:00 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. How can people use this framework to help them come up with ideas that are more likely to actually be successful? One of the main mistakes people make is thinking that Pull is a thing that a company has. It's a thing a person has. You're not selling to SpaceX. You're selling to the head of legal at SpaceX who has a project on her to-do list that they can't do themselves. You have this idea of the Hail Mary approach. You're talking with people and they're like, oh, my gosh, this is exactly what I need.

Starting point is 00:00:40 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.

Starting point is 00:01:01 Say you actually found something, something that is pulling and people are like, I need this now. What comes next? Retention is super important and it's not obvious. And so what I recommend is... Rob, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Hello, thank you. You are the author of The Power of Pull. I've got the book right here.

Starting point is 00:01:25 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 have been reading his book and it's extremely useful to what I've been doing. And these are some founders, some product people. And I'm just like, well, who is this guy?

Starting point is 00:01:53 I got to 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 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:02:42 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 so I've just gotten strangely obsessed with doing zero to one as many times as possible. I love that. I'm going to read a couple quotes actually from my community to reinforce the things you just said of 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.

Starting point is 00:03:08 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, if I'm normalizing, 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 a prospect said they wanted rather than we actually got them to say yes.

Starting point is 00:03:53 Wow. You're very nice people in your community. That's true. That's super kind. That's true. That's true. All right. Anyway, so there you go.

Starting point is 00:04:02 Just to give people, okay, let's pay attention. Okay, give us an overview of the pull framework. Yeah, so the pull framework describes a person who will pull your product out of your hands. Someone who's weird not to buy your product. So we like, know what pull feel. like it's the thing that's written about with startups you know it's the thing you startups that take up you your newsletter had insane 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

Starting point is 00:04:38 them to buy and they're it's like kind of maybe working and so poll 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 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. This thing's going to the moon.

Starting point is 00:05:15 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 it um because 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 priority 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

Starting point is 00:06:01 with their existing tools, methods, or options. In that case, they're like a coiled spring, right, trying to do something stuck, and you show up and just offer something that gets them unstuck, that helps them get that priority done. That's when they rip it out of your hands. And the pull framework is just an acronym for that. This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor WorkOS. What to OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common?

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Starting point is 00:07:01 stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer 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 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 P-Pol, because that goes deeper into this idea. Yeah, so acronym P-U-L-L, there's a P-P project. They have a project on their to-do list.

Starting point is 00:07:42 You can think of a project like a job to be done. It's, you know, Bob Mesto, 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. You 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. And the second L is limitations. Why are those options not good enough for getting me, getting my project done? Amazing. So the first two are really important there. And it's interesting the second to feel less

Starting point is 00:08:34 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 and fire problem very concretely defined. Here's what hair on fire looks like. I have like a to do my boss is waiting for me to do and it needs to happen now. It's not just like a general thing that I need to solve. Yes. Why are the second two so important this idea of other options and why those are not working? Yeah. So you can you can imagine a case where like a product team for example, 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

Starting point is 00:09:14 to-do list. But they're going to do it themselves. So they don't need anything. They won't buy anything unless 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 kind of category leader. I can do it with whatever tool is out there. It has to be something where my existing options are not good enough. So I am like stuck. I'm blocked. Let's do an example to make this even more real.

Starting point is 00:09:46 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 math libsy thing where it's just like P-U-L and you fill it out. So let's go. Give us an example. Yeah. So my friends are at a company called Jump, which is an AI note taker for financial advisors. Very interesting space. They did the same thing I did, by the way.

Starting point is 00:10:06 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 jail. So they have to take those notes, but when they're taking the notes, they don't want to be

Starting point is 00:10:41 doing that. And so they want to minimize the amount of time because they don't enjoy doing that. This is just not a fun thing. So the list of options they considered to minimize the amount of time were like a generic AI note taker. 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 really couldn't use. 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, this must be how Alexander Graham Bell felt when he invented the telephone.

Starting point is 00:11:29 Like, that's a weird thing to say about a product for financial advisors. Amazing. That's a great testimonial to stick on their website. Yeah. Okay, what would be like a bad version of this? Like, what would it look like if it wasn't, if there wasn't Paul? Yeah, so a fun conversation with the jump team about they said, okay, cool, financial advisors. They have this project.

Starting point is 00:11:50 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 minutes. 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,

Starting point is 00:12:16 which they were already doing. And so you can see the framework kind of doesn't fill out for them. Or it doesn't, there's not, the force isn't there. They're fine. That an avoidal piece, I see why that is so important. And this is an example, basically, basically you need all four here. Yes.

Starting point is 00:12:31 So that's a good lesson here is all four need to exist for real pull. In the first example that you do, to me doesn't feel like it's like a to-do that 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? Or was this like specifically at every financial advisor's to-do list? Yeah. So it was a thing that I wouldn't say it's like actually something they wrote down on their

Starting point is 00:12:57 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 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.

Starting point is 00:13:19 Got it. And so if a founder of product team is listening to this and they're struggling with their product, it's probably one of these four is not there. Yeah, you need all four at once. If you find P without you and in the L's, 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.

Starting point is 00:13:41 What they'll do is they'll complain and they won't buy. If they have P and you, but their Ls are good enough, they're going to say, yeah, that's exactly what we're doing right now. And working with Claude Code on it, we're going to figure it out. Something along these lines that you talk about is that this poll 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 poll and discovering it. Talk a bit about that. Yeah, this was super liberating when I like realized this because I always thought that I was

Starting point is 00:14:11 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 poll, this project on their to-do list exists before and independent of me, which means I just have to go out there and find it. I don't have to convince people to have pull. And it's like, I haven't quite figured out how to do that, but I think it's very, very hard to do if it's possible at all. That feels very familiar, just trying to convince people. Look, this is so great. It's going to solve so many of your problems. And I love these idea. I just love how very specific and concrete it makes all of these

Starting point is 00:14:55 general pieces of advice around finding product market fit coming up with ideas. It just tells you exactly here's what it looks like. 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. It's like, it's weird. Why aren't you buying this? Talk a bit about that. Most people, most of the time are like fine. It would be weird if they bought our product, given what's on their to-do list, given what they have, given their options. 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.

Starting point is 00:15:34 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 we get onboard? 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.

Starting point is 00:15:54 that's super interesting. That's totally the future of our industry. Wow, I can see how that would save us so much money. But they're not saying, I need this right now. And that's how you know they actually have pull. Those conversations sound very familiar. Okay. So before we get into the kind of the whole journey of the startup process and how you can use this framework in that journey, anything else around just the general idea of the pull framework that's important to share. One of the main mistakes people make is thinking that pull is a, thing that a company has. It's a thing a person has. Even if you're selling enterprise software, you're selling not to the company. You're not selling to SpaceX. You're selling to,

Starting point is 00:16:35 just going to your Gen Able conversation. You're selling to like the head of legal at SpaceX, who has a project on her to-do list that they can't do themselves. That is really useful. So it's not like SpaceX needs this. It's like, say, Jen. Yes. 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. Yeah, yeah. 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. 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'm talking about. 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. How can people use

Starting point is 00:17:33 this framework to help them come up with ideas that are more likely to actually be successful? 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 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 thing that's upstream of your product idea that says, I believe there is a person who is trying to do X right now, and 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. And so I'm,

Starting point is 00:18:20 going to go and talk to them and see, do they want to, do they try to buy from me even before we have a product? And so for me, the, the idea of the, the, um, the poll framework is, is to come up with a hypothesis of who has poll and then go and test that. And then the question becomes, okay, how do you find this poll idea, this poll hypothesis? What do you do for that? I have some fairly strong opinions on this. Like, I don't think we take this stage seriously enough. Like, if your life depended on it, how would, would you, would you be doing like 10 customer interviews for like 30 minutes on Zoom? No, you would go all out. You'd go in person. I have like a couple stories of friends who have done crazy things to go and like do the job with the potential customer to

Starting point is 00:19:15 feel it firsthand, to find that poll 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 is like trying to do something in stock. Amazing. So the advice here is don't sit around and brainstorm. Don't just look for big markets and figure out where there might be something massive. What you're saying here is almost like this lens of if your life dependent on and how would you find a problem that is likely to be a real.

Starting point is 00:19:48 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, non, who is the head of product that linear. Now he just went to Open AI. Described what he looks for when he's trying to find opportunities. He describes it, I want to feel the pain of the person the same way they feel the pain. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:20:10 Yeah. And what you're saying is the way to do that is get in there with people building things. Is there an example of doing that? Yeah. So a friend from school, he had no idea what he wanted to build. He had no product idea. He didn't have my notebook. He didn't have any of that.

Starting point is 00:20:27 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.

Starting point is 00:20:57 And he went and spent days with them. We loved them. They loved him. And it was like, okay, cool. What am I? What is the pole here? What should I do? And so he washed over their shoulder days on end.

Starting point is 00:21:08 He even tried to buy a physical therapy franchise to like was able to see the P&L and was actually considering it. And in that process, he came up with something. Like, wait a second. It looks like you're trying to do X and are stuck there. And so it's firsthand experience is what you should do there. Awesome.

Starting point is 00:21:30 So like live it yourself. Live it. And is the reason you need to do that, 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 for approaching it this way? Yeah, I'd say. I'll give two reasons. One is, you know, these things don't really emerge from a whiteboard.

Starting point is 00:21:53 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 was something he saw only by observing where it's unclear that that would have emerged in an interview either. But Zeta's second thing is like more of a philosophical thing, which is you're building a. company to serve this kind of person. The whole point of building a company is to serve somebody to help them do something. And so if you don't have firsthand experience, how are you going to make the thousands of decisions it takes to actually build something that serves them? And is the idea once you have this insight, say with this physical therapy company,

Starting point is 00:22:37 you write it out through the poll framework to kind of pressure. Is that, you call it the poll hypothesis. Is that right? So talk about that. Just like say you have this insight and 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 poll framework. Yeah. So you then take that and say, okay, this is the kind of idea. I believe this kind of person is this physical therapist is trying to cut some specific cost on their, on their P&L. I can't actually remember what it was. Unavoidable for XYZ reasons. And 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 poll hypothesis. And then what he did next was super important, which was he showed it to that person and said, is this you? The person said, oh my God, yeah, that's exactly the thing.

Starting point is 00:23:27 He said, okay, great. Would you buy something if I helped you get this done? Yeah, totally. Okay, great. And then he said, I need to go talk to five other physical therapists and just make sure this repeats. And then he did that. And they also pulled, which was the really important thing to make sure he wasn't just building a product for one person. What is it that he showed this company is at the four bullet points with here's the project here is why it's unavoidable or is jump mouse?

Starting point is 00:23:57 Yeah, so I actually like recommend having two slides. One slide is basically the pull framework. You don't have to show them the pull framework because no one's going to understand it. You can just say, 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.

Starting point is 00:24:24 So it sounds like you're looking for a way to cut this line item that's faster than a consultant. We could offer that for X, Y, Z. 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 do we move forward? What I love about your stuff is it's like very plug-in-play pragmatic. So we'll actually show a slide of the actual template you have people used to fill this out.

Starting point is 00:24:54 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 options you looked into your 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 to kind of run by people.

Starting point is 00:25:11 And the idea is this is the hypothesis. And what does it look like when there's poll 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? Yeah, you look for a couple things. The thing that really, really matters is that they actually try to buy. They say, okay, cool, how do we get started?

Starting point is 00:25:32 And they will do that. I have a friend who is selling into, he kind of pivoted around for a while. But he knew he found pull when someone. an exec in pharma before he had a product said if you can do that i will pay you right now so okay that's the signal you are looking for what you're looking for as well as 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 ends any of those kinds of things anything that is not like okay how do we

Starting point is 00:26:08 actually move forward on this, it's just not worth your life force going after. It's interesting how much body language and just like the physical experience of getting excited about an idea is 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. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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. Is there like a limit, like a, you know, there's like the I will buy this idea.

Starting point is 00:26:47 Like, they say they will buy it versus a sign they will actually buy it. Is it the body language? Like, how do you know they're serious about it? So I call it like a pull shaped action. Not a good, good term. But a pull shaped action is like, I need this right now. How do, like I am pulling it out of you. How do we move forward right now?

Starting point is 00:27:11 It is not like a, oh, I could totally see us using this in Q4 kind of thing. That's a not pulling towards me. That's a kind of pushing out into the future. Like the urgency of like I need those now. There's always the advice of solve your own problem, which is different from what you described. Is that a path you recommend or would you recommend against it? So a friend's, so like Emily, at a company. called Clearly AI. She was in security engineering at AWS. And she found something there

Starting point is 00:27:45 that she would have paid somebody to solve, but there was nobody out there. And so in that case, it's solve your own problem. Yes, 100%. Where the solve your own problem falls kind of flat a lot of times is it's a thing that you wouldn't have paid somebody to do for you, but you just think should exist, right? If it's, and so you have to be honest with yourself, I have done things where I've built things that like, oh, I think the world needs this. I ran into this problem, but if I looked myself in the mirror, I wouldn't have said, yeah, I'll buy this right now. Along those lines, is this advice mostly for B2B SaaS sort of software, or is this applicable to, say, consumer app? So I am mostly in the B2B space, but I have seen quite a few people,

Starting point is 00:28:32 I've been kind of surprised that a lot of people from the consumer space have used this as well. And someone sent me the story of like Spanx, which was basically, she did the same thing of, of, like, selling one-on-one with people seeing how they reacted to figure out all the different pieces of what became Spanx. Yeah, and she solved their own problem, famous thing. Yes. Just tore off her panty hoser. I think that's the story. I guess she needed it now. I think it was like, yeah, she's going into a bit.

Starting point is 00:28:59 So 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. So the Hail Mary, so we've been talking about the happy path here. You find something. You're talking with people and they're like, oh, my gosh, yeah, this is exactly what I need. A lot of the time, that's not going to happen. You're going to get that kind of lukewarm feel.

Starting point is 00:29:23 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? now, like that you would pay somebody to take off your plate. And that's just an open-ended Hail Mary. I've actually seen quite a few startups totally pivot and take off from the Hail Mary, which has been really interesting. There's one startup. They were trying to sell an applicant tracking system into governments. And they had a call with somebody. And the person was like, yeah, that's kind of interesting. But after the Hail Mary question, yeah, what I'd actually pay you to

Starting point is 00:30:02 solve is this like job description thing right now. And that's, became their first contract. That became their first customer and they've grown super fast since then. That's awesome. So the advice here is just sometimes feel free to just ask what problem can we solve for you. Yeah. And that like leads to how to think about sales. 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 overthinker. Like it just feels like a lot of pressure. And it like I need to convince you to buy. And so that. That question feels uncomfortable. But if you kind of reframe it in your own head of,

Starting point is 00:30:41 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. 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?

Starting point is 00:31:01 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? Yeah, infinite. But the main ones that I have seen that are like really, really brutal are feeling like you need to build it yourself first.

Starting point is 00:31:27 So you come up with an idea and you're like, I don't think this is ready for prime time 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 hopefully a couple weeks instead of, you know, months or not. But you do not, you want to face the cold wind of reality as soon as possible. And so don't delay the customer conversations where you can actually find pull. You're also not a fan of design, design partners. Oh, no.

Starting point is 00:32:02 Which is, okay, same work, because this is typically very standard advice to find design partners. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe in some context it's helpful. I have yet to see it be helpful. What I've seen, and 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.

Starting point is 00:32:27 They never buy. And you realize that all of their feedback was just, just like them playing Steve Jobs. And they're just 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. I love that. Okay.

Starting point is 00:32:50 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 term I've heard to describe this idea, I think it was a VC floodgate that uses this. You're basically looking for an earned secret. Yes.

Starting point is 00:33:23 And your advice here is the way to find that earn secret. Either it's you have lived it at a company, say Amazon gave this AWS example. Or you're on the ground working side by side with the people dealing with it and just looking for our problems that they have. Yeah. Yeah. And the method kind of doesn't matter. It might come to you in an ayahuasca retreat. Like you could get that secret from anywhere.

Starting point is 00:33:46 But the things that are most likely to actually work are like getting your hands dirty and learning it from reality versus from theory. So just to follow that through it, say there's like a pie chart of the, say, 50 companies you've worked with. where their idea came from, what would be like the biggest chunks of the pie chart? I 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. And then what percentage ayahuasca retreat? There's no room for that. 100%.

Starting point is 00:34:31 That's mandatory as part of me advising you. That's 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.

Starting point is 00:35:00 And we'll talk about actually running the call, but before we get there, just like finding people to talk to you. 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. email, and it's with a very specific kind of message that is not a, hey, do you have XYZ pain points? Would you like to buy our game changing solution? Like, no template you get online is going to get you any responses except for like leaving you alone. And so I call the 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 to help,

Starting point is 00:36:00 Their message was, hey, Snoop Dog 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 poll exists out there on their to-do list.

Starting point is 00:36:26 And so the message doesn't do anything about that. It's just to get them to talk to you. So just say something interesting to cause them to meet with you. Okay. This is really helpful. So your advice here is don't craft like a whole value prop pitch, problem identification. Don't tell them how much pain you're going to solve. It's just like get their attention with something interesting.

Starting point is 00:36:47 Yes. The Snoop Dog example is awesome. Any other examples, any other kind of ways of thinking about what might be interesting to someone? 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

Starting point is 00:37:23 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, I could, yeah, what I'd say is it really depends on your end customer too, because if you're doing outreach to like, for example, HVAC companies, saying, hey, I'm Sam Altman's former chief of staff thought you might find it interesting. 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 high school, and now I'm working on this kind of interesting thing. Thought you might find it interesting. Would you be open to chat?

Starting point is 00:38:06 An implicit element of this is keep it very short. Sounds like it's just like a sentence or two. Yeah. Okay. And then what's your take on AI emailing a bunch of people versus individually reaching out and thinking about some unique message per person? I have not seen AI personalization work at this stage. Usually what it does is it tells them something they already know about themselves, and they're like, that looks like Claude wrote it. And so I don't usually recommend that. I also don't, I haven't seen personalization be super important here.

Starting point is 00:38:40 These messages that I, like, I said the entire message that I would send. You don't need to actually have a ton of personalization in it. Or like, hey, I'm going to X conference. We're going to be pitching. would you be open to chat? Like something like that can be good enough without any personalization at all. All the examples you shared are very simple and don't have anything to do with them and just say something interesting, basically.

Starting point is 00:39:02 And what you don't recommend is the idea you're not trying to sell them immediately. You just want to have a call. Yeah. And on the call, we'll see if you have poll. 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. Okay. How many email slash LinkedIn post should you start with, say, you're just getting started to try to find some calls?

Starting point is 00:39:26 Yeah, so I tend to start on LinkedIn because the kind of person who you and I talk to, they have interesting LinkedIn's. And so if you're reaching out to someone, they're going to say, okay. 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.

Starting point is 00:39:49 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 send 150. My typical targets for that are like 30 to 40 percent of them should accept your connection request. And then of them, 30 to 50 percent should reply. And a subset of them should say yes. The majority of them should say, yeah, sure, why not? Okay.

Starting point is 00:40:13 That's an awesome benchmark. So if you're not at that level, basically your interesting email is not working. You should find some more interesting. 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. It looks like you're about to pitch me, right? Or something like that. Or your message just isn't interesting if you're deading 30 to 40 percent accepts and then people aren't reply.

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Starting point is 00:41:18 Visit get dX.com slash Lenny to get a demo of DX. That's getdX.com slash Lenny. So say you've landed a call and you're going to do a sales call, say your first one. What is your advice for doing a great job on the sales call? Mostly two steps in a sales call. There's the pull discovery step. and then there's the kind of conceptual pitch of how we might help step. And so the theory behind a sales call is, again, it's like, if you have pull, you're going to rip the thing out of my hands.

Starting point is 00:41:59 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 going to convince me to let you buy. And so I approached this with the vibe which is like, waned back, excited to chat. Let's see if I might be able to help you. And so I have a very specific structure of a sales call that I recommend for getting into discovery and then transitioning out of discovery. Basically, that you start the call, hey, thanks so much for taking the time. I'm curious. I'm sure you get a bunch of people reaching out to you.

Starting point is 00:42:32 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 it winds up being. And they fill out the entire poll framework for you right there. That's ideal. And then you can say, oh, that's interesting. Let me, can I ask a couple follow-ups?

Starting point is 00:42:53 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. Does that sound good to you? get their thumbs up on the agenda, and then you earn the right to ask them some discovery questions about their poll

Starting point is 00:43:14 by saying, great, okay, before we get to those items on our agenda, do you wonder 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, they're not telling you anything. Okay, a few tactical questions.

Starting point is 00:43:34 One is just how long should you try to make this call? how long should your invite be for? And then where does a demo fit in? Do you so recommend demo on this call or doing a separate call for that? Yeah, so this is almost always a 30-minute call on the calendar. I've found smaller calendar blocks they don't see on their calendar, and so they don't show. 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.

Starting point is 00:44:03 And so, but later on, you might have a very very. very short demo in your first call. I guess because I'm thinking about the gen conversation I had and her advice is wait to do the demo, but that's an enterprise sales sort of product, not like an early stage, just pull hypothesis phases. Yeah, totally. Okay, got it. What's a sign that this meeting went well?

Starting point is 00:44:24 Is it this kind of leaning in, pulling it from you feeling? Yeah, 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. How many of these calls should you do before you're like,

Starting point is 00:44:54 okay, there's no pull here, time to move on? I don't have a hard, like, what I tend to do is if you have five calls and everybody's leaned back and you learn nothing, then there's a sign that, something's wrong. If you have, and I've seen people do like hundreds of calls where they still don't, how to get they, so do five and then check in and see what you've learned from the calls. Was there any pull there? Do we learn anything interesting? Like I started up, I was just helping out. They had done like five calls into banking and they just felt nothing. But they got an intro from one of

Starting point is 00:45:29 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? And they're like, okay, maybe there's something here. And they changed their poll hypothesis. It feels like a big part of this of your framework and approach

Starting point is 00:45:48 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 a way to validate that and be really real with what's working or not. Yeah, and I think it's thinking of it as we're selling to learn, not really to, to like push something.

Starting point is 00:46:11 Yeah, not to push. We're going to learn and we're seeing if they try to buy. If they don't, cool, we've learned something. We can kind of keep iterating from there. If they do, okay, great. Now we might have something. Let's see if it repeats. The whole idea of calling this poll is so smart because you always hear product market fit is you're feeling poll.

Starting point is 00:46:31 if you can pull, this boulder's 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. Yeah, and you can also tell, like, do I feel like I'm pushing right now? Do I feel like I'm convincing? That's a red flag that something either in your mind or in the conversation is off and like, okay, cool, let's figure out what that is. Is there an example that comes to mind when you think about a good sales call, what that kind of feels like, looks like, looks like. like what a pitch would be. Yeah. So what you're trying to do is you're trying to get, again,

Starting point is 00:47:05 get the poll out of them. And so they say, 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 poll there. You've kind of pulled that out of them. They've described that. And so the kind of interesting thing is that once you have PATH poll, 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. And so your pitch in that case is, okay, so it sounds like you're looking for something to make a website without all the hassle of a point and click thing.

Starting point is 00:47:56 Is that roughly it? And you describe it in a really, really small and simple way, not a really you describe it in a small way and they say, yeah, 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. 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 we need right now and unavoidable? What are their alternatives and kind of thinking through all that? Yeah, those are like actually the questions I will ask too, which is like, 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

Starting point is 00:48:36 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 what you've been unable to do with your existing tools, methods, team, whatever. Right. And so that question has all the elements of pull in it so that they can then say, oh yeah, actually, we've been trying to automate end-to-end testing, but can't do da-da-da-da-da-da-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 dock during the call. 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

Starting point is 00:49:18 if you don't do that now? Like, can you, is there some reason you have to do this now or is this okay to do another time? And you're like scared to almost ask you. Like, no, it's not going to work. 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? And to hear that one, when they're like, actually, yeah, we can do it ourselves. And that's good enough. But it prevents you from, again, pushing a product the market doesn't want.

Starting point is 00:49:46 And just spending years of your life trying to make it work. Yeah. There's a reason I look like I'm 60 and I'm 35, right? Like, don't push. You look great, Rob. You look great. Filters. Oh, man.

Starting point is 00:50:00 So this touches on. 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 going to buy it now is really high. And the idea here of this framework is to get over that home. 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.

Starting point is 00:50:33 Well, you're looking for the people who are already trying to change, who don't need convincing. There's this idea that your product has to be 10 times better than the existing solution for anyone to care. Do you feel like, like, how do you think about, okay, this is better? They tried alternatives. None of them do it. Or some of them do it okay. Like, how much better does this have to be for them to care?

Starting point is 00:50:54 Or is it okay if it's just like, you know, just a little bit better? The example with jump, I think, again, the AI notetaker 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? So I think about a company like linear who competes with Jira.

Starting point is 00:51:32 I don't know if you know, do you know linear? Yeah, yeah. So I'm just curious if it applies through this framework. So in my understanding, linear wins over GRA 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 full framework? Or is there something else going on there?

Starting point is 00:51:59 Again, if we use the pull framework 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 U.S., way better experience, and I'm going to crush it. And like, try that in HR software. And then I tried it in HR software. And it turned out the user experience was not relevant to the buyer.

Starting point is 00:52:48 And so they didn't have, they didn't care that their systems look like they're still on Cool Bowl or whatever it is. So it wasn't relevant there. But again, the poll theory would say that basically in the case of Jira versus Winnier, that there was a kind of person who was kind of blocked by Jira's experience. And I imagine the stronger the pull, the faster all this stuff happens grows. I know Lidier 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 there's more of just like, okay, I can just move faster.

Starting point is 00:53:24 be happier. It took longer. Is that you find that just like stronger the pull, the faster the company grows that. Yeah, I've seen a bunch of startups where like they go zero to whatever, like everyone now is going zero to infinity super fast. And and it's like not it's because they have found these like pockets of pole 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 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? That's growing up. I like that. Okay. So let's move on to the next step. So at this point,

Starting point is 00:54:11 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? 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 farmer exec. Farm exec was like, oh my gosh, thank you so much for asking. Our current market research is da 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 looks like the current research you're getting, but kind of, I don't know, like it's just better in these 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 days with a kind of mock up of what I think that could look like? And then 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 vibe codes, a kind of rough layout of what this would look like. Get some feedback on it.

Starting point is 00:55:32 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 talk track you can use for price, but that's basically it. Okay. Tell me more about this price talk track. Yeah. Yeah. So the interesting thing about the poll framework is that it can help you set the bounds for pricing. So what's the value of getting the project done? Or what are the cost of the alternatives? So the L's, what's the value of getting this market research faster? Or what is the cost you're currently spending with your market research consultants? Both of those can tell you, okay, the value of market research is like X. The cost with cost with consultants is, I don't know, $50,000 per year. And so that gives me a rough boundary to say,

Starting point is 00:56:28 okay, what if we charged $50,000 a year, the same price as your current market research consultants? It kind of gives a frame on price that makes it intuitive to your potential customers. 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? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:56:58 So this is, you did a great episode with Jen, of a great couple episodes with Jen on the like sales process. And so in bigger deals, enterprise deals, there's like the champion has pull and decides, yes, I want this. And then you have to do a set of like 17 demos. You have to genuflect in front of four committees. 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

Starting point is 00:57:30 the Stripe link and we schedule an onboarding call. And so the project management step will depend. My typical recommendation for project management in larger organizations is to have a conversation with the buyer with the 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,

Starting point is 00:58:01 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:58:29 Per your earlier point, you are not into design partnerships, I imagine your advice here just like sell it directly. Don't try to give them for free. Don't set up some kind of partnership thing. Yeah. Yeah. Why shoot yourself in the foot? And again, the reason not to is because it just, you find that it doesn't lead to the best to stuff that actually. sells and works building this kind of design partnership relationship. Yeah, if they're like,

Starting point is 00:58:53 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, it's a negative signal to the most, to people with, who actually have pull. And it's a positive signal to people who don't. Awesome. Okay. And that totally makes sense. Like, if there's pull, just go with it. You know, I need to. Yeah. Yeah. You can sell something that's like, you know, you might not have. a full platform ready. You can sell something that's more service shaped early on. I've seen a bunch of startups do that where they sell, you know, okay, we're going to have an AI product manager who can do X, Y, Z kind of thing. For now, it's delivered by us while this thing is working

Starting point is 00:59:35 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 is real pull there and you figure out what the actual thing to build is while delivering it a mix of manually and automated. Okay, that's really interesting. That's come up a lot on the podcast, especially with Go to Market Sales,

Starting point is 00:59:59 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 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

Starting point is 01:00:19 that increases margins. Yeah, it definitely has downsides, right? You definitely can get stuck in a kind of service businesses kind of thing, but everything has downsides. Awesome, yeah. And the idea is AI kind of does more and more of the stuff. And part of it is you learn more and more of what the problem opportunities are

Starting point is 01:00:38 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? 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.

Starting point is 01:01:08 That said, I was just working with a company that's their first deal is Enterprise, and they've got a big demo day coming up. And so they're like, how do we get the most possible revenue out of this so we can look like that for demo day? Totally valid thing to do. In that case, what you do is you throw out a number in a way that doesn't like get you slapped. And the specific approach that I'd recommend for that is almost like using a case study as a, hey, react to this kind of case study. And so you'd say, when we talk to others, the way they everyone's kind of done pricing differently. some of them have been, you know, it's been, sometimes it's been a small project for 80,000.

Starting point is 01:01:48 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. Throw up on that. I like that. I know this case study concept is actually an important part of this whole framework.

Starting point is 01:02:21 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? Yeah, this is where the paths might diverge. So hopefully you're right. And these people have pull. Great.

Starting point is 01:02:40 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 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 poll. 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 pulled? Did zero? Like, what have we learned here? And then you craft a new hypothesis and run it again. Got it. And imagine most of the time it's not there. And is that your experience or what's kind of the pie chart of yes, success versus not at the stage? Yeah, I've seen like maybe once or twice where it was there from the beginning. And that's magical. Like you feel like a hero. 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

Starting point is 01:03:48 you just ask a Hail Mary a couple times and that gets you on the right path. Or you like do something crazy where a friend just 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 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. Say more about Goblin mode. This is amazing. Yeah, you know, like when dogs do that, like, get the zoomies, right?

Starting point is 01:04:18 And they just like, that's the thing I have in my mind for what Goblin Mode is as a founder, where it's like. And this is a good thing or not a good thing? It's a, it's a break glass in case of emergency thing. Where it's, and I think some founders actually operate like this all the time, where it's like, okay, there's actually a conference tomorrow in Europe. that has these potential customers there. I can't get them to talk to me.

Starting point is 01:04:43 So looks like I'm going to get on a plane right now and go there. Right? It's just doing kind of somewhat crazy things with the goal of getting in front of customers right now. And yeah, like some people can do this all the time. Others like me who are getting old. Like I can pull this out once in a while. Get that gobble mode out sometimes. So the idea there is, and you're saying this sometimes, this can work.

Starting point is 01:05:07 Just like going nuts. just like going, talking to everyone looking for these earned secrets. Yeah, and one example of this, like, it's kind of a crazy example, but a friend's building a company called Tiro, which does dental staffing 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 talk to him about being customers. And that worked. And so it's just like weird stuff like that can work.

Starting point is 01:05:36 Amazing. Okay. So say do a couple sales calls. Well, say do five. Is that kind of the idea? Do like five and assess. Is that rough heuristic? Okay. So say to your point, most times you'll find, okay, this is not, there's no pull here. Sorry. What do you do? Do you go back to the beginning? Go hands on with some other small business sort of thing? Or what do you recommend? Yeah. So different pathways there, hopefully you've asked the Hail Mary question and you've learned something there. That's like worth double clicking into. And the Hail Mary question is just like, what is there anything that we can do? Yeah. Right now that is a. problem on your two-do list. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so you've generated some new information that you can then use to like do another set of five. If not, then yeah, you just go back, get some firsthand knowledge, try it again. Awesome. Okay, so, so this process is very straightforward.

Starting point is 01:06:27 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, get a sense, is there a pull or not? If there's not pull, throw out some Hail Mary questions, maybe enter Goblin mode, 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. Yep, and then you have a business. There we go. Off to the races. Okay. So say you actually found something, something that is pulling and people are like, I need this now. What comes next? What do you, kind of the, there's kind of like the building onboarding process and then just keeping them happy.

Starting point is 01:07:09 What's that process like? What advice do you have there? Yeah, so I found that I didn't really have a good way to think about what happens after people buy. And so I felt like the dog who got a car and I just kind of like threw the software 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, 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. And so X is, you might think of it as,

Starting point is 01:08:00 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 sent 10,000 messages or 1,000 messages in your first X amount of time. If you hit that, it's like it'd be weird if you churned. 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,

Starting point is 01:08:31 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 would be weird if they turned. And so we just designed the onboarding process to that. And so what I recommend is once you have a couple people who are saying yes, don't just like throw the product over and like send them a log in and pray. Go deliver firsthand as well. And you're going to learn a ton from that.

Starting point is 01:08:57 And keep asking the question like, are you going to turn now? Are you going to turn now? Like what? And try to find the moment when when they're like, Oh, okay, cool. I can't live without this. I love how your mind works, 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

Starting point is 01:09:21 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 turning. just like a sign of like, okay, they thought they didn't, but it's not working. And they think they're just like, what's a sign at this stage? Okay, maybe it's not working versus it is. Yeah. So if everybody's churning, it is unacceptable for you to not figure out why.

Starting point is 01:09:48 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 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.

Starting point is 01:10:16 First of all, I'm sorry. It sucks. It really, you know, you wake up at 4 a.m. every morning just sweating. But in that, you often can figure out why. And is it something that you're doing or is it something about them? And that can tell you, okay, who actually had. that we can sell, deliver, retain, and for like that horizontal workflows product,

Starting point is 01:10:38 they found that freight forwarders were using it for one specific workflow. And so they pivoted the entire company to focus on that. And so they went from being this horizontal product with massive churn, low price, to a very premium product for freight forwarders. There's no point at which like,

Starting point is 01:10:55 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 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.

Starting point is 01:11:16 And he said something like even at 100 million error, they were still very unclear if this is a thing that will last. And I think it's very common. So that's like its own topic of just like that's nice to know. That's nice to know because everyone, yeah, everyone's like, how will this become a big thing? It's like, I don't know, we'll figure it out. Yeah, it's just kind of one step at a time. And so in this conversation, the final step in my mind is this idea you have of this user case study factory, which kind of takes you from things they're starting to work to, okay, now we can create a repeatable system that helps us grow. So talk about that, what that looks like when that's about.

Starting point is 01:11:53 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 it's 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.

Starting point is 01:12:25 Their existing options weren't good enough for Y. and you offer Z that helps unblock them. That sounds a lot like a case study that you would feature on your website. And it's a helpful thing because, okay, my job as a founder is not to produce a hundred different case studies, totally different case studies,

Starting point is 01:12:46 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

Starting point is 01:13:09 study infinite times. And all the stuff that I do is to build a factory for repeating that case study. And if I do this right, there's a case study where customers say hell yes, and they pull themselves through each step of the factory. The steps are the pipeline step. How do we get people to talk to us, sales step, how do we turn potential customers into actual customers, and the delivery 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 factoring. 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

Starting point is 01:13:52 look at your case study factory and say, okay, where is our, where is the, 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. Let's solve that bottleneck. And then we'll move to the next one. The next one is our close rate is lower than it should be. Okay, cool. That's our bottleneck. Now we're going to go all in on that. And so it lets you go, like the case study factory model gives you a way of thinking about your startup and knowing exactly where to focus at any one point in time. It's a really interesting way to think about it, where instead of we are trying to just get more customers closed and more deals closed,

Starting point is 01:14:30 instead of we're looking, we're building case studies, like you 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 wanted to look consistent across all the companies drop into. People talk about all this repeatable sales motions. But I like the idea of thinking of it. 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?

Starting point is 01:14:54 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 will later be able to share. And yeah, and exact. And then what sales becomes is it becomes kind of like, hey, this is the case study that we deliver on.

Starting point is 01:15:11 Is this relevant to you or not? And it becomes actually like you can show the case study to people. They say, yeah, that's actually what I want as well. And so it becomes this kind of tool. And you can say, 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.

Starting point is 01:15:30 That's funny. There's this whole theme now of building software factories where, you know, product build itself. But this is 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. Yeah. Yeah, we don't make software here. We make case studies. So is that, is that your advice?

Starting point is 01:15:50 Just like think of it that way? Yes. 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. Yeah, totally. And the good news is if you have the poll framework, then you just describe, here's how we helped them and what they accomplished.

Starting point is 01:16:10 And you have a case study. Amazing. Okay. There's a couple things I want to touch on, because this is the end of the process, basically. Yes. 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, yeah, this term hell yes customers. Say more about that. You mentioned it like when you're looking for someone to buy it and then use it. There's this idea of they want them to be hell yes. Yeah, it's 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 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

Starting point is 01:17:00 clones at them. Okay. The other kind of point I want to reinforce is you recommend no pilots, no point, proof of concepts, no design partners. Just go straight to we're going to sell this to you and roll it out and it's going to be amazing. Yep. And 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 offer. 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.

Starting point is 01:17:46 I'm helping a couple companies launch their second product. And what they are doing is actually the founders are like, cool, we're doing it again. 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 existing companies is, I can't show 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

Starting point is 01:18:29 that could do that project for them all worked. All the ones they whiteboarded never worked. 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 whole 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,

Starting point is 01:19:07 the founders ideally are doing that selling. 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. Awesome. And then again, if things aren't working, there's this idea you should have goblin mode of just like,

Starting point is 01:19:33 okay, just try a bunch of stuff, talk to as many people, get on planes, go have 20 meetings and just look for something. Yes. Yeah, hell merry, goblin mode. All of these things are just your break 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,

Starting point is 01:19:53 It's like the worst time of your life. And you just don't want to prolong that. So just get on a plane, go to the office, go in person, do whatever it takes to find something. Rob, we did it. We went through everything. That was amazing. Is there anything else that you think is important to share or anything you want to, I don't know, double down on before we get to a very exciting lighting around? Hopefully what's come across is kind of how simple this is.

Starting point is 01:20:20 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. Awesome. That sounds very simple. And I think it's important to know. 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 disillusion miss feeling like there's something there wasting a lot of your life and doing something that's not going to work yeah think of it as like a you know like

Starting point is 01:21:07 a metal detector on a beach like this is just giving you a metal detector you might not find metal where you're looking right now but at least i'm not giving you a spoon at least i'm not giving you a spoon, meaning what was happening? For the beach, right? Oh, I see. You're not. Oh, I see. You 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 matter. Well, Rob, with that, we reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? Let's do it. First question. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most other people. Oh, gosh. My favorite one is the four-volume nature of order series

Starting point is 01:21:55 by Christopher Alexander. It's a book on architecture, a series of books on architecture. Best thing ever. Never heard that recommendation before. Those are my favorite. Favorite recent movie or TV show, you've really enjoyed. I have two favorite movies that we watch repeatedly. One is the the most recent Pride and Prejudice, and the second is the Penguins of Madagascar movie. Don't know why. The four-off were in both ends of the spectrum there. Favorite or most interesting AI product that you recently discovered or use or love? I've been using Muse, and it's like, if it works for me, it can work for anyone. Yeah, very hot right now.

Starting point is 01:22:34 Amazing. Okay, favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life? Life is what you make of it. So true. Final question. I'm curious to get your thoughts on this. So there's this idea of tarpet ideas. So I had Dalton Caldwell on the podcast.

Starting point is 01:22:56 He was a partner at YC and he has this term tarpid 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 tarpid ideas you just find people keep coming to you and you're like, don't do that. It's not going to work. Oh, that's interesting.

Starting point is 01:23:16 The category 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 their bootstrapped and they're growing really fast. So let me just build the exact same thing as them or something very close. And it's like, okay, but they've already, they've already won that or 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.

Starting point is 01:23:58 What am I doing wrong? And I imagine everyone answers, but it's better. And as we know, it can't just be a little bit better. And basically you're saying like, okay, this is unblocking them. Yes. And it's better than all the attorneys. They're just going to go with that thing. But I guess then, you know, this goes into whole other conversation.

Starting point is 01:24:15 Like, what if it's like two times better? And I guess your advice there is it's probably not good to know. There are many things, right? You could give me a 100x better printer for my house and I won't buy it because I don't, I'm not blocked. That's a great example. Oh, man. Rob, we did it. We did it.

Starting point is 01:24:33 Holy cow. We did it. Holy cow. Okay, how can listeners be useful to you? That's our final question. Oh, gosh. If you like the framework, use it, tell other. people about it. Check out the book if it's useful and reach out if you have any thoughts, ideas,

Starting point is 01:24:50 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 it. This is kind of like what I'm going to be doing for the next 10, 20 years. So if you have ways to improve it, like reach out and tell me. Awesome. And your newsletter is exactly that. 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. Just the idea of calling it physics of startups is an awesome idea. So we'll point people to the newsletter.

Starting point is 01:25:20 Rob, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about it. about the show at lenniespodcast.com.

Starting point is 01:25:43 See you in the next episode.

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - An 86-minute guide to finding PMF | Rob Snyder (Author, The Power of Pull)

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