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

1. 0:00 – 1:13

   Introduction to Rob Snyder

   1. RSRob Snyder0:00

      The theory behind a sales call is if you have pull, you're gonna 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.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky0:13

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

   3. RSRob Snyder0:18

      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.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky0:34

      You have this idea of the Hail Mary approach.

   5. RSRob Snyder0:37

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

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01

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

   7. RSRob Snyder1:07

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

2. 1:13 – 7:30

   The PULL framework: what makes customers buy

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16

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

   2. RSRob Snyder1:19

      Hello. Thank you.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:21

      You are the author of The Power of Pull. I've got the book right here. You have a newsletter called The Physics of Startups. I don't think I told you this, but the way I learned of you is a very unusual way. Uh, I have this Slack community for my paid subscribers, and in the Slack, just in the past month, two different people started threads where they were like, "Lenny, uh, you need to get Rob on the podcast. I have been reading his book, and it's extremely useful to what I've been doing." And these are some founders, some product people, and I'm just like, "Well, who is this guy? [chuckles] I gotta find out." And so I reached out, and, uh, that's how this came to be. Essentially, what you've written in this book and what you do in your newsletter is you've basically created a very pragmatic guide to finding product-market fit, and basically going from zero to one, and then one beyond. And to give people a reason to believe you, other than what I've already said about people, uh, saying how useful this has been, I know you've helped something like 50 different startups get from zero to over a million in ARR. Speak to just where this insight and, and advice comes from.

   4. RSRob Snyder2:27

      Yeah. Yes, I did not expect to be writing a book or doing anything like this. Uh, I, I got punched in the face as a founder trying to go zero to one, and then randomly figured it out, and then a bunch of my friends started pulling me in to help their startups go zero to one, and 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, uh, and so I've just gotten strangely obsessed with doing zero to one as many times as possible.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky2:55

      [chuckles] I love that. I'm gonna read a couple quotes actually from my community to reinforce the things you just said of why, of what people have been saying about what you've done, and this is really unusual. There's like... Even though you just said there's not a lot, there is a lot of content for founders.

   6. RSRob Snyder3:08

      Mm-hmm.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky3:08

      Here's how to find idea. Here's how to find product-market fit. So it's really, it, it's a big signal to me if people are saying this is, in particular, extremely useful to them, more than anything else out there. So a few things that, uh, people told me in my community. One, "I remember reading the first chapter of his book and feeling the weight lifted off my shoulders that I'm not some silly, clueless outlier, and that this is a normal part of the process." Another, "Besides all the very tactical stuff, personally, I found him normalizing just how painful, lonely, weird it is to go through finding mark- finding product-market fit." Finally, "We ran into the same zero-to-one traps," uh, Rob describes, "building based on what prospects said they wanted rather than what actually got them to say yes."

   8. RSRob Snyder3:54

      Wow. The, the, you have very nice people in your community. That's, that's, uh-

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky3:58

      That's true

   10. RSRob Snyder3:59

       ... that's super kind.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky4:00

       That's true. That's true. All right. Anyway, so there you go. Just to give people... Okay, let's pay attention. Um, okay, give us a fr- uh, an overview of the PULL framework.

   12. RSRob Snyder4:10

       Yeah. So the PULL framework describes a person who will pull your product out of your hands. Um, someone, someone who's weird not to buy your product. So we, like, know what pull feels like. It's, it's the thing that's written about with startups. You know? It's the thing, you know, the startups that take off. You, your newsletter, had insane pull. You grew like that, right? And everybody wants that, and most of us are in the situation where it feels like we are pushing. We're trying to convince people to care, convince them to buy, and they're... It's, like, kind of maybe working. And so pull describes a person who'd, who'd be weird not to buy. The question is just, like, what causes somebody to pull a product out of your hands? And for that, I've found a lot of the traditional descriptions of things, like when I was a founder, I went out and found hair-on-fire pain points, big problems, offered a differentiated solution that provided real value. We had design partners using our product every single day. And so I was like, "Okay, cool. Check, check, check, check, check. This thing's going to the moon." And then tried to sell it and just got smashed into a wall for two years, pivoting around aimlessly, not, having no clue why. And then we randomly pivoted, it took off, and I realized that it wasn't the thing that causes people to pull a product out of your hands. It's not pain points or value props or things like that. It, um, it, because I realized that people can basically just say, uh, "Yeah, like, great. Th- this, you know, it's great that your product solves our pain points, problems, offers a ton of value, but I'm not gonna drop my priorities to buy it." And so I realized it's about priorities, a certain kind of priority, where somebody's trying to do something. They got a project on their to-do list, trying to do it right now, but they- ... can't do it with their existing tools, methods, or options. In that case, they're like a coiled spring, right, trying to do something, stuck, and you show up and just offer something that gets them unstuck, that helps them get that priority done. That's when they rip it out of your hands, and the PULL framework is just an acronym for that.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky6:21

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3. 7:30 – 9:44

   The “PULL” acronym

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky7:30

      today. Let's talk it through the, the acronym of PULL-

   2. RSRob Snyder7:33

      Yeah

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky7:33

      ... 'cause that goes deeper into this idea.

   4. RSRob Snyder7:35

      Yeah, so acronym P-U-L-L. There's a P, project. They have a project on their to-do list. You can think of a project like a job to be done. It's, um, you know, Bob Moesta, you've had him on, he's amazing. Um, project is not like, "I wanna buy recruitment software," it's, "I wanna hire more employees," kinda thing. U is the second one, is unavoidable. This is a thing that I have to do right now. Why now? Why not later? Uh, 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?

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky8:29

      Amazing. So the first two are really important there and, um, it's interesting the second two feel less important. I'm curious why they're so important. So the first two are essentially like, I have a problem I need to solve, a job to be done, and this is an urgent problem. So in a sense, this is the hair-on-fire problem very concretely defined.

   6. RSRob Snyder8:45

      Yes.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky8:45

      Here's what hair on fire looks like. I have, like, a to-do my boss is waiting for me to do, and it needs to happen now. It's not just, like, a general thing that I need to solve.

   8. RSRob Snyder8:54

      Yes.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky8:55

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

   10. RSRob Snyder9:00

       Yeah, so you can, you can imagine a case where, like, a product team, for example, um, they have a really important thing that the, that has been mandated down. They have a really important feature they need to build or something that's an unavoidable project on their to-do list. But they're gonna do it themselves, so they don't need anything. They, uh, they won't buy anything unless they, their existing options aren't good enough. And so it really, really is important that it's not just I'm trying to do something and I can do it myself, or I can do it with a, with a kind of category leader. I can do it with whatever tool is, is out there. It has to be something where my existing options are not good enough, so I am, like, stuck. I'm, I'm blocked.

4. 9:44 – 13:53

   How Jump found pull with financial advisors

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky9:44

      Let's do an example to make this even more real. What's, like, a product or a company that gives us a sense of what... Uh, basically use this as a template. It's like a Mad Libs-y thing where-

   2. RSRob Snyder9:52

      Yeah

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky9:52

      ... it's just like P-U-L-L and you fill it out. So let's go. Give, give us an example.

   4. RSRob Snyder9:56

      Yeah, so my friends are at a company called Jump, which is an AI notetaker for financial advisors. Very interesting space. They did the same thing I did, by the way. They spent 18 months just, like, hitting their head against the wall and then finally found PULL, tried to sell, and, and figured it out. But what they found was that financial advisors have a project on their to-do list that is to minimize the amount of time they spend taking notes for client meetings and putting those notes into their CRMs. It's a project on their to-do list. The U, the unavoidable, is if they don't take notes and put them into their CRMs, they could go to jail. Uh, so they have to take those notes, but when they're taking the notes, they don't wanna be doing that. And so, so they wanna minimize the amount of time because they don't enjoy doing that. It's, it's not a, not a fun thing. So the list of options they considered to minimize the amount of time were, uh, you know, like a generic AI notetaker. Your, your kind of... There's a list of, of all of those out there. But those AI notetakers 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 c- 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, um, "This must be how Alexander Graham Bell felt when he invented the telephone."

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky11:29

      Mm.

   6. RSRob Snyder11:29

      Like, that's a weird thing to say about a product for financial advisors.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky11:33

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

   8. RSRob Snyder11:36

      Yeah.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky11:37

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

   10. RSRob Snyder11:43

       Yeah, so, uh, fun conversation with the, with the Jump team about, they, they said, "Okay, cool. Financial advisors, they have this project. You know who else meets with clients all the time? Insurance agents. So maybe we just go and talk to them." And it turns out they also have the project on their to-do list of minimizing the amount of time they spend taking meeting notes. But the U isn't there because they don't have to... They're, they're not required to put meeting notes into their CRM. So their existing options, the first L, are not taking meeting notes, which they were already doing. And so you can see the framework kind of doesn't fill out for them, or it doesn't... There's not... The force isn't there. They're fine.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky12:24

       That unavoidable piece, uh, I see why that is so important, and, uh, this is an example. Basically, basically you need all four here.

   12. RSRob Snyder12:30

       Yes.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky12:31

       So that's a good lesson here is all four need to exist for real pull. In the first example, that to-do to me doesn't feel like it's, like, a to-do they just wrote down. It's kind of this general to-do, just, like, generally save time. Is that an okay P for a project for it to be a to-do, just a ge- or is the- or is the... Was this, like, specifically on every financial advisor's to-do list?

   14. RSRob Snyder12:52

       Yeah, so it was a thing that, uh, I wouldn't say it's, like, actually something they wrote down on their to-do list, but it was, like, a thing they were doing all the time. It was a part of their workflow, and while they were doing it, they were trying not to do it. Like, I think there's, like, a, the action I'm doing right now on my calendar, and then the project is my intention while I'm doing it.

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky13:14

       Got it.

   16. RSRob Snyder13:14

       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."

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky13:19

       Got it. And so if a founder or product team is listening to this and are struggling with their product, it's probably one of these four is not there.

   18. RSRob Snyder13:28

       Yeah, you need all four at once. If you find P without U and, and the Ls, so you find something that somebody's trying to do kind of, but they're not actually trying to do it right now, and their existing options aren't good enough, what they'll do is they'll complain and they won't buy. If they have P and U but their Ls are good enough, they're gonna say, "Yeah, that's exactly what we're doing right now, and working with Claude Code on it, we're gonna figure it

5. 13:53 – 16:10

   Why pull is discovered, not created

   1. RSRob Snyder13:53

      out."

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky13:53

      Something along these lines that you talk about is that this pull exists. It's like this thing that is already there, and you're just kind of this like, I don't know, hunter looking for the pull and discovering it. Talk a bit about that.

   3. RSRob Snyder14:05

      Yeah, this was super liberating when I, like, realized this because I always thought that I was incompetent. I wasn't good at convincing the market to want my product. And it was from that perspective of, okay, I'm building something that's really valuable and people aren't buying. How do I convince them to want it, to buy? And it turns out this pull, this project on their to-do list, exists before and independent of me, which means I just have to go out there and find it. I don't have to convince people to have pull. And it's like I haven't quite figured out how to do that, but I think it's very, very hard to do, if it's possible at all.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky14:45

      That feels very familiar, just trying to convince people, "Look, this is so great. It's gonna solve so many of your problems." Uh, and I love these idea- these like... I just love how very specific and concrete it makes all of these general pieces of advice around finding product market fit, coming up with ideas. It just tells you exactly here's what it looks like. Um, something else you talk about, you mentioned this earlier, this idea that it, it needs to feel weird for them not to buy it. That's like the sign that this is right, that it's like, w- it's weird. Why aren't you buying this? Talk a bit about that.

   5. RSRob Snyder15:14

      Most people, most of the time, are, like, fine. It would be weird if they bought our product given what's on their to-do list, given what they have, given their options. Like, uh, so it would be weird if they bought. But a person with pull is weird not to buy. They should actually pull the product out of your hands because they are like that coiled spring. And so if you talk to somebody who has pull, the conversation should basically go like, "Wait a second, you can do what? Okay, how do we get started? Does the product exist yet? Like, h- how do, how do we get on board?" Where basically every other conversation you have with somebody who doesn't have pull can have anything other than that. They can be enthusiastic and nice and say, "Wow, that's amazing. That's super interesting. That's totally the future of our industry. Wow, I can see how that would save us so much money." But they're not saying, "I need this right now." And that's how you know they actually have pull.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky16:06

      Mm-hmm. Those conversations sound very familiar.

6. 16:10 – 17:13

   Selling to a person, not a company

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky16:10

      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?

   2. RSRob Snyder16:20

      One of the main mistakes people make is thinking that pull is a thing that a company has. It's a thing a person has. Even if you're selling enterprise software, you're selling not to the company. You're not selling to SpaceX. You're selling to, just going to your Jen C- uh, Jen Abel conversation, you're sell- selling to, like, the head of legal at SpaceX who has a project on her to-do list that, that they can't do themselves.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky16:47

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

   4. RSRob Snyder16:52

      Yes

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky16:53

      ... [chuckles] needs this. Uh, and you're saying that that's often a mistake people make. They don't think about the specific person with this need.

   6. RSRob Snyder17:00

      Yeah, yeah. It's, it's super common to say, "We sell to," right, like, "mid-market private equity companies." It's like-

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky17:06

      Mm

   8. RSRob Snyder17:06

      ... you don't. You sell to a partner or an operating partner in there who's specifically trying to do X, Y, and Z.

7. 17:13 – 22:34

   Finding startup ideas through firsthand experience

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky17:13

      Awesome. Okay. So through the lens of this framework, let's go through kind of the key moments of an early-stage startup finding product market fit. So I want to talk about coming up with an idea, getting your first sales call, closing your first deal, and then kind of scaling from there. So let's start with coming up with an idea.

   2. RSRob Snyder17:31

      Yeah.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky17:32

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

   4. RSRob Snyder17:38

      As a founder, I, I have a notebook of ideas that are all like, "What if we built an API for APIs?" kind of thing. Like, there, there are all these, like, product ideas, and the product ideas all sound unhinged. And so I can never tell between product ideas [chuckles] what's a good idea and what's a bad idea. Well, fortunately, the PULL framework is a, is a thing that's upstream of your product idea that says, "I believe there is a person- Who is trying to do X right now. We... And who's basically weird not to buy. And so what I've found to be helpful is to use the PULL framework to stake out a claim and say, "I believe," for whatever idea I have, "I believe this specific person is stuck, and so I'm gonna go and talk to them and see, do they wanna... Do they try to buy from me even before we have a product?" And so for me, the, the idea of the, the, um, the PULL framework is, is to come up with a hypothesis of who has pull, and then go and test that. And then the question becomes, okay, how do you find this pull idea, this pull hypothesis? What do you do for that? And 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? Like, no. You would go all out. You would go in person. I have, like, a couple stories of friends who have done crazy things to go and, like, do the job with the potential customer to feel it firsthand, to find that pull firsthand, and they've either built something that they would buy themselves, or they've, like, embedded with people to find that, like, that moment when someone will a- is, like, trying to do something and stuck.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky19:29

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

   6. RSRob Snyder20:09

      Yeah. Yeah.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky20:11

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

   8. RSRob Snyder20:17

      Yeah, so a friend from, uh, from school, he had no idea what he wanted to build. He had no product idea. He wasn't, he didn't have my notebook. He didn't have any of that. He just said, "You know, I like serving small businesses. I like small business. I'd like to just find somebody I like to serve, and I'll figure out the idea from that." And so he wrote out a list of industries that he thought might be interesting, and then he went and shadowed them and, like, worked with them for, like, rode along with them for days at a time. And so he started with solar panel installers, and, uh, he hated them, and they hated him, so he moved on to the next one. He, uh, eventually worked his way to, like, independent physical therapists, and he went and spent days with them. He loved them. They loved him. And it was like, okay, cool. What am I... What is the pull here? What, what, what, what should I do? And so he watched over their shoulder days on end. He even tried to buy a physical therapy franchise to, like, was able to see the P&L and was actually considering it. And in that process, he came up with something. Like, wait a second, you're... It looks like you're trying to do X and, and are stuck there. And so it's, it's, um, firsthand experience is, is what you, what you should do there.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky21:30

      Awesome, so, like, live it yourself and-

   10. RSRob Snyder21:32

       Live it.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky21:33

       And is the reason you need to do that, is it part- is it because people would have discovered... If it was easy, basically somebody else would have found the idea. Uh, what, why do you think that is so important for approaching it this way?

   12. RSRob Snyder21:45

       Yeah, I'd, I'd say... I'll, I'll, I'll give two reasons. One is, you know, these things don't really emerge from a whiteboard. Like, it would be weird if his idea came to him that he eventually wound up finding from brainstorming. Like, think of how many different ideas he could have come up with. Um, and it wasn't something that, like, it, it was something he saw only by observing where, uh, it's unclear that that would have emerged in an interview either. But I'd say the second thing is, like, more of a philosophical thing, which is you're building a company to serve this kind of person. The whole point of building a company is to serve somebody, to help them do something. And so if you don't have firsthand experience, how are you gonna make the thousands of decisions it takes to actually build something that serves them?

8. 22:34 – 26:41

   Testing your pull hypothesis with two slides

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky22:34

      And is the idea once you have this insight, say, with this physical therapy company, you write it out through the PULL framework to kind of pressure... Is that, is that, you s- you call that the pull hypothesis.

   2. RSRob Snyder22:43

      Yep.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky22:43

      Is that right?

   4. RSRob Snyder22:44

      Yep.

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky22:44

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

   6. RSRob Snyder22:52

      Yeah, so you then take that and say, okay, this is, this is the kind of idea. I believe this kind of person is, this physical therapist is trying to cut some specific cost on their, on their P&L. I can't actually remember what it was. Unavoidable for XYZ reasons, and, um, their existing options of getting a consultant to come in and do this wasn't good enough for some specific reason. It was too expensive. It was too slow. Wrote out that pull hypothesis, and then what he did next was super important, which was he s- he showed it to that person and said, "Is this you?" Person said, "Oh my God, yeah. That's exactly the thing." He said, "Okay, great. Uh, would you buy something if I helped you get this done?" "Yeah, totally." "Okay, great." And then he said, "I need to go talk to five other physical therapists and just make sure this repeats." And then he did that, and they also pulled, which was the really important thing to make sure he wasn't just building a product for one person.

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky23:50

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

   8. RSRob Snyder23:57

      Yeah, so I actually, like, recommend having two slides. Uh, one slide, one slide is the, basically the PULL framework. You don't have to show them the PULL framework 'cause no one's gonna understand it. You can just say, uh, "Here's what I hear. You're trying to do X right now because of Y." And you've considered this, but it's not good enough for this reason." And you say, "Is-- Do I have that roughly right?" And then the second slide is a kind of conceptual overview of how I can help. "So it sounds like you're looking for a way to cut this line item that's faster than a consultant. We could offer that for X, Y, Z with-- Does that kind of fit what you're looking for?" And you're looking for the first slide, them to say, "Oh my God, yes." And the second slide, "Yeah, how does it work? How exactly-- How, uh, you know, how do we move forward?"

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky24:44

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

   10. RSRob Snyder25:06

       Yep.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky25:07

       Amazing. I love this. So the idea is you have this little slide that you just create and to kind of run by people, and the idea is this is the hypothesis. And what does it look like when there's pull once you show it to them? Is it like they're ready to send you money? Is it their eye-- pupils dilate? What do you look for?

   12. RSRob Snyder25:22

       Yeah, you look for a couple things. The, the thing that really, really matters is that they actually try to buy. They say, "Okay, cool. How do we get started?" And they will do that. I have a friend who is selling into-- He, he kind of pivoted around for a while, but he knew he found pull when someone, an exec in pharma, before he had a product, said, "If you can do that, I will pay you right now." So okay, that's the signal you are looking for. What you're looking for as well is they're leaning in. "Wait a second. You can do what?" What you're not looking for is kind of like leaned out enthusiasm. "Okay. Well, tell me more. Well, let me-- Yeah. We'll, we'll think about it. Can you send more information so our team can review that?" Like, you know, and, and any of those kinds of things, anything that is not like, "Okay, how do we actually move forward on this?" is just not worth your life force going after.

   13. LRLenny Rachitsky26:14

       It's interesting how much body language and just, like, the physical experience of getting excited about an idea is, is a sign that it is good. Uh, I just had Josh Woodward on the podcast, head of Google Labs, and he's similarly-- Like, you see a twinkle in their eyes, and their eyes just light up. And it's so interesting that that's a sign of, of pull.

   14. RSRob Snyder26:32

       Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's, it's-- What you're seeing is, is it weird for them not to buy right now? Are they, like-- Are they behaving as if it's weird for them not to buy?

9. 26:41 – 27:24

   Recognizing real buying intent

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky26:41

      Mm-hmm. Is-- What's k- Is there, like, a lim- a s- a, like a-- You know, there's, like, the, "I will buy this" id- 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?

   2. RSRob Snyder26:55

      So I call it, like, a pull-shaped action. Not a good, good, uh, uh, term, but, but a pull-shaped action is like, "I need this right now. How do-- Like, I am pulling it out of you. How do, how do we move forward right now?"

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky27:11

      Mm-hmm.

   4. RSRob Snyder27:12

      It is not like a, "Oh, I could totally see us using this in Q4," kind of thing. That's a-

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky27:19

      Mm-hmm

   6. RSRob Snyder27:20

      ... that's a not pulling towards me. That's a kind of pushing out into the future.

10. 27:24 – 29:02

    When solving your own problem works

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky27:24

       Like the urgency of like-

    2. RSRob Snyder27:25

       Yes

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky27:25

       ... "I need this 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 that?

    4. RSRob Snyder27:35

       So a friend, um, so, like, Emily at a company called Clearly AI. She was, uh, in security engineering at AWS. And she found something there that she would have paid somebody to solve, but there was nobody out there. And so in that case, it's solve your own problem, yes, 100%. Where the solve your own problem falls kind of flat a lot of times is, um, it's a thing that you wouldn't have paid somebody to do for you, but you just think should exist, right? If it's-- And so you have to be honest with yourself. I have done things where I've built things that like, "Oh, I think the world needs this. I ran into this problem." But if I looked myself in the mirror, I wouldn't have said, "Yeah, I'll buy this right now."

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky28:21

       Along those lines, is this advice mostly for B2B SaaS sort of software, or is this, uh, applicable to, say, consumer app?

    6. RSRob Snyder28:28

       So I am mostly in the B2B space, but I have seen quite a few people-- I've been kind of surprised that a lot of people from the consumer space have, have used this as well. And someone sent me the story of, like, Spanx, which was basically she, she did the same thing of, of, um, uh, like selling one-on-one with people, seeing how they reacted to figure out all the different pieces of, of what became Spanx.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky28:51

       Yeah, and she solved her own problem famously.

    8. RSRob Snyder28:52

       Yes.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky28:53

       Just tore off her pantyhose or I think that's the story. Just [chuckles] guess she needed it now. I think it was like, yeah, she was going to an event. So that's, that's a cool example.

11. 29:02 – 31:01

    The Hail Mary question that can unlock a pivot

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky29:02

       You have this, we're gonna talk more about this, but you have this idea of the Hail Mary approach. Talk about that.

    2. RSRob Snyder29:07

       So the Hail Mary, so we've been talking about the happy path here. You find something, uh, you're talking with people, and they're like, "Oh my gosh, uh, uh, yeah, this is exactly what I need." A lot of the time, that's not gonna happen. You're gonna get that kind of lukewarm feel. And so what I've tended to find is that's also an opportunity to, what I call, throw the Hail Mary, which is, "Okay, this doesn't seem to be a thing. Is there anything on your to-do list that you would pay me to do right now? Like, that you would pay somebody to take off your plate?" And that's just an open-ended Hail Mary. I've actually seen quite a few startups totally pivot and take off from the Hail Mary, which has been really interesting. There's one startup, they were trying to sell an applicant tracking system into governments, and they had a call with somebody, and the person was like, "Yeah, that's kind of interesting." But after the Hail Mary question, "Yeah, what I'd actually pay you to solve is this, like, job description thing right now." And that became their first contract. That became their first customer, and they've grown super fast since then.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky30:11

       That's awesome. So the advice here is just sometimes feel free to just ask-

    4. RSRob Snyder30:14

       [laughs]

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky30:14

       ... what problem can we solve for you?

    6. RSRob Snyder30:16

       Yeah, and that, like, leads to- How to think about sales. Well, I'll just give a little, and we can dig into this if it's interesting. But, like, I always was kind of nervous to sell as a mega introvert and over thinker. Like, it just feels like a lot of pressure, um, and it, like, I need to convince you to buy. And so that question feels uncomfortable. But if you kind of reframe it in your own head of, "No, I'm just seeing if they need help with anything that they are stuck on. And if they don't, that's fine. But if they do, cool, we can explore if it, if I can help," then, uh, it kind of changes your orientation towards sales.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky30:54

       I, I am in the same boat as you, and that's a really nice way of thinking about it. I'm just trying to solve someone's problem.

    8. RSRob Snyder30:59

       Yeah.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky30:59

       That's why, why is it so hard?

12. 31:01 – 32:50

    Common traps to avoid

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky31:01

       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, or just, like, uh, traps people fall into when they're coming up with ideas?

    2. RSRob Snyder31:15

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

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky31:58

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

    4. RSRob Snyder32:01

       Oh, no

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky32:01

       ... which is... [chuckles] Okay, say more, 'cause this is typically very standard advice to find design partners.

    6. RSRob Snyder32:07

       Yeah. The, I don't know, uh, maybe in some context it's helpful. I have yet to see it hel- be helpful. What I've seen in basically every single time I've seen somebody with a design partner is that you recruit a design partner who, quote unquote, "buys into your vision for the product," and they give a bunch of feedback and never buy from you. They never buy, and you realize that all of their feedback was just, like, them playing Steve Jobs. And they're just like, "I'm gonna help this startup," versus, "I have something I'm actually trying to get done." And i- if you think about it, like, the people who actually have something really important they're trying to get done, they don't wanna be a design partner. They just want that thing done.

13. 32:50 – 34:46

    Quick recap

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky32:50

       I love that. Okay. So, so your advice is don't set up a bunch of design partners, and we'll go through kind of the process you actually recommend. Okay. So I guess just to think about this coming up with an idea step, the core moment is some insight based on-

    2. RSRob Snyder33:07

       Yes

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky33:07

       ... being hands-on, living with the people that you will be helping. The, the term I've heard describe, th- to describe this idea, um, I think it was, um, uh, a VC Floodgate that uses this. Um, you're basically looking for an earned secret.

    4. RSRob Snyder33:21

       Yes.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky33:23

       And your advice here is the way to find that earned secret, either it's you have lived it at a company, say Amazon gave this AWS example, or you're on the ground working side by side with the people dealing with it and just looking for, uh, problems that they have.

    6. RSRob Snyder33:38

       Yeah. Yeah.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky33:39

       Cool.

    8. RSRob Snyder33:39

       And you get, like, the method kind of doesn't matter. It might come to you in an ayahuasca retreat. Like, I, the, you get, you could get that secret from anywhere, but the things that are most likely to actually work are, like, getting your hands dirty and, and learning it from reality versus from theory.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky33:56

       So just to [chuckles] follow that thread, say there's, like, a pie chart of, of the, say, 50 companies you've worked with, where their idea came from. What would be, like, the biggest chunks of the pie chart?

    10. RSRob Snyder34:06

        I would say 10%, um, own experience, 90% going and getting firsthand, uh, uh, like, experience. And within that, it's been a bit of, like... S- some of them sold the wrong product to figure out what the right product was, um, but most of them actually go and do the thing firsthand.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky34:28

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

    12. RSRob Snyder34:30

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

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky34:34

        Yes. [laughs] That's the, the pull hypothesis.

    14. RSRob Snyder34:37

        Yes.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky34:38

        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.

14. 34:46 – 39:18

    Landing your first customer conversations

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky34:47

       The next phase in my eyes is finding someone to talk to and sell it to, so basically landing a first sales call.

    2. RSRob Snyder34:54

       Mm-hmm.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky34:55

       Talk about how you go about landing that call and what happens kind of... And then we'll talk about actually running the call, but before we get there, just, like, finding people to talk to.

    4. RSRob Snyder35:05

       Yeah, this is a fun one. So my goal is actually, like, I wanna have two to three conversations per day with potential customers, but to get there, you have to first get your first conversation. So you can do warm intros, you can do all that kind of stuff. We'll just talk about if you don't have any of that and you need to get people to talk to you cold. The way I typically recommend founders start is to just reach out to your potential customers on LinkedIn or via email, and it's with a very specific kind of message that is not a, "Hey, do you have X, Y, Z pain points? Would you like to buy our game-changing solution?" Like, no template you get online is going to get you any responses except for, like, "Leave me alone." And so I call it founder magic kind of outreach at this stage, which is basically like, "You're interesting. I'm interesting. Let's chat and see." And this is totally acceptable. Like, I, one of the startups that I helped, their message was, uh, "Hey, Snoop Dogg invested in us, and I thought you'd find it interesting, too. Would you be open to chat?" That's a fun message. Everyone has their own version of that. Like, everyone who listens to this or everyone who's a founder, like, has an interesting message you can send, and you don't have to convince them in the message to buy your product. You just get them to talk with you. This pull exists- ... out there on their to-do list. And so the message doesn't do anything about that. It just, the, it's just to get them to talk to you.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky36:32

       Yeah.

    6. RSRob Snyder36:32

       So just say something interesting to cause them to meet with you.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky36:35

       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 gonna solve. It's just, like, get their attention with something interesting.

    8. RSRob Snyder36:47

       Yes.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky36:48

       Uh, the Snoop Dogg example is awesome. Any other, any other examples, any other kind of ways of thinking about what might be interesting to someone?

    10. RSRob Snyder36:55

        There's, there's been a variety of ones that I've seen. Um, [lip smack] 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. Um, you can have, there's a variety of different things I've seen from, um, I, you know, I was s- you know, Sam Altman's chief of staff, right? That, you know-

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky37:23

        Mm

    12. RSRob Snyder37:23

        ... if anybody sends that message, that will work quite well. It doesn't matter what the rest of the message says. I thought you'd be interesting and o- open to chat. And so it's finding something interesting that's, like, worth a conversation, uh, with them. Yeah, I c- uh, what, what I'd say is it really depends on your end customer, too, because if you're doing outreach to, like, for example, HVAC companies, saying, "Hey, I'm Sam Altman's former chief of staff. Thought you might find it interesting," they're gonna say, "Buddy, I have no idea what the words in this message mean." So it could be like, "Hey, I was at my da- uh, like, I worked at my family's plumbing company w- in, in high school, and now I'm do- working on this kind of, uh, interesting thing. Thought you might find it interesting. Would you be open to chat?"

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky38:06

        Uh, an implicit element of this is keep it very short. Sounds like it's-

    14. RSRob Snyder38:09

        Yes

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky38:09

        ... just, like, a sentence or two.

    16. RSRob Snyder38:10

        Yeah.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky38:11

        Okay. And then what's your take on, uh, AI emailing a bunch of people versus individually reaching out and thinking about some unique message per person?

    18. RSRob Snyder38:21

        I, uh, have not seen AI personalization work at this stage. Usually, what it does is it tells them something they already know about themselves, and they're like, "That looks like Claude wrote it." And so I don't usually recommend that. I also don't, I haven't seen personalization be super important here. The, these messages that I, like, I said the entire message that I would send. You don't need to actually have a ton of personalization in it. Or like, "Hey, I'm going to X conference. We're gonna be pitching. Would you be open to chat?" Like, something like that can be good enough without any personalization at all.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky38:55

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

    20. RSRob Snyder39:10

        Yeah. And on the call, we'll see if you have pull. If you do, you're gonna turn it into a sales call. If you don't, nothing I do is gonna change that.

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky39:17

        [chuckles]

15. 39:18 – 41:27

    Outreach benchmarks and diagnosing what isn’t working

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky39:19

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

    2. RSRob Snyder39:26

       Yeah, so I tend to start on LinkedIn, because the kind of person who you and I, like, talk to, they have interesting LinkedIns. And so if you're reaching out to someone, they're gonna say, "Oh, okay." That, so that's gonna do a lot of lifting. You can just get started. And so, uh, you can add 100, 150 people on LinkedIn per week. Go for that. Add 20 a day, and then message them when they accept the connection request. And if you're sending, like, if you're connecting with, I don't know, let's say you connect with 100 people per week, or you, you send 150, um, m- my typical targets for that are, like, 30% to 40% of them should accept your connection request, and then of them, 30% to 50% should reply, and a subset of them should say yes. The majority of them should say, "Yeah, sure. Why not?"

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky40:13

       Okay. That's an awesome benchmark. So if you're not at that level, basically your interesting email is not, is not working, you should find some more interesting-

    4. RSRob Snyder40:20

       It's, it's, it's, 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 requ-"

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky40:28

       Mm.

    6. RSRob Snyder40:28

       Or, "It looks like you're about to pitch me," right? Or something like that. Or your message just isn't interesting if you're getting 30% to 40% accepts and then people aren't replying.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky40:37

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16. 41:27 – 46:56

    How to run your first sales call

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky41:28

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

    2. RSRob Snyder41:37

       Mostly two steps in a sales call. There's the pull discovery step, and then there's the kind of conceptual pitch of how we might help step. And so the, uh, the theory behind a sales call is, again, it's like if you have pull, you're gonna rip the thing out of my hands. I don't come into this call, like, wired up ready to try to convince you to buy, like, SuperAnt. No, it's just-

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky42:05

       Mm-hmm

    4. RSRob Snyder42:06

       ... if you have pull, you're gonna convince me to let you buy. And so I approach this with the vibe of just, like, waned back, excited to chat. Let's, let's see if I might be able to help you. And so I have a very specific structure of a sales call that I recommend for getting into discovery and then transitioning out of discovery. Basically, the, you start the call, "Hey, thanks so much for taking the time." I'm curious, I'm sure you get a bunch of people reaching out to you. Like, why did you take the call with me today? That's a chance for them to say, "You know, you mentioned AI agents, and I've been thinking about this, and I've just been waiting, and I looked at your website," I, whatever, whatever it winds up being. And y- they, they fill out the entire PULL framework for you right there. That's ideal, and then you can say, "Oh, that's interesting. Let me... Can I ask a couple follow-ups?" But most of the time they'll say, "I don't know, you reached out to me. Excited to hear what you have to say." 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, and 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 pull by saying, "Great. Okay, before we get to those items on your, you know, uh, on our agenda, um, do you mind if I ask you a few questions to better understand your context?" And that way you've earned the right to ask questions. It does not feel like an interrogation to them, because if it does, uh, they're not telling you anything.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky43:33

       Okay. A few tactical questions. One is just how long should you try to make this call? How long should your invite be for? And then where does, where does a demo fit in? Do you recommend demo on this call or doing a separate call for that?

    6. RSRob Snyder43:44

       Yeah, so this is almost always a 30-minute call on my calendar. Just, um, I've found smaller calendar blocks, uh, they don't see on their calendar-

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky43:53

       [chuckles]

    8. RSRob Snyder43:53

       ... and so they don't show. Um, and so 30 minutes, and then iffy on doing a demo. So if you're super early, you probably don't have a demo to show. And so, um, but later on you might have a very short demo in, in your first call.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky44:09

       I, I guess, 'cause I'm thinking about the Jen conversation I had, and her advice is wait to do the demo.

    10. RSRob Snyder44:14

        Yeah.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky44:14

        But that's an enterprise sales sort of product, not like an early stage, just full hypothesis phase.

    12. RSRob Snyder44:19

        Yeah, totally. Totally.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky44:21

        Okay, got it. What's a sign that the, this meeting went well? Is it this kind of leaning in, pulling it from you feeling?

    14. RSRob Snyder44:28

        Yeah, so, so it's kind of you're able to surface pull, or you're able to say, "Okay, you don't have pull at all. Ex- 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.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky44:51

        How many of these calls sh- should you do before you're like, "Okay, there's no pull here. Time to move on"?

    16. RSRob Snyder44:56

        I don't have a hard, uh... 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... A- and I've seen people do, like, hundreds of calls where they still don't [chuckles] like they... So do five and then check in and see what you've learned from the calls. Was there any pull there? Did we learn anything interesting? Like I, a startup I was just helping out, they had done, like, five calls into banking and they just felt nothing. But they got an intro from one of the people. They said, "Yeah, this doesn't seem relevant to me, but you might consider defense companies." And they got an intro into that. They know nothing about defense. And in the first conversation in defense, the person's like, "Holy. Are you serious?" And they're like, "Okay, maybe there's something here," and they changed their pull hypothesis.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky45:45

        It feels like a big part of this, of your, of your framework and approach is to just, like, be brutally honest with yourself whether there's something here. I imagine a lot of founders are just, like, so excited and convinced this is real, and your approach is just like, here's, here's a way to validate that and be really real with what's working or not.

    18. RSRob Snyder46:03

        Yeah, and I think it's the thinking of it as we're selling to learn, not really to, to, like, push something. Yeah, not, not to push. Uh, we're, we're gonna learn, and we're seeing if they try to buy. If they don't, cool, we've learned something. We can kind of keep iterating from there. If they do, okay, great, now we've might have something. Let's see if it repeats.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky46:25

        The whole idea of calling this pull is so smart because you always hear product market fit is you're feeling pull, you're feeling pull.

    20. RSRob Snyder46:32

        Yeah.

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky46:32

        This boulder's pulling you down. You're, the wind is pushing you.

    22. RSRob Snyder46:35

        Yeah.

    23. LRLenny Rachitsky46:35

        Um, 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.

    24. RSRob Snyder46:43

        Yeah, and you can also tell, like, do I feel like I'm pushing right now?

    25. LRLenny Rachitsky46:46

        Mm.

    26. RSRob Snyder46:46

        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.

17. 46:56 – 49:59

    Successful pitch tactics

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky46:56

       Is there an example that comes to mind when you think about a good sales call, what that kind of feels like, looks like, what a pitch would be?

    2. RSRob Snyder47:03

       Yeah, so, so what you're trying to do is you're trying to get, again, get the pull out of them. And so they say, um, you know, uh, "I'm trying to, I'm trying to make a website, but one of those, like, you know, those typical point-and-click website design things are just, like, too much effort for me." Right? So you have something about pull there. You've kind of pulled that out of them.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky47:26

       Mm.

    4. RSRob Snyder47:26

       They, they, they've described that. And so the kind of interesting thing is that once you have pull, your pitch is, like, quite simple. What you're not trying to do here is you're not trying to describe this massive product vision or your theory of the problem. You know that they're trying to do X, but blocked because of Y. And so your pitch in that case is, "Okay, so it sounds like you're, you're looking for something to make a website without all the hassle of a point-and-click thing. Is that roughly it?" And you describe it in a really, really small and simple way, not a really big way. You describe it in a small way, and they say, "Yeah, that's, that sounds like it. How exactly does that work? Like, tell me more." They're pulling more information out of you, and that's when you know you're, like, starting to be onto something.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky48:15

       And are you in your head thinking through the PULL framework of these four points and just thinking through, like, okay, is this actually a something they need right now and unavoidable? Are there, what are their alternatives, and kind of thinking through all that?

    6. RSRob Snyder48:26

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

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky48:29

       Mm.

    8. RSRob Snyder48:29

       Which is, like, um, if I, if they don't tell me at the very beginning when I say, "Why'd you take the call?" Then I'm asking a question that's kind of like- Is there anything as it relates to, I don't know, your QA process that you're trying to do but you've been unable to do with your existing tools, methods, team, whatever, right? And so that question has all the elements of pull in it so that they can then say, "Oh yeah, actually, we've been trying to automate end-to-end testing, but can't do da, da, da, da, da w- with, uh, you know, with our existing tools." And so, and then if they kind of give me some element there, then I have the framework in my mind, and I know a lot of people actually have the framework in, like, a doc during the call, and they're filling it out live. And it's like, I don't think I have the you. And then you ask a question, you're like, "Okay, but, like, is it okay if you don't do that now? Like, can you... Is there some reason you have to do this now, or is this okay to do another time?"

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky49:26

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

    10. RSRob Snyder49:29

        Oh, and the scariest one is to say, "Well, what have you, uh, I'm sure you've looked into other options. Are they good enough?" Right? [laughs] And, and, uh, to hear that one, uh, when they're like, "Actually, yeah, we can do it ourselves, and that's good enough." But it prevents you from, again, pushing a mar- product the market doesn't want.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky49:46

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

    12. RSRob Snyder49:49

        Yeah. I-

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky49:49

        Which is the-

    14. RSRob Snyder49:50

        There's a reason I look like I'm 60 and I'm 35, right?

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky49:52

        [laughs]

    16. RSRob Snyder49:52

        Like, don't push-

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky49:54

        You look great, Rob. You look great.

    18. RSRob Snyder49:56

        Filters. [laughs]

18. 49:59 – 54:08

    Does your product need to be 10 times better?

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky50:00

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

    2. RSRob Snyder50:25

       Well, it's to find the people for whom sta- the status quo is not okay, right? It's to find the people, you know, everyone says, like, change is hard and all this kind of stuff. Well, you're looking for the people who are already trying to change, who don't need convincing.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky50:39

       There's this idea that your product has to be 10 times better than the existing solution for anyone to care. Do you feel like, like, how do you think about, okay, this is better. They tried alternatives. None of them do it, or some of them do it okay. Like, how much better does this have to be for them to care, or is it okay if it's just, like, you know, just a little bit better?

    4. RSRob Snyder50:58

       The example with, 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 notetakers? Well, if those notetakers don't get the job done and we do, they are infinitely better. They unblock something. And so that's kind of how I think about, how stuck are they with their existing options? And so I don't know, I don't know about 10X. Like, I, that, 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?

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky51:28

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

    6. RSRob Snyder51:33

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky51:35

       Yeah. So just, I'm curious if it applies through this framework. So in my understanding, Linear wins over Jira often 'cause the experience is s- is just better. It's just, like, a beautiful, smooth, uh, you know, well-crafted, uh, experience. And so they win a lot of customers because it just feels nice, and engineers really like using it. Do you feel like that works through the PULL framework, or is there something else going on there?

    8. RSRob Snyder52:00

       Again, if we use the PULL framework to, to analyze that situation, what would have to be true is there's a certain kind of person who is trying to do their issue tracking, but, like, they are blocked from do... They're trying to do something around issue tracking, and something about Jira's experience is blocking them from doing the way, such that Linear's way better experience is actually relevant to them, right? Like, I've done... So I've made the mistake of taking that analogy and being like, "Okay, so I can just come into a category with way better UX, way better experience, and I'm gonna crush it," and, like, try that in HR software. And, [laughs] and, uh, I try, I tried it in HR software, and it turned out the user experience was not relevant to the buyer. And so they didn't have pull. They didn't care that their systems look like they're still on COBOL or whatever it is. The, so it wasn't relevant there. But a- again, the pull theory would say that basically in, in, uh, the case of Jira, Jira versus, uh, Linear, that there was a kind of person who was kind of blocked by Jira's experience.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky53:08

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

    10. RSRob Snyder53:29

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

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky54:05

        [laughs] When I was growing up.

19. 54:08 – 1:00:41

    Closing the deal

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky54:08

       I like that. Okay, so let's move on to the next step. So at this point, we, you had your first sales call. Uh, I imagine the next step is closing the deal, and, uh, it, it's interesting 'cause it's still early. You may not even have a product. What does that look like going from, "Okay, I wanna buy it now"? What do you, what do you do next?

    2. RSRob Snyder54:24

       Yeah. So it, it, it kind of gonna depend on the size of the deal, but you wanna come back with some sort of a concept and some sort of a plan. And so, uh, examples of this, so the pharma company that I mentioned, uh, earlier, the company selling into pharma He showed up and just threw a Hail Mary on a, on an intro to a pharma exec. Pharma exec was like, "Oh my gosh, thank you so much for asking. Our current market research is da, da, da, da, da. We're trying... It's, 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. A- and so it sounds like you're looking for faster market research that, uh, that looks like the current research you're getting, but kind of, I don't know, like, it, it's just better in these kinds of ways. Is that roughly right?" And the exec was like, "Yes, that's exactly it." And so the founder was like, "Okay, let's do this. What if I come back to you in a couple days with a kind of mock-up of what I think that could look like, and then we can, we can discuss if that fits what you're really looking for, and then decide if we wanna move forward?" And so in that case, no slides, no nothing. Goes and vibe codes a kind of rough layout of what this would look like, gets some feedback on it, says, "Okay, based on that, is there anything else you need to know to decide whether this is a fit that you wanna bring into your organization?" Says, uh, like, "Yeah, what's the price?" And then there's a, there's a talk track you can use for price, but that's basically it.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky55:48

       Okay. Tell me more about this price talk track.

    4. RSRob Snyder55:51

       Yeah. So the interesting thing about the PULL framework is that it can help you set the bounds for pricing. So what's the value of getting the project done? Or what are the costs of the alternatives? So, uh, the, the Ls. So you could-- What's the value of getting this market research faster? Or what is the cost you're currently spending with your, um, with your market research consultants? Both of those can tell you, okay, the value of market research is, like, X. The cost with consultants is, I don't know, $50,000 per, per year. And so that gives me a rough boundary to say, "Okay, what if we charged $50,000 a year, the same price as your current market research consultants?" It, it kind of gives a frame on price that, um, that makes it intuitive to your potential customers.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky56:41

       Awesome. Okay. Um, so the way you've kind of written about this closing step, there's kind of, like, two parts. There's the fit of just, like, is this a fit? And then it's just a bunch of project management to get the deal closed. Um, so we've spent a lot of time, I think, on the fit. The project management, is there anything there important to talk about?

    6. RSRob Snyder56:58

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

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky57:32

       Mm-hmm.

    8. RSRob Snyder57:33

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

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky58:12

       Awesome. So basically asking when do we need to show success for this to be a thing that you all roll out, and then working backwards from that. Okay. Um, at this point a lot of people would create basically design partnership arrangements where they're like, "Okay, well, cool. We'll build this with you. We'll figure it out as we go. We won't charge you." Uh, per your earlier point, you are not into design partnerships. Uh, I imagine your advice here is just, like, sell it directly. Don't try to give them to for free. Don't set up some kind of partnership thing.

    10. RSRob Snyder58:39

        Yeah. Yeah. Why, well-

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky58:40

        Okay

    12. RSRob Snyder58:40

        ... why shoot yourself in the foot?

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky58:43

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

    14. RSRob Snyder58:52

        Yeah. If they're like... It, it, it basically takes something from, "I need to, to solve this right now"-

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky58:58

        Mm-hmm

    16. RSRob Snyder58:58

        ... to, 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.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky59:10

        Awesome. Okay. That totally makes sense. Like, if there's pull, just go with it. You don't need to... Yeah. Don't waste it.

    18. RSRob Snyder59:16

        Yeah, and you can sell something that's like, you know, you might not have a full platform ready. You can sell something that's more service shaped early on. I've seen a bunch of startups do that, where they sell, you know, "Okay, we're gonna have an AI product manager who can do X, Y, ki- Z kind of thing. For now, it's delivered by us while this thing is working behind the scenes." And so you can kind of frame it so they're not expecting a full platform that, like, enterprise grade platform ready next week. They expect something more service shaped, and you kind of validate that there's real pull there, and you figure out what the actual thing to build is while delivering it a mix of manually and automated.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky59:55

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

    20. RSRob Snyder1:00:21

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

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:31

        Hmm. Awesome. Yeah. And the idea is AI kind of does more and more of the stuff.

    22. RSRob Snyder1:00:35

        Yes.

    23. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:35

        And part of it is you learn more and more of what, uh, what the problem opportunities are and things like that with people doing the work.

20. 1:00:41 – 1:02:22

    Using the PULL framework to set pricing

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:00:41

       Okay. Um, going back to price real quick. Uh, classically, founders are afraid to ask for big numbers and throw out, you know, high prices, uh, knowing that this stuff changes and you'll learn as you go. Any advice for that first price pitch of what number to throw out?

    2. RSRob Snyder1:00:57

       Yeah. So early on, I'm really more testing willingness to transact versus willingness to pay, and so I don't care about pricing a ton in the early couple of customers. That said, I was just working with a company that set, their first deal 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 [chuckles] approach that I'd recommend for that is, um, almost like using a case study as a, "Hey, react to this kind of case study." And so you'd say, "Y- when we talk to others, the way they've... Everyone's kind of done pricing differently. Some of them have been, you know, it's been, sometimes it's been a small project for 80,000, other times it's been up to a million in terms of, right, and these are kind of the levers here. And some people, a lot of people wind up in the middle. Uh, 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.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:14

       [laughs] Throw up on that. I like that. Um, I know this case study concept is, is actually an important part of this whole framework. I'm gonna come back

21. 1:02:22 – 1:06:56

    Revising your hypothesis and going into goblin mode

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:22

       to it.

    2. RSRob Snyder1:02:22

       Yeah.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:02:23

       But okay, so s- so let's talk about the next steps. So say you have the sales call, maybe you have two, what kind of comes next after this first batch of sales calls that you're doing?

    4. RSRob Snyder1:02:31

       Yeah. This is where the paths might diverge. So hopefully, you're right, and, [chuckles] and, uh, these people have pull. Great. You now have customers. Time to deliver and start repeating this, and tr- start figuring out how to automate things and, and just systematize this. You're on the right path. A lot of the times, you get kind of a weird set of responses. You, you learn that the people you thought were weird not to buy are actually weird to buy. It'd be weird if they did buy. They're not behaving in a way where they have pull. And in that case, what I tend to recommend is you just analyze, you go back and review the calls, and you say, "Okay. Did one actually have pull? Did zero? Like, what have we learned here?" And then you craft a new hypothesis and run it again.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:19

       Got it. And imagine most of the time it's not, it's not there, and is that your experience, or what's kind of the pie chart of yes success versus not at this stage?

    6. RSRob Snyder1:03:29

       Yeah. I've seen, like, maybe once or twice where it was there-

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:33

       Mm-hmm

    8. RSRob Snyder1:03:33

       ... uh, from the beginning, and that's magical.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:36

       Mm-hmm.

    10. RSRob Snyder1:03:36

        Like, you feel like a hero when you, when you get it right the first time. Uh, a lot of times it is, uh, it is m- like we're so wrong and backwards that we don't know, and so you just ask a Hail Mary a couple times, and that gets you on the right path. Or you, like, do something crazy where a friend just, uh, like, went to a conference and scheduled 20 meetings and just was like, "I don't know what to do. You tell me what to build." You were s- 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.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:12

        Say more about goblin mode. This is amazing.

    12. RSRob Snyder1:04:14

        Yeah. You know, like, when, when dogs do the, like, get the zoomies, right, and they just like... That's, that's the thing I have in my mind for what goblin mode is as a founder, where it's like-

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:23

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

    14. RSRob Snyder1:04:25

        It's a, it's a break glass in case of emergency thing.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:04:29

        Mm-hmm.

    16. RSRob Snyder1:04:29

        Uh, where it's, um... And I think some founders actually operate like this all the time, where it's like, okay, there's actually a conference tomorrow in Europe that has these potential customers there. I can't get them to talk to me, so looks like I'm gonna get on a plane right now and go there, right? It's just doing, uh, kind of somewhat crazy things with the goal of getting in front of customers right now. And, uh, yeah, like some people can do this all the time. Uh, others like me who are getting old, like I can, I can pull this out once in a while.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:01

        [laughs] Get that goblin mode out sometimes.

    18. RSRob Snyder1:05:05

        Yeah.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:05

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

    20. RSRob Snyder1:05:12

        Yeah. And one example of this, like it's kind of a crazy example, but a f- a friend's building a, a company called Teero, which does dental staffing, uh, for, for dental hygienists, and he, his version of goblin mode was his parents went door to door [chuckles] to different dental offices to just get people to, to talk to him about, about being customers, and-

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:32

        Mm-hmm

    22. RSRob Snyder1:05:32

        ... that worked, and so it's just like weird stuff like that can work.

    23. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:36

        Amazing. [laughs] Okay, so say you do a couple sales calls, say you do five. Is that, is that kind of the idea, do, like, five and assess? Is that-

    24. RSRob Snyder1:05:42

        Yeah

    25. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:42

        ... rough heuristic? Okay. So say, to your point, most times you'll find, okay, this is not, there's no pull here, sorry. What do you do? Do you go back to the beginning, go hands, hands-on with some other small business sort of thing, or what do you recommend?

    26. RSRob Snyder1:05:55

        Yeah. So d- different pathways there. Hopefully you've-

    27. LRLenny Rachitsky1:05:58

        Yeah

    28. RSRob Snyder1:05:58

        ... asked the Hail Mary question and you've learned something there that's, like, worth double-clicking into.

    29. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:03

        And the Hail Mary question is just like, w- what, is there anything that we can do to-

    30. RSRob Snyder1:06:07

        Yes
22. 1:06:56 – 1:09:28

    Designing onboarding to make customers stay

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:56

       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, like, there's kind of like the building, onboarding process, and then just keeping them happy. What's that process like? What advice do you have there?

    2. RSRob Snyder1:07:12

       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 caught a car, and I just kind of like threw the software over the, [chuckles] over the, over the fence and like, "Good luck." Um, what I've learned since then, the hard way obviously, is that, like, retention is super important, and it's not obvious. And so the way I think about, like, delivery post-sale is that basically everybody who buys is guaranteed to churn until X, in which case they're weird to churn. And all delivery is all, ev- everything is about figuring out what is X and how do you design a bullet train so every customer gets there. And so, uh, the X is y- you might think of it as, oh, they're using the product or they have high NPS or whatever it is. It's almost never those things. Mark Roberge w- uh, has this kind of leading indicator of retention, which for Slack was like you've sent 10,000 messages or 1,000 messages in your first X amount of time. If you hit that, it's like, it'd be weird if you churned. You're, it's the leading indicator of retention. For my startup, we gave retention software to restaurants. If they got a notification that somebody was going to quit that they could prevent within the first two weeks, uh, after purchase, they would s- like, go insane. They would tell all of their friends about it, and they, it would be weird if they churned. And so we just designed the onboarding process to that. And so what I recommend is once you have a couple people who are saying yes, don't just like throw the product over and like send them a login and pray. Go deliver firsthand as well, and you're gonna learn a ton from that, and keep asking the question, like, "Are you gonna churn now? Are you gonna churn now?" Like, what, and try to find the moment when, when they're like, "Oh, okay, cool. I can't live without this."

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:06

       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, uh, to take these general ideas of what it looks like when things are going well and how to find an idea to just like, "Okay, here's what you plug in. Talk about the specific thing. It's working. Adjust."

23. 1:09:28 – 1:11:37

    What churn can teach you about your ideal customer

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:09:28

       So this is great. On the churn piece, is there, what's like a sign, okay, shoot, everyone's churning, just like a sign of like, okay, they thought they didn't, but that it's not working? Anything there of just like what's a sign n- at this stage, okay, maybe it's not working versus it is?

    2. RSRob Snyder1:09:42

       Yeah. So if everybody's churning, the, it is unacceptable for you to not figure out why. And so, uh, w- what I've actually seen is in a lot of cases, like for a lot of horizontal products, you're gonna have a lot of, like, user drop-off. Uh, one, one startup I know, like, they, they were a horizontal AI workflows product. Cool. Join the club, right? But they found through being a horizontal AI workflows product that, like, one or two kinds of customers kept using it while everyone else was churning. And so if a bunch of people are churning, 90%-plus of your cust- your u- customers are churning, first of all, I'm sorry. It sucks. It really, you know, you wake up at 4:00 AM every morning just sweating. But in that, you often can figure out why, and is it something that you're doing or is it something about them? And that can tell you, okay, who actually had pull that we can sell, deliver, retain, and, and for, like, that horizontal workflows product, they found that freight forwarders were using it for one specific workflow, and so they pivoted the entire company to focus on that. And so they went from being this horizontal product with massive churn, low price, to a very premium product for freight forwarders.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:54

       There's no point at which, like, okay, we figured it out. We're gonna 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 m- step you get, it's more and more certain there's something here at least, and then there's, like, the in forever in doubt of, like, how big can this get. I remember talking to the founder of Databricks, which is now, like, a bazillion trillion dollar company, and, um, he said something like, even at 100 million ARR, they were still very unclear if this was a thing that will last, and I think that's very common. So that's, it's like its own topic of just, like-

    4. RSRob Snyder1:11:26

       That's nice to know. That's nice to know-

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:28

       Mm

    6. RSRob Snyder1:11:28

       ... 'cause everyone, yeah, ev- everyone's like, "How will this become a big thing?" And it's like, I don't know. We'll figure it out.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:34

       Yeah. It's just kind of one step at a time and, and

24. 1:11:37 – 1:16:15

    Building a repeatable case study factory

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:37

       so, so in this conversation, the final step in my mind is this idea you have of this, um, use- user case study factory, which kind of takes you from things are starting to work to, okay, now we can create a repeatable system that helps us grow. So talk about that, what that looks like, what that's about.

    2. RSRob Snyder1:11:54

       Yeah. So this is the thing that whenever I talk about, everyone just, like, everyone's eyes glaze over, and so I haven't found, found a useful way to talk about this yet, so just pre-warning. I think it's the most important thing in, in all of this, which is how do you think about your startup? What's your conceptual model for your startup? And, like, you need to have a way to think about your startup to know how to grow it as fast as humanly possible. So what winds up happening is you find somebody who has pull. You give them a product, a service, a whatever that they pull out of your hands. So it turns out they were trying to do X, their existing options weren't good enough for Y, and you offer Z that helps unblock them. That sounds a lot like a case study that you would feature on your website, and it's a helpful thing because, okay, my job as a founder is not to produce 100 different case studies, totally different case studies, because that's not scalable. That's not repeatable I'm looking to build one case study where a customer says, "Hell yes," before they buy and after they buy, and just repeat that a million times. And so that model helped me go from thinking that startups were a bunch of different things, I need to know all these different things, to like, no, a startup is just a thing that repeats one case study infinite times, and all the stuff that I do is to build a factory for repeating that case study. And if I do this right, there's a case study where customers say, "Hell yes," and they pull themself through each step of the factory. The steps are the pipeline step, how do we get people to talk to us? Sales step, how do we turn potential customers into actual customers? And the delivery step of the case study factory, which is, how do we get people who are customers to be weird not to churn? And so everything we do kind of fits into this case study factory, and if you see this in your mind, it radically simplifies, like, a startup, how it works, and then you can use, like, the theory of constraints, we're gonna get really nerdy for a second, from manufacturing to, like, look at your case study factory and say, "Okay, where is our s- where is the bottleneck to our growth? Is it that we're not, like, s- 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 con- close rate is lower than it should be. Okay, cool, that's our bottleneck. Now we're gonna 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.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:23

       It's a really interesting way to think about it, where instead of we are trying to just get more customers closed and more deals closed, instead we're looking, we're building, uh, case studies. Like, you're almost, like, working backwards from what's the case study gonna be of this company we're talking to. Say we're talking to SpaceX, just like we want it to look s- consistent across all the companies we're talking to. People talk about, call this repeatable sales motions. But I like the idea of thinking about, like, it's almost like working backwards from the press release-

    4. RSRob Snyder1:14:51

       Yes

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:51

       ... but for sales. What is the case study we're gonna write about SpaceX? Okay, here's how we got them, here's how we got, sold them, here's how we delivered it.

    6. RSRob Snyder1:14:58

       And the pull-

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:59

       And the idea is just, like, create, like, consistent, repeatable case studies that you will later be able to share.

    8. RSRob Snyder1:15:03

       And, yeah, and ex- exact- And then, and then what sales becomes is it becomes kind of like, "Hey, this is the case study that we deliver on. Is this relevant to you or not?" And it becomes actually, like, you, you can show the case study to people, and they say, "Yeah, that's actually what I want as well." And so it-

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:19

       Mm

    10. RSRob Snyder1:15:19

        ... becomes this kind of tool, and you can say, "Yeah, you don't look like our case study, so it's probably gonna 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.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:30

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

    12. RSRob Snyder1:15:45

        Yeah. Yeah, we don't make software here.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:46

        Okay.

    14. RSRob Snyder1:15:46

        We make case studies.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:47

        [laughs] So is that, is that, is that your advice, just, like, think of it that way?

    16. RSRob Snyder1:15:51

        Yes.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:51

        Like, we make, we make case studies here. Yeah, that's interesting. And it's not like you need to actually share and write up a case study. It's just a mental model for how to think about what you're trying to build as an, a sales go-to-market org.

    18. RSRob Snyder1:16:03

        Yeah, totally. And, and the good news is if you have the PULL framework, then you just describe, "Here's how we helped them and what they accomplished," and you have a case study.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16:12

        Mm. Amazing. Okay.

25. 1:16:15 – 1:20:03

    Applying the framework inside established companies

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16:15

       There's a couple things I wanna touch on, 'cause this is the end of the process, basically.

    2. RSRob Snyder1:16:18

       Yes.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16:19

       Um, there's a few things I wanna touch on, uh, that came out of, of the community and things you mentioned real quick. One is you, you had this term, hell yes customers. Say more about that. Is, um, you mentioned it of, like, when you're looking for someone to buy it and then use it, there's this idea of they want them to be hell yes.

    4. RSRob Snyder1:16:34

       Yeah, it's, it's basically somebody who pulls the product out of your hands before they buy, and then afterwards they use it as if it is addictive. And so they, they might literally say, "Hell yes," but what matters is they're weird not to buy and weird to churn, and that process is mostly them pulling versus you pushing.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:16:56

       Mm.

    6. RSRob Snyder1:16:56

       That's your perfect fit customer, and your job is just to find more who are basically clones of them.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:17:01

       Okay. Uh, the other kind of point I wanna reinforce is you recommend no pilots, no point, proof of concepts, no design partners. Just go straight to, "We're gonna sell this to you and roll it out, and it's gonna be amazing."

    8. RSRob Snyder1:17:12

       Yep. And, and, like, sometimes you're gonna do that and they say, "Okay, but the way we buy here is we actually need to pilot it."

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:17:18

       Mm.

    10. RSRob Snyder1:17:18

        Okay, cool, but don't proactively-

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:17:21

        I see

    12. RSRob Snyder1:17:22

        ... offer.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:17:23

        Awesome. Okay. Another big question that came out of the community is from an external perspective, this feels like this is just for startups and founders, but this actually applies for, and we mentioned this at the beginning, but just to reinforce this point, for larger companies that are working on a new feature, new business line sort of thing. Uh, talk about just if there's anything that you would think about differently through this process if you're at a mature company building a new product.

    14. RSRob Snyder1:17:46

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

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:18:35

        So the idea here is you have a product, you're hearing, you're basically look- finding these little nuggets of this could be a thing. And what I'm imagining is then you go through this whole pull hypothesis step by step, just like put up the hypothesis, talk to five of your existing customers, look for that pull- Uh, see if they're gonna actually buy it-

    16. RSRob Snyder1:18:53

        Yes

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky1:18:53

        ... and then kind of go through the same process. And an important wrinkle here that we haven't reinforced enough maybe is that it's the founders that should be doing this, especially in a startup. But it's interesting you said even at a mature company, if it's a new product, the founders ideally are doing that selling.

    18. RSRob Snyder1:19:10

        Uh, yeah, ideally. Not always the case.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky1:19:12

        Yeah, yeah.

    20. RSRob Snyder1:19:12

        There, there are people who are, who are doing zero-to-one stuff, but I just recommend if you're in that situation and you're n- 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.

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky1:19:26

        Awesome. And then again, if things aren't working, uh, there's this idea you shared of goblin mode, of just like, okay, just try a bunch of stuff, talk to as many people, get on planes, go have 20 meetings, and just look for something.

    22. RSRob Snyder1:19:38

        Yes. Yeah.

    23. LRLenny Rachitsky1:19:39

        Okay.

    24. RSRob Snyder1:19:39

        Hail Mary, goblin mode.

    25. LRLenny Rachitsky1:19:41

        Goblin mode. Okay

    26. RSRob Snyder1:19:41

        Like, all of these things are just the, your break glass in case of emergency. Time is really valuable, and, like, staying stuck, stuck is awful. If you're in this, like, pain cave of zero to one, it's like the worst time of your life, and you just don't wanna prolong that. So just get on a plane, go to the office, go in person, do whatever it takes to find something.

26. 1:20:03 – 1:25:45

    Lightning round and final thoughts

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky1:20:04

       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 wanna, I don't know, double down on before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

    2. RSRob Snyder1:20:14

       Hopefully what's come across is kind of how simple this is. Pull framework, show to people, see if they pull. There's a lot of ways to, like, overcomplicate this, and there's a lot of ways where we try to solve every variable in our head in advance. And I've found that just pull framework, sell, see if they try to buy, uh, and think less in that process, [chuckles] uh, it will get you there.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky1:20:44

       Awesome. That sounds very simple. And I think it's important to note, like, this is very actually not... [chuckles] Like, it's hard to find an idea that actually works, and this is all, uh, here to help you save a lot of pain and suffering and building and be kind of being, uh, disillusion- not disillusioned, mis- uh, feeling like there's something there, wasting a lot of your life doing something that's not gonna work.

    4. RSRob Snyder1:21:05

       Yeah. Think of it as like a, um, you know, like a metal detector on a beach. Like, this is just giving you a metal detector. You might not find metal where you're looking right now, but at least I'm not giving you a spoon.

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky1:21:16

       At least I'm not giving you a spoon, meaning... [chuckles] Wait, what does that mean?

    6. RSRob Snyder1:21:19

       For, for the beach, right? Like, to, to, for metal on the beach.

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky1:21:21

       Oh, I see. You're not-

    8. RSRob Snyder1:21:22

       Yeah.

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky1:21:23

       Oh, I see. The, the you have a metal detector versus looking through all the sand with a spoon. Wow, I love that metaphor. [chuckles] Uh, and then sometimes you may find a thing that, and then you real- realize it's not worth anything.

    10. RSRob Snyder1:21:34

        Yeah.

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky1:21:34

        Okay. Wow, that's a great metaphor. Well, Rob, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?

    12. RSRob Snyder1:21:42

        Let's do it.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky1:21:43

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

    14. RSRob Snyder1:21:49

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

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky1:21:57

        Whoa

    16. RSRob Snyder1:21:57

        ... architecture, series of books on architecture. Best thing ever.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky1:22:00

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

    18. RSRob Snyder1:22:07

        I have two favorite movies that we watch repeatedly. One is the Pride, the most recent Pride and Prejudice, and the second is the Penguins of Madagascar movie. Don't know why.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky1:22:16

        Wow. Very different.

    20. RSRob Snyder1:22:17

        We're on both ends of the spectrum there.

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky1:22:18

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

    22. RSRob Snyder1:22:26

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

    23. LRLenny Rachitsky1:22:32

        Yeah, very hot right now. Uh, amazing. Okay, favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life?

    24. RSRob Snyder1:22:40

        Hmm. Uh, life is what you make of it.

    25. LRLenny Rachitsky1:22:45

        Hmm. So true. Final question. I'm curious to get your thoughts on this. So there's this idea of tar pit ideas. Uh, so I had Dalton Caldwell on the podcast. He was a partner at YC, and he has this term, tar pit ideas, which are ideas that people constantly have that are just terrible and don't work. And people keep having these ideas, and they keep trying it, and they're just like, "Okay, that doesn't work." Is there, are there any tar pit ideas you just find people keep coming to you and you're like, "Don't do that, it's not gonna work"?

    26. RSRob Snyder1:23:15

        Oh, that's interesting. The, the category is, of ideas is to go after a space when there is already a clear winner in that space without any theory on being different. I just keep seeing the, the... It's just like, "Oh, wow, Lemlist just built a sales automation tool and they're bootstrapped and they're growing really fast, so let me just build the exact same thing as them or something very close." And, you know, it's like, okay, but they, they've already, they've already won that or they've al- they've already, they've already done that thing. Um, and so, uh, unless you're like, "Oh, but this kind of customer is unblocked, and so we're gonna build something kind of different for them," those ideas almost always don't work, and you feel like you're going crazy 'cause you're like, "Well, it worked for them. What am I doing wrong?"

    27. LRLenny Rachitsky1:23:59

        And I imagine everyone answers, but it's better. And as we know, it can't just be a little bit better. And basically you're saying like, okay, but this is unblocking them.

    28. RSRob Snyder1:24:10

        Yes.

    29. LRLenny Rachitsky1:24:10

        And it's better than all the alternatives. They're just gonna go with that thing. But I guess then, you know, this goes into a whole other conversation. Like, what if it's, like, two times better? And I guess your advice there is it's, it's probably not good enough.

    30. RSRob Snyder1:24:20

        There are many things, right? You could give me a, a 100X better printer for my house, and I won't buy it 'cause I don't, I'm not blocked.

Episode duration: 1:25:47