0:00The theory behind a sales call is if you have pull, you're going to rip the thing out of my hands. So, I have a very specific structure of a sales call for getting into discovery and then transitioning out of discovery. How can people use this framework to help them come up with ideas that are more likely to actually be successful?
0:18One of the main mistakes people make is thinking that pull is a thing that a company has. It's a thing a person has. You're not selling to SpaceX. You're selling to the head of legal at SpaceX who has a project on her to-do list that they can't do themselves.
0:34You have this idea of the Hail Mary approach. You're talking with people and they're like, "Oh my gosh, this is exactly what I need." A lot of the time that's not going to happen. That's also an opportunity to what I call throw the Hail Mary, which is is there anything on your to-do list that you would pay me to do right now? We're seeing if they try to buy. If they don't, cool. We've learned something. We can kind of keep iterating from there. If they do, okay, great. Now we might have something.
1:00Let's see if it repeats.
1:01Say you actually found something, something [music] that is pulling and people are like, I need this now. What comes next?
1:07Retention is super important [music] and it's not obvious. And so what I recommend is Rob, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.
1:20Hello. Thank you. You are the author of The Power of Pull. I've got the book right here. You have a newsletter called The Physics of Startups. I don't think I told you this, but the way I learned of you is a very unusual way. Uh I have this Slack community for my paid subscribers. And in the Slack, just in the past month, two different people started threads where they're like, "Lenny, uh you need to get Rob on the podcast. I have been reading his book and it's extremely useful to what I've been doing." And these are some
1:49founders, some product people, and I'm just like, well, who is this guy? I got to find out. And so I reached out and uh that's how this came to be. Essentially, what you've written in this book and what you do in your newsletter is you've basically created a very pragmatic guide to finding product market fit and basically going from zero to one and then one beyond. And to give people a reason to believe you, other than what I've already said about people uh saying how useful this has been, I know you've
2:18helped something like 50 different startups get from zero to over a million in AR. Speak to just where this insight and advice comes from.
2:27Yeah. 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 0ero to one and then randomly figured it out and then a bunch of my friends started pulling me in to help their startups go 0ero 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 0ero to1 as many times as possible and I love that. I'm going to
2:56read a couple quotes actually from my community to reinforce the things you just said of why of what people have been saying about what you've done. And this is really unusual. There's like even though you just said there's not a lot, there is a lot of content for founders. Here's how to find idea. Here's how to find product market fit.
3:11So, 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.
3:32Another besides all the very tactical stuff, personally, I found I'm normalizing just how painful, lonely, weird it is to go through fighting mark fighting 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.
3:56You have very nice people in your community. That's that's uh that's true.
4:00That's true. That's true. All right.
4:01Anyway, so there you go. Just to give people Okay, let's pay attention. Um okay, give us a uh an overview of the pull framework.
4:10Yeah. 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 is it's the thing that's written about with startups, you know, it's the thing the startups that take up you your newsletter had insane pull. You grew like that, right? And everybody wants that. And most of us are in the situation where it feels like we are pushing. We're trying to convince people
4:37to care or convince them to buy and they're it's like kind of maybe working.
4:43And so pull describes a person who would be weird not to buy. The question is just like what causes somebody to pull a product out of your hands. And for that I found a lot of the traditional descriptions of things like when I was a founder I went out and found hair on fire pain points big problems offered a differentiated solution that provided real value. We had design partners using our product every single day. And so I
5:11was like okay cool check check. This thing's going to the moon. and then tried to sell it and just got smashed into a wall for 2 years pivoting around aimlessly, not having no clue why. And then we randomly pivoted. It took off and I realized that it wasn't the thing that causes people to pull a product out of your hands. It's not pain points or value props or things like that. it um because realize that people can
5:37basically just say uh yeah like great this you know it's great that your product solves our pain points problems offers a ton of value but I'm not going to drop my priorities to buy it and so I realized it's about priorities a certain kind of priority where somebody's trying to do something they got a project on their to-do list trying to do it right now but they can't do it with their existing tools methods or options In that case, they're like a coiled spring,
6:07right? Trying to do something stuck and you show up and just offer something that gets them unstuck, that helps them get that priority done. That's when they rip it out of your hands. And the pull framework is just an acronym for that. This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, Work OS.
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7:22faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to works.com to make your app enterprise ready today. Let's talk it through the the acronym of pull because that goes deeper into this idea.
7:35Yeah. So, acronym PL, 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 Mesto, you've had him on. He's amazing. Um project is not like I want to buy recruitment software. It's I want to hire more employees kind of thing. You is the second one is unavoidable.
8:01This is a thing that I have to do right now. Why now? Why not later? There's some reason why you have to do it now.
8:08First L is list of options I consider for doing the project. Could be again hiring somebody. Could be having our existing team do it. could be using the tools I already have or the tools out on the market. And the second L is limitations. Why are those options not good enough for getting me getting my project done? Amazing. So the first two are really important there and um it's interesting the second two feel less important. I'm curious why they're so important. So the first two are
8:36essentially like I have a problem. I need to solve a job to be done and this is an urgent problem. So in a sense this is the hair on fire problem very concretely defined. Here's what hair on fire looks like. I have like a to-do my boss is waiting for me to do and it needs to happen now. It's not just like a general thing that I need to solve.
8:55Why are the second two so important?
8:57This idea of other options and why those are not working.
9:00Yeah. 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 going to do it themselves.
9:17So, they don't need anything. They they won't buy anything unless they their existing options aren't good enough. And so, it really really is important that it's not just I'm trying to do something and I can do it myself or I can do it with a with a kind of category leader. I can do it with whatever tool is is out there. It has to be something where my existing options are not good enough. So I am like stuck. I'm I'm blocked.
9:44Let's do an example to make this even more real. What's like a product or a company that gives us a sense of what I basically use this as a template. It's like a mad libsy thing where it's just like pull l and you fill it out. So let's go give us an example.
9:56Yeah. So my friends are at a company called Jump which is an AI noteaker 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
10:25putting those notes into their CRM. 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 CRM, they could go to jail. Uh, so they have to take those notes, but when they're taking the notes, they don't want to be doing that. And so, so they want to minimize the amount of time because they don't enjoy doing that. It's just not a not a fun thing. So, the list of options they considered to minimize the amount
10:53of time were uh, you know, like a generic AI notetaker. you're you're 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 advisor CRM and it wasn't clear if they were compliant with the SEC's regulations on this. And so there's a list of options they they really couldn't use. And so when Jump showed up and found that poll, people ripped the product out of their
11:23hands. Well, I think one person literally said, uh, this must be how Alexander Graanbell felt when he invented the telephone. Like, that's a weird thing to say about a product for financial advisors.
11:34Amazing. That's a great testimonial to stick on their website.
11:37Okay. What would be like a bad version of this? Like, what would it look like if it wasn't if there wasn't Paul?
11:42Yeah. So, fun conversation with the with the Jump team about they they said, "Okay, cool. Financial adviserss. They have this project. You know who else meets with clients all the time?
11:52Insurance agents. So maybe we just go and talk to them. And it turns out they also have the project on their to-do list of minimizing the amount of time they spend taking meeting notes. But the U isn't there because they don't have to. They're not required to put meeting notes into their CRM. So their existing options, the first L are not taking meeting notes, which they were already doing. And so you can see the framework kind of doesn't fill out for them or it
12:22doesn't there's not the force isn't there. They're fine. That unavoidable piece uh I see why that is so important. And this is an example. Basically basically you need all four here. Yes.
12:31So 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 that just wrote down. It's kind of this general to-do just like generally save time. Is that an okay P for a project for to be able to do just a or is or is was this like specifically on every financial advisor's to-do list?
12:52Yeah. So, it was a thing that I wouldn't say it's like actually something they wrote down on their to-do list, but it was like a thing they were doing all the time. It was a part of their workflow and while they were doing it, they were trying not to do it. Like I think there's like a the action I'm doing right now on my calendar and then the project is my intention while I'm doing it. And so while I'm doing it, the project on my mental to-do list was like spend the least amount of time doing this annoying thing.
13:19Got it. And so if a founder or product team is listening to this and they're struggling with their product, it's probably one of these four is not there.
13:28Yeah. You need all four at once. If you find P without U and in the L's, so you find something that somebody's trying to do kind of, but they're not actually trying to do it right now and their existing options aren't good enough, what they'll do is they'll complain and they won't buy. If they have P and U, but their L's are good enough, they're going to say, "Yeah, that's exactly what we're doing right now and working with cloud code on it. We're going to figure it out."
13:53Something along these lines that you talk about is that this pull exists. It's like this thing that's already there and you're just kind of this like I don't know hunter looking for the pull and discovering it. Talk a bit about that.
14:05Yeah, 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 poll, this project on their to-do list exists before and independent of me, which means I just have to go out there and
14:34find it. I don't have to convince people to have pull. And it's like I haven't quite figured out how to do that, but I think it's very very hard to do if it's possible at all. That feels very familiar just trying to convince people.
14:47Look, this is so great. It's going to solve so many of your problems. Uh, and I love these idea this like I just love how very specific and concrete it makes all of these general pieces of advice around finding product market fit, coming up with ideas. It just tells you exactly here's what it looks like. Um, something else you talk about, you mentioned this earlier, this idea that it it needs to feel weird for them not to buy it. That's like the sign that this is right, that it's like it's weird. Why aren't you buying this? Talk a bit about that.
15:14Most people most of the time are like fine. It would be weird if they bought our product given what's on their to-do list, given what they have, given their options, like so it'd 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?
15:41Okay, how do we get started? Does the product exist yet? Like how do how do we get on board?" where basically every other conversation you have with somebody who doesn't have pull can have anything other than that. They can be enthusiastic and nice and say, "Wow, that's amazing. That's super interesting. That's totally the future of our industry. Wow, I can see how that would save us so much money, but they're not saying, "I need this right now." And that's how you know they actually have pull. Those conversations sound very familiar.
16:10Okay. So before we get into the kind of the whole journey of the startup process and how you can use this framework in that journey, anything else around just the general idea of the pull framework that's important to share? One of the main mistakes people make is thinking that pull is a thing that a company has. It's a thing a person has. Even if you're selling enterprise software, you're selling not to the company.
16:33You're not selling to SpaceX. You're selling to just going to your genable conversation. you're selling to like the head of legal at SpaceX who has a project on her to-do list that that they can't do themselves.
16:48That is really useful. So, it's not like SpaceX needs this. It's like say Jen Yes. needs this. Uh and you're saying that that's often a mistake people make. They don't think about the specific person with this need.
17:00Yeah. Yeah. It's it's super common to say we sell to right like mid-market private equity companies. It's like you don't you sell to a partner or an operating partner in there who's specifically trying to do X, Y, and Z.
17:13Awesome. Okay. So, through the lens of this framework, let's go through kind of the key moments of an early stage startup, finding product market fit. So, I want to talk about coming up with an idea, getting your first sales call, closing your first deal, and then kind of scaling from there. So, let's start with coming up with an idea.
17:31Yeah. How how can people use this framework to help them come up with ideas that are more likely to actually be successful? As a founder, I I have a notebook of ideas that are all like, "What if we built an API for APIs kind of thing like they're there all these like product ideas and the product ideas all sound unhinged?" And so I can never tell between product ideas, what's a good idea and what's a bad idea. Well, fortunately, the pull framework is a is
17:59a thing that's upstream of your product idea that says, I believe there is a person who is trying to do X right now.
18:06We who basically weird not to buy. And so, what I found to be helpful is to use the pull framework to stake out a claim and say, I believe for whatever idea I have, I believe this specific person is stuck. And so I'm going to go and talk to them and see do they want to do they try to buy from me even before we have a product. And so for me the the idea of the the um the poll framework is is to come up with a hypothesis of who has
18:35pull and then go and test that. And then the question becomes okay how do you find this pole idea this pole hypothesis what do you do for that? I have some fairly strong opinions on this. Like I don't think we take this stage seriously enough. Like if your life depended on it, how would would you would you be doing like 10 customer interviews for like 30 minutes on Zoom? No. You would
19:03go all out. You would go in person. And 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 is like trying to do something and stuck.
19:29Amazing. 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.
19:40What you're saying here is uh almost like this lens of if your life dependent on how would you find a problem that is likely to be a real I guess have real pull and what I'm hearing here is get like in the weeds get your hands dirty like get in the way this reminds me of a quote um Naan who is the head of product at linear now he just went to open AAI described what he looks for when he's trying to find opportunities is he he describes I want to feel the pain of the person the same way they feel the pain.
20:11And what you're saying is the way to do that is get in there with people building the thing. Is there an example of of of doing that?
20:17Yeah. So, a friend from uh from school, he had no idea what he wanted to build.
20:24He had no product idea. He wasn't he didn't have my notebook. He didn't have any of that. He just said, you know, I like serving small businesses. I like small business. I'd like to just find somebody I like to serve and I'll figure out the idea from that. And so he wrote out a list of industries that he thought might be interesting. And then he went and shadowed them and like worked with them for like wrote along with them for days at a time. And so he started with solar panel installers and uh he hated them and they hated him. So he moved on
20:53to the next one. He 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 poll here? what what should I do? And so he watched over their shoulder days on end. He even tried to buy a physical therapy franchise to like was able to see the P&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
21:22are stuck there. And so it's it's um firsthand experience is is what you what you should do there.
21:30Awesome. So like live it yourself and live it. And is the reason you need to do that is it part is it because people would have discovered if it was easy basically somebody else would have found the idea. Uh why do you think that is so important approaching it this way?
21:45Yeah I'd say I I'll I'll give two reasons. One is you know these things don't really emerge from a whiteboard.
21:53Like 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 it's unclear that that would have emerged in an interview either. But I 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
22:23them do something. And so if you don't have firsthand experience, how are you going to make the thousands of decisions it takes to actually build something that serves them?
22:34And is the idea once you have this insight, say with this physical therapy company, you write it out through the pull framework to kind of pressure is that is that you call it the pull hypothesis. Is that right?
22:44So talk about that just like say you have this insight and I'm curious what he actually found with his physical therapy business and how to kind of start to think about it through the pull framework.
22:52Yeah. 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 said he showed it to that person said
23:22Is this you? Person said, "Oh my god, yeah, that's exactly the thing." Said, "Okay, great. Uh, would you buy something if I helped you get this done?" Yeah, totally. Okay, great. And then he said, "I need to go talk to five other physical therapists and just make sure this repeats."
23:41And then he did that and they also pulled, which was the really important thing to make sure he wasn't just building a product for one person. What is it that he showed this companies that this the four bullet points with here's the project, here's why it's unavoidable or is something else?
23:57Yeah. So, I actually like recommend having two slides. One slide, one slide is the basically the pole framework. You don't have to show them the poll framework because no one's going to understand it. You can just say uh here's what I hear. You're trying to do X right now because of Y and you've considered this but it's not good enough for this reason. You say is do I have that roughly right? And then the second slide is a kind of conceptual overview of how I can help. So it sounds like you're looking for a way to cut this
24:27line item that's faster than a consultant.
24:31We could offer that for XYZ with does that kind of fit what you're looking for? And you're looking for the first slide them to say, "Oh my god, yes." And the second slide, yeah, how does it work? How exactly how, you know, how do we move forward? What I love about your stuff is it's like very plug-and-play 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
24:59list and it's unavoidable right now because of this and options you looked into are this and they're lacking for this reason. Amazing. I love this. So the idea is you have this little slide that you just create and to kind of run by people and the idea is this is the hypothesis and what does it look like when there's poll once you show it to them. Is it like they're ready to send you money? Is it their pupils dilate?
25:21What do you look for?
25:22Yeah, 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?"
25:32And they will do that. I have a friend who was 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 as they're leaning in wait a second you can do 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
26:01about it could you send more information so our team can review that like you know and and any of those kinds of things anything that is not like okay how do we actually move forward on this is just not worth your life force going after it's interesting how much body language and just like the physical experience of getting excited about an idea is is a sign that it is good 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 [laughter] and it's
26:29so interesting that that's a sign of of pull yeah Yeah. Yeah. It's is what you're seeing is is it weird for them not to buy right now? Are they like are they behaving as if it's weird for them not to buy?
26:42Is what's is there like a li like a you know there's like the I will buy this idea like they say they will buy it versus a sign they will actually buy it.
26:51Is it the body language? Like how do you know they're serious about it?
26:55So I call it like a pullshaped action.
26:57not 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? It is not like a oh I could totally see us using this in Q4 kind of thing. That's a that's a not pulling towards me. That's a kind of pushing out into the future like the urgency of like I need those
27:27There's always this advice of solve your own problem which is different from what you described. Is that a path you recommend or would you recommend against that?
27:35So a friend um so like Emily at a company called Clearly AI she was in security engineering at AWS and she found something there that she would have paid somebody to solve but there was nobody out there. And so in that case it's solve your own problem.
27:54Yes, 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 buy this right now. along those lines. Is
28:22this advice mostly for B2B SAS sort of software or is this applicable to say consumer app? So, I am mostly in the B2B space, but I have seen quite a few people 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 specs.
28:51Yeah. And she solved her own problem famously.
28:53Yes. Just tore off her pantyhoser. I think that's the story. just because she needed it now. I think it was like yeah, she's going to event. So that's that's a cool example. You [clears throat] have this we're going to talk more about this, but you have this idea of the Hail Mary approach. Talk about that. So the Hail Mary, so we've been talking about the happy path here. You find something, you're talking with people and they're like, "Oh my gosh, uh uh yeah, this is exactly what I need." A lot of the time that's not going to happen. You're going
29:20to 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
29:49they 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.
30:10That's awesome. So the advice here is just sometimes feel free to just ask what problem can we solve for you?
30:16Yeah. 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 overthinker. 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.
30:38But if you kind of reframe it in your own head of 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.
30:54I I am in the same boat as you. And that's a really nice way of thinking about it. I'm just trying to solve someone's problem. Why is it so hard?
31:01Before we get to the next step, which is getting your first sales call, finding basically finding someone to talk to that you don't already know, are there any anti- patterns or just kind of signals or just like uh traps people fall into when they're coming up with ideas?
31:15Yeah, the infinite, but the [laughter] but the main ones that I have seen that are like really really brutal are feeling like you need to build it yourself first. So, you come up with an idea and you're like, I don't think this is ready for prime time or I think people have to see it to get it and then you go heads down and build it. Now, now with AI, you can kind of get that out of your system in a in hopefully a couple weeks instead of, you know, months or
31:43not. But, uh, you do not you you want to face the cold wind of reality as soon as possible. And so don't delay the customer conversations where you can actually find pull.
31:58You're also not a fan of design design partners which is okay. Say more because this is typically very standard advice to find design partners.
32:07Yeah. The I don't know maybe in some context it's helpful. I have yet to see it help be helpful. What I've seen in basically every single time I've seen somebody with a design partner is that you recruit a design partner who quote unquote buys into your vision for the product and they give a bunch of feedback and never buy from you. They never buy and you realize that all of their feedback was just like them playing Steve Jobs and there's like I'm
32:35going to help this startup versus I have something I'm actually trying to get done. And if you think about it, like the people who actually have something really important they're trying to get done, they don't want to be a design partner. They just want that thing done.
32:49I love that. Okay. So, so your advice is don't set up a bunch of design partners and we'll go through kind of the process you actually recommend. Okay. So, I guess just to think about this coming up with an idea step. The core moment is some insight based on being hands-on living with the people that you will be helping. The the term I've heard describe to describe this idea um I think it was um uh a VC floodgate that
33:18uses this um you're basically looking for an earned secret. Yes. And your advice here is the way to find veteran secret either it's you have lived it at a company say Amazon gave this AWS example or you're on the ground working side by side with the people dealing with it and just looking for problems that they have.
33:38Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And you can like the method kind of doesn't matter. It might come to you in an IASCA retreat. Like I you get you could get that secret from anywhere, but the things that are most likely to actually work are like getting your hands dirty and and learning it from reality versus from theory.
33:55So just to follow that thread, say there's like a pie chart of of the say 50 companies you've worked with where their idea came from. What would be like the biggest chunks of the pie chart? I 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 some some of them sold the wrong product to figure out what the
34:23right product was. Um but most of them actually go and do the thing firsthand.
34:28And then what percentage I retreat?
34:30There's no room for that.
34:30100%. That's that's mandatory as part of of me advising you. [laughter] That's the the pull hypothesis.
34:38Okay, sweet. Okay, so say at this point you've got a pull hypothesis. There's signs that maybe there's something really good here. The next phase in my eyes is finding someone to talk to and sell it to. So basically landing a first sales call.
34:55talk 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. Yeah, this is a fun one. So my goal is actually like I want to have two to three conversations per day with potential customers. But to get there, you have to first get your first conversation. So you can do warm intrus, you can do all that kind of stuff. We'll just talk about if you don't have any of that and you need to get people to talk to you cold. The way
35:23I typically recommend founders start is to just reach out to your potential customers on LinkedIn or via email and it's with a very specific kind of message that is not a hey do you have XYZ pain points would you like to buy our gamechanging 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
35:52basically 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?
36:08That's a fun message. Everyone has their own version of that. Like everyone who listens to this or everyone who's a founder like has an interesting message you can send and you don't have to convince them in the message to buy your product. You just get them to talk with you. This pull exists out there on their to-do list. And so the message doesn't do anything about that. It just it's just to get them to talk to you. So just say something interesting to cause them to meet with you. Okay, this is really helpful. So your advice here is don't
36:38craft like a whole value prop pitch problem identification. Don't tell them how much pain you're going to solve.
36:44It's just like get their attention with something interesting. Yes. Uh the Snoop Dog example is awesome. any other any other examples? Any other kind of ways of thinking about what might be interesting to someone?
36:55There's there's been a variety of ones that I've seen. Um random ones that are like, "Hey, I dropped out of my PhD and I'm now working on something for content marketers, right?" Like something something that's just kind of interesting enough there that's not super magical. Um, you can have there's a variety of different things I've seen from um I, you know, I was, you know, Sam Olman's chief of staff, right? That, you know, if anybody sends that message,
37:24that will work quite well. It doesn't matter what the rest of the message says. I thought you'd be interesting and open to chat. And so, it's finding something interesting that's like worth a conversation uh with them. Yeah. Like 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 Alman's former chief of staff thought you might find it interesting we're going to say buddy I have no idea what the words in
37:53this message mean. So it could be like hey I was at my dad like I worked at my family's plumbing company in in high school and now I'm do working on this kind of uh interesting thing. Thought you might find it interesting. Would you be open to chat?
38:06Uh, an implicit element of this is keep it very short. Sounds like it's just like a sentence or two.
38:11Okay. 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?
38:21I 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 haven't seen personalization be super important here. The these messages that I like I said the entire message that I would send. You don't need to actually have a ton of personalization in it or like hey I'm going to X conference. We're going to be pitching.
38:50Would you be open to chat? Like something like that can be good enough without any personalization at all. All the examples you shared are very simple and don't have anything to do with them and just say something interesting basically. Uh, and what you what you don't recommend is is basic. Yeah. The idea, you're not trying to sell them immediately. You just want to have a call.
39:10Yeah. And on the call, we'll see if you have poll. If you do, you're going to turn it into a sales call. If you don't, nothing I do is going to change that. [laughter] Okay. How many emails slash LinkedIn posts should you start with? Say you're just getting started to try to find some calls.
39:26Yeah. So, I tend to start on LinkedIn because the kind of person who you and I like talk to, they have interesting LinkedIn. And so, if you're reaching out to someone, they're going to say, "Oh, okay. That so that's going to do a lot of lifting. You can just get started."
39:38And so, you can add 100 150 people on LinkedIn per week, go for that. Add 20 a day and then message them when they accept the connection request. And if you're sending like if you're connecting with I don't know let's say you connect with a 100 people per week or you you send 150 um my typical targets for that are like 30 to 40% of them should accept your connection request and then of them
40:0530 to 50 should% should reply and a subset of them should say yes the majority of them should say yeah sure why not.
40:13Okay 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 is is 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 requesting if you're dead 30 to 40% accepts and then people aren't replying."
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41:28So, say you've landed a call and you're going to do a sales call, say your first one. What is your advice for doing a great job on the on the sales call?
41:37mostly two steps in a sales call.
41:39There'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 going to rip the thing out of my hands. I don't come into this call like wired up ready to try to convince you to buy like super ant. No, it's just if you have pull, you're going to convince me to let
42:09And 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 that you start the call, hey, thanks so much for taking the time. I'm curious. I'm sure you get a bunch of people reaching out to you.
42:32like 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 they they fill out the entire poll framework for you right there.
42:49That'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. That does that sound good to you?" Get their thumbs up on the agenda. And then you earn the right to ask them some discovery questions about their poll by saying, "Great. Okay, before we get to
43:16those items on your, you know, on our agenda, um, do you mind if I ask you a few questions to better understand your context?" And that way you've earned the right to ask questions. it does not feel like an interrogation to them because if it does uh they're not telling you anything.
43:32Okay, a few tactical questions. One is just how long should you try to make this call? How long should your invite be for? And then where does where does a demo fit in? Do you recommend demo on this call or doing a separate call for that? Yeah. So, this is almost always a 30 minute call on the calendar. Just um I found smaller calendar blocks uh they don't see on their calendar and so they don't show. Um and so 30 minutes and then iffy on doing a demo. So if you're super early, you probably don't have a
44:02demo to show. And so um but later on you might have a very short demo in in your first call. I I guess because I'm thinking about the Jen conversation I had and her advice is wait to do the demo but that's an enterprise sales sort of product not like an early stage just full hypothesis phase.
44:19Yeah totally totally okay got it. What's a sign that the this meeting went well? Is it this kind of leaning in pulling it from you feeling?
44:28Yeah. So so it's kind of you're able to surface pull or you're able to say okay you don't have pull at all. help me understand why this isn't relevant to you, what is and so you come away with a either filled out poll framework of okay, I understand this person's poll and they are trying to pull or you understand why they don't have pull.
44:51How many of these calls should you do before you're like okay there's no pull here time to move on. I don't have a hard like what I tend to do is if you have five calls and everybody's leaned back and you learn nothing then there's a sign that something's wrong. If you have and I've seen people do like hundreds of calls where they still don't 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
45:21helping out, they had done like five calls into banking and they just felt nothing. But they got an intro from one of the people said, "Yeah, this doesn't seem relevant to me, but you might consider defense companies." And they got an intro into that. They know nothing about defense. And in the first conversation, defense, the person's like, "Holy, are you serious?" And they're like, "Okay, maybe there's something here." And they changed their poll hypothesis. It feels like a big part of this of your of your framework and approach is to just like be brutally
45:50honest with yourself whether there's something here. I imagine a lot of founders are just like so excited and convinced this is real and your approach is just like here's here's a way to validate that and be really real with what's working or not.
46:03Yeah. I think it's thinking of it as we're selling to learn, not really to to like push something. Yeah. Not not to push. We're we're going to learn and we're seeing if they try to buy. If they don't, cool. We've learned something. We can kind of keep iterating from there. If they do, okay, great. Now we might have something. Let's see if it repeats.
46:25The whole idea of calling this pull is so smart because you always hear product market fit is you're feeling pull. You're feeling pulled. This boulder is pulling you down. The wind is pushing you.
46:35Um and so not only is it this acronym of what you look for, but it's this reminder. What you're looking for is pull. something pulling.
46:43Yeah. And you can also tell like, do I feel like I'm pushing right now? Do I feel like I'm convincing? That's a red flag that something either in your mind or in the conversation is off and like, "Okay, cool. Let's figure out what that is."
46:56Is there an example that comes to mind when you think about a good sales call, what that kind of feels like, looks like, what a pitch would be?
47:03Yeah. So, so what you're trying to do is you're trying to get again the poll 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. They they they've described that. And so, the kind of interesting thing is that once you
47:31have 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
48:01really big way. you describe it in a small way and they say yeah that's that sounds like it. How exactly does that work like tell me more? They're pulling more information out of you and that's when you know you're like starting to be on to something. And are you in your head thinking through the pull framework of these four points and just thinking through like okay is this actually a something they need right now and unavoidable are there what are their alternatives and kind of thinking through all that. Yeah, those are like actually the questions I will ask too,
48:29which 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 poll in it so that they can then say oh yeah actually we've been trying to automate endtoend testing but can't do d with you
48:58know 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 Is it okay if you don't do that now? Like can you is there some reason you have to do this now or is this okay to do another time?
49:26And you're like scared to almost ask you're like oh no it's not going to work.
49:29Oh and the scariest one is to say well what have you I'm sure you've looked into other options. Are they good enough? Right. And uh to hear that one uh where they're like actually yeah we can do it ourselves and that's good enough. But it prevents you from again pushing a product the market doesn't want and just spending years of your life trying to make it work.
49:49Yeah. There's a reason I look like I'm 60 and I'm 35, right? Like [laughter] don't push.
49:54You look great, Rob. You look great.
49:58[laughter] Oh man. So this [clears throat] touches on a like we haven't actually addressed the specific challenge which is that there's a lot you have to get over for people to decide to try something new and to buy something new. the status quo is generally fine. They have so many priorities. They have so many things they're dealing with. Just like the bar to get over for people to be like, I want this. I'm going to buy it now is really high. And the idea here of this framework is to get over that hump.
50:25Well, it's to find the people for whom stat the status quo is not okay, right?
50:29It's to find the people, you know, everyone says like change is hard and all this kind of stuff. Well, you're looking for the people who are already trying to change who don't need convincing. There's this idea that your product has to be 10 times better than the existing solution for anyone to care. Do you feel like like how do you think about okay this is better they tried alternatives none of them do it or some of them do it okay like how much better does this have to be for them to care or is it okay if it's just like you know just a little bit better the
50:58example with with jump I think again the AI noteaker for financial advisors is a good one how much better are they than the other generic AI note takers 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 thing that doesn't quite register in my head. It's really are they a coiled spring and how do they respond when I show up?
51:28So I think about a company like linear who competes with Jira. I don't know if you know do you know linear?
51:35So just I'm curious if it applies through this framework. So in my understanding, linear wins over Jira often because the experience is is just better. It's just like a beautiful smooth uh you know well-crafted uh experience and so they win a lot of customers because it just feels nice and engineers really like using it. Do you feel like that works through the pull framework or is there something else going on there? Again, if we use the poll framework to to analyze that
52:03situation, what would have to be true is there's a certain kind of person who is trying to do their issue tracking, but like they are blocked from they're trying to do something around issue tracking and something about Jira's experience is blocking them from doing the way such that linear's way better experience is actually relevant to them.
52:25Right? like I've done. So I've made the mistake of taking that analogy and being like, "Okay, so I can just come into a category with way better UX, way better experience, and I'm going to crush it."
52:37And like try that in HR software 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 P. They didn't care that their systems look like they're still on Cobalt or whatever it is. So it wasn't relevant there. But again, the poll 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
53:05kind of blocked by Jira's experience. And I imagine the stronger the pull the faster all this stuff happens. It grows.
53:12I know linear took him a long time to get get people using it to trust it to switch and so maybe the pull because of maybe there wasn't as much of that blocking and it was more of just like okay I can just move faster be happier uh it took longer is that do you find that just like the stronger the pull the faster the company grows that yeah I've seen a bunch of startups where like they go zero to whatever like everyone now is going zero to infinity super fast and and it's like not it's because they have found these like pockets of pull where
53:42people will rip a product out of their hands. Um, and it's like people will see these AI pitches now and it's like, wait a second, it can do X and buy basically instantly. And I've seen I've seen that happen in like enterprise. I saw an enterprise deal close in like two weeks and it's just like that thing did. When I was growing up, enterprise deals took 18 months. Like what what the heck? When I was growing up, I like that.
54:08[clears throat] Okay, so let's move on to the next step. So, at this point, we you had your first sales call. Uh, I imagine the next step is closing the deal. And I interesting because it's still early. You may not even have a product. What does that look like going from, okay, I want to buy it now. What do you What do you do next?
54:24Yeah. So, it kind of going to depend on the size of the deal, but you want to come back with some sort of a concept and some sort of a plan. And so, uh, examples of this, so the pharma company that I mentioned, uh, earlier, the company selling into pharma, he showed up and just threw a Hail Mary on a on an intro to a pharma exec. Pharma exec was like, "Oh my gosh, thank you so much for asking. Our current market research is da da da da. We're trying. It's just so bad. It's so slow." And the founder was like, "Okay, I don't even have slides
54:53here. I'm just hearing this for the first time." And so it sounds like you're looking for faster market research that that looks like the current research you're getting but kind of I don't know like it it's just better in these kinds of ways. Is that roughly right? And the exec was like yes that's exactly it. And so the founder is like okay let's do this. What if I come back to you in a couple days with a kind of mockup of what I think that could look like and then we can we can discuss if that fits what you're really looking for and then decide if we want to move
55:22forward. 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 want to bring into your organization?"
55:40Says, 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.
55:48Okay. Tell me more about this price talk track.
55:51Yeah. So the interesting thing about the poll framework is that it can help you set the bounds for pricing. So what's the value of getting the project done or what are the cost of the alternatives?
56:03So uh the the L's so 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
56:32as your current market research consultants? It it kind of gives a frame on price that um that makes it intuitive to your potential customers.
56:41Awesome. 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?
56:58Yeah. So this is you did a great episode uh with Jen a great couple episodes with Jen on the like sales process. And so in bigger deals, enterprise deals, there's like the champion has pull and decides, yes, I want this.
57:16And then you have to do a set of like 17 demos. You have to genulect 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 plank and we schedule an onboarding call." And so the project management step will depend. My typical recommendation for project management in larger organizations is to have a conversation with the buyer with
57:44the 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.
58:12Awesome. 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 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 were 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.
58:39Yeah. Yeah. Why? Well, why shoot yourself in the foot?
58:43And again, the reason not to is because it just you find that doesn't lead to the best to stuff that actually sells and works. Building this kind of design partnership relationship.
58:52Yeah. If they're like it it basically takes something from I need to to solve this right now 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 pole and it's a positive signal to people who don't.
59:10Awesome. Okay, that totally makes sense.
59:12Like if there's pull just go [laughter] with it, you need to Yeah.
59:16Yeah. 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 servicehaped early on. I've seen a bunch of startups do that where they sell, you know, okay, we're going to have an AI product manager who can do XYZ kind of thing.
59:30For 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 enterprisegrade platform ready next week. They expect something more service-shaped and you kind of validate that there's real pull there and you figure out what the actual thing to build is. while delivering it a mix of manually and automated.
59:55Okay, that's really interesting. That's come up a lot on the podcast, especially with go to market sales conversations.
1:00:00This idea of services being a great place to start, which historically has been a terrible idea because uh the fear is you never actually get to a place where you can automate it and you're just running a consulting business forever with terrible margins. So, you've seen this work, this idea of starting with basically like humans doing the thing and then slowly building a product around it that increases margins. Yeah, it definitely has downsides, right? You definitely can get stuck in a kind of service businesses kind of thing, but everything has
1:00:32Awesome. Yeah. And the idea is AI kind of does more and more of this stuff. And part of it is you learn more and more of what uh what the problem opportunities are and things like that with people doing the work. Okay. Um going back to price real quick. Uh classically founders are afraid to ask for big numbers and throw out, you know, high prices. uh knowing that the stuff changes and you'll learn as you go. Any advice for that first price pitch of what number to throw out?
1:00:57Yeah. 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's their first deal is enterprise and they've got a big demo day coming up and so they're like, "How do we get the most possible revenue out of this so we can look like that for demo day?" Totally valid thing to do. In that case, what you do is you
1:01:24throw out a number in a way that doesn't like get you slapped. And the specific 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.
1:01:38And so you'd say yeah when we talk to others the way they everyone's kind of done pricing differently. Some of them have been you know it's been sometimes it's been a small project for 80,000 other times it's been up to a million in terms of right and these are kind of the levers here and some people a lot of people wind up in the middle. You tell me how are you thinking about this? And so what you're doing is you're not like me on this side proposing pricing to you on this side. It's both of us looking at
1:02:05like an example, a kind of semi-real example of what you've heard from others as how they think about this and letting them them throw up on that.
1:02:15[laughter] 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 going to come back to it, but okay. So let's talk about the next step. So say you have the sales call in BF2. what kind of comes next after this first batch of sales calls that you're doing.
1:02:31Yeah, this is where the paths might diverge. So hopefully you're right and uh these people have pull. Great. You now have customers time to deliver and start repeating this and try 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
1:03:00to buy. It'd be weird if they did buy.
1:03:02They're not behaving in a way where they have pull. And in that case, what I tend to recommend is you just analyze. You go back and review the calls and you say, "Okay, did one actually have pull? Did zero like what have we learned here?"
1:03:15And then you craft a new hypothesis and run it again. Got it? And imagine most of the time it's not it's not there. And is that your experience or what's kind of the pie chart of yes success versus not at this stage?
1:03:29Yeah, I've seen like maybe once or twice where it was there uh from the beginning and that's magical like you feel like a hero when you when you get it right the first time. Uh a lot of times it is uh it is like we're so wrong and backwards that we don't know and so you just ask a Hail Mary a couple times and that gets you on the right path or you like do something crazy where a friend just uh like went to a conference and scheduled 20 meetings and just was like I don't know
1:03:59what to do. You tell me what to build you or something like that. I call that goblin mode where you just just going all out and doing unhealthy things to see like who will buy something from me right now to then generate your hypothesis out of.
1:04:12Say more about goblin mode. This is amazing.
1:04:14Yeah. You know like when when dogs do that like get the zooies 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 and this is a good thing or not a good thing?
1:04:25It's a it's a break glass in case of emergency thing. 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 going to 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
1:04:53and uh yeah like some people can do this all the time uh others like me who are get an old like I can I can pull this out once in a while.
1:05:03Get that goblin mode out sometimes. So the idea there's and you're saying this sometimes this can work just like going nuts just like going talking to everyone looking for these earned secrets.
1:05:12Yeah. And one example of this, like it's kind of a crazy example, but a friend's building a a company called Tiro, which does dental staffing uh for for dental hygienists. And he his version of goblin mode was his parents went doortodoor to different dental offices to just get people to to talk to him about about being customers. And that worked. And so it's just like weird stuff like that can work.
1:05:36Amazing. Okay. So you say do a couple sales calls, say do five. Is that is that kind of the idea? do like five and assess. Is that rough heristic? Okay. So, say to your point, most times you'll find, okay, this is not there's no pull here. Sorry.
1:05:49What do you do? Do you go back to the beginning, go hands hands-on with some other small business sort of thing or what do you recommend?
1:05:55Yeah. So, different pathways there.
1:05:57Hopefully, you've asked the Hail Mary question and you've learned something there that's like worth double clicking into.
1:06:03And the Hail Mary question is just like what is there anything that we can do to with Yeah. right now that is a problem on your to-do list.
1:06:10Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And it's and so you've generated some new information that you can then use to like do another set of five.
1:06:19If not, then yeah, you just go back, get some firsthand knowledge, try it again.
1:06:24Awesome. Okay. So, so this process is very straightforward. Have a pull hypothesis, fill out this template, schedule basically cold outbound with this surprising message that'll get people's attention, think you're interesting. Uh, do five calls roughly, get a sense, is there pull or not? If there's not pull, throw out some Hail Mary questions, maybe enter goblin mode to look for something. Uh, come up with another pull hypothesis, do five more calls, and repeat until you're like, "Oh, wow. We've got this poll." Yep. And then you have a business.
1:06:54There we go. Off to the races. Okay. So, say you've actually found something, something that is pulling and people are like, I need this now. What comes next?
1:07:04What do you kind of the there's kind of like the building onboarding process and then just keeping them happy? What's that process like? What advice do you have there?
1:07:12Yeah, so I found that I didn't really have a good way to think about what happens after people buy and so I felt like the dog who got a car and I just kind of like threw the software over the over the over the fence and like good luck. 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
1:07:40until X in which case they're weird to churn.
1:07:47And all delivery is all everything is about figuring out what is X and how do you design a bullet train so every customer gets there. And so X is, you might think of it as, oh, they're using the product or they have high NPS or whatever it is. It's almost never those things. Mark Rober has this kind of leading indicator of retention, which for Slack was like you sent 10,000 messages or a thousand messages in your
1:08:15first X amount of time. If you hit that, it's like it'd be weird if you churned.
1:08:21You 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 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.
1:08:44And 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 going to learn a ton from that and keep asking the question like are you going to turn now? Are you going to turn now?
1:09:00Like what and try to find the moment when when they're like oh okay cool I can't live without this. I love how your mind works where it's these formulas and these templates and just everything is this and obviously it's not like this cleancut 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 so this is great on
1:09:30the churn piece is there what's like a sign okay shoot everyone's turning just like a sign of like okay they thought they in but that it's not working. Anything there of just like what's a sign at this stage? Okay, maybe it's not working versus it is.
1:09:42Yeah. So, if everybody's churning the it is unacceptable for you to not figure out why. And so, uh what I've actually seen is in a lot of cases like for a lot of horizontal products, you're going to have a lot of like user drop off. So, one one startup I know like they they were a horizontal AI workflows product.
1:10:01Cool. 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 c your you customers are churning. First of all, I'm sorry it sucks. It really, you know, you wake up at 4 a.m. every morning just sweating.
1:10:23But 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 turn, low price to
1:10:51a very premium product for freight forwarders.
1:10:54There's no point at which like, okay, we figured it out. We're going to be a massive success. Like every moment of the startup journey is a uncertain moment but what's great about this process so far is every mo 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 data bricks which is now like a bazillion trillion dollar company and he said something like even at 100 million RR they were still very unclear if this was a thing that will last and I
1:11:23think that's very common so that's like its own topic of just like that's nice to know That's nice to know because everyone Yeah. Everyone's like, "How will this become a big thing?" It's like, I don't know. We'll figure it out.
1:11:34Yeah. It's just kind of one step at a time and and so so in this conversation, the final step in my mind is this idea you have of this um use user case study factory, which kind of takes you from things are starting to work to okay, now we can create a repeatable system that helps us grow. So talk about that, what that looks like, what that's about.
1:11:53Yeah. 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 or service or whatever that they pull out
1:12:22of 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.
1:12:31That sounds a lot like a case study that you would feature on your website. And it's a helpful thing because, okay, my job as a founder is not to produce a hundred different case studies, totally different case studies, 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
1:13:00helped 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."
1:13:20And they pull themselves through each step of the factory. The steps are the pipeline step, how do we get people to talk to us? Sales step, how do we turn potential customers into actual customers? And the delivery step of the case study factory, which is how do we get people who are customers to be weird, not to churn. And so everything we do kind of fits into this case study 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.
1:13:49We're going to get really nerdy for a second from manufacturing to like look at your case study factory and say, "Okay, where is our where is the bottleneck to our growth? Is it that we're not like we don't have enough pipeline?" Okay, cool. If that's the bottleneck, then that's the only thing that matters right now. Let's solve that bottleneck and then we'll move to the next one. The next one is our close rate is lower than it should be. Okay, cool.
1:14:12That's our bottleneck. Now we're going to go all in on that. And so it lets you go like the case study factory model gives you a way of thinking about your startup and knowing exactly where to focus at any one point in time.
1:14:23It's a really interesting way to think about it where instead of we are trying to just get more customers closed and more deals closed instead we're looking we're building a case studies like you almost like working backwards from what's the case study going to be of this company we're talking to. Say we're talking to SpaceX just like we want it to look consistent across all the companies we're talking to. People talk about call this repeatable sales motions, but I like the idea of thinking of like it's almost like working backwards from the press release, but for sales,
1:14:52what is the case study we're going to write about SpaceX? Okay, here's how we got them. Here's how we got sold them. Here's how we delivered it.
1:14:58And then here is just like create like consistent repeatable case studies that you will later be able to share. 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 they say yeah that's actually what I want as well and so it becomes this kind of tool and you can say yeah you don't look like our case study so it's probably going to be a lot of work and it might not be a good fit and you can use it for
1:15:27qualification disqualification and for people to understand what you do. 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 really another version of a factory you're building which is even the broader version of just the sales the user the case study factory.
1:15:45Yeah. Yeah. We don't make software here.
1:15:46We make case studies.
1:15:48So is that is that is that your advice?
1:15:50Just like think of it that way like we make we make case studies here. Yeah. It's interesting. And it's not like you need to actually share and write up a case study. It's just a mental model for how to think about what you're trying to build as an a sales go to market or work.
1:16:02Yeah, totally. And and the good news is if you have the poll framework, then you just describe here's how we helped them and what they accomplished and you have a case study.
1:16:13Amazing. Okay, there's a couple things I want to touch on because this is the end of the process basically. Um there's a few things I want to touch on uh that came out of the community and things you mentioned real quick. One is you you have this term hell yes customers. Say more about that is um you mentioned of like when you're looking for someone to buy it and then use it there's this idea of they want them to be hell yes. Yeah.
1:16:34It's it's basically somebody who pulls the product out of your hands before they buy and then afterwards they use it as if it is addictive. And so they they might literally say hell yes. But what matters is they're weird not to buy and weird to churn. And that process is mostly them pulling versus you pushing. That's your perfect fit customer. Your job is just to find more who are basically clones of them.
1:17:01Okay. Uh the other kind of point I want to reinforce is you recommend no pilots, no point proof of concepts, no design partners. Just go straight to we're going to sell this to you and roll it out and it's going to be amazing.
1:17:12Yep. And and like sometimes you're going to do that and they say, "Okay, but the way we buy here is we actually need to pilot it."
1:17:18Okay, cool. But don't proactively I see offer. Awesome. Okay. Another big question that came out of the community is from an external perspective. This feels like this just for startups and founders, but this actually applies for and we mentioned this at the beginning, but just to reinforce this point for larger companies that are working on new feature, new business line sort of thing. Uh talk about just if there's anything that you would think about differently through this process if you're at a mature company building a new product. I'm I'm helping a couple
1:17:47companies launch their second product.
1:17:49And what they are doing is actually the founders are like, "Cool, we're doing it again. We're running it back." And the founders are taking this approach to existing customers because they're going to try to upsell them. And they are actually selling new features before they've built them. Another example at at uh existing companies is um I can't share the name but a company was a new product leader at a company was telling me hey yeah the way we get our ideas all of the ideas that have worked have come
1:18:18from sales calls where they said cool yeah you can do X but could you also do this other thing for us and the products that came out of the customer in the sales calls asking for something that could do that project for them uh all worked all the ones they whiteboarded never worked. So the idea here is you have a product, you're hearing, you're basically look finding these little nuggets of this could be a thing. And what I'm imagining is then you go through this whole pull hypothesis step by step. Just like put up that
1:18:47hypothesis, talk to five of your existing customers, look for that poll, uh see if they're going to actually buy it, and then kind of go through the same process. And an important wrinkle here that we haven't reinforced enough maybe is that it's the founders that should be doing this, especially in a startup. But it's interesting you said even at a mature company if it's a new product the founders ideally are doing that sailing.
1:19:10Yeah. Ideally not always the case. There there are people who who are doing zero to one stuff but I just recommend if you're in that situation and you're a non-founder really focus on trying to sell the thing and learning through selling because there's a lot of ways to get lost in zero to one.
1:19:26Awesome. And then again, if things aren't working, uh there's this idea you should 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.
1:19:38Yes. Yeah. Hail Mary, goblin mode. Like all of these things are just the your break class in case of emergency. Time is really valuable. And like staying suck stuck is awful. If you're in this like pain cave of 0ero to one, it's like the worst time of your life and you just don't want to prolong that. So just get on a plane, go to the office, go in person, do whatever it takes to find something. Rob, we did it. We went through everything. That was amazing. Is
1:20:07there anything else that you think is important to share or anything you want to I don't know, double down on before we get to our very exciting lightning round? Hopefully what's come across is kind of how simple this is. Pull a framework, show to people, see if they pull. There's a lot of ways to like over complicate this.
1:20:27And 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 uh it will get you there. Awesome. That sounds very simple. And I think it's important to know like this is very actually not like it's hard to find an idea that actually works. And this is all uh here to help you save a lot of pain and suffering and building and be kind of
1:20:57being uh disillusion not disillusioned mis uh feeling like there's something there wasting a lot of your life doing something that's not going to work.
1:21:05Yeah. 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.
1:21:16At least I'm not giving you a spoon. Meaning for the beach, right? Like to look for metal.
1:21:22You're not Oh, I see. You have a metal detector versus looking through all the sand with a spoon. Wow. I love that metaphor. Uh and then sometimes you may find a thing that and then you realize it's not worth anything. Yeah.
1:21:34Okay. Wow. That's a great metaphor.
1:21:36Well, Rob, with that we reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? Let's do it. First question, what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
1:21:49Oh gosh. The um my favorite one is the four volume nature of order series by Christopher Alexander. It's book on architecture, series of books on architecture. Best thing ever.
1:22:00Never heard that recommendation before.
1:22:02Those are my favorite. Uh favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed? I have two favorite movies that we watch repeatedly. One is the Pride the most recent Pride and Prejudice and the second is the Penguins of Madagascar movie. Don't know why we're in both ends of the spectrum there. [laughter] Favorite or most interesting AI product that you recently discovered or use or love?
1:22:26I've been using Muse and it's like if it works for me, it can work for anyone.
1:22:31Yeah. Very hot right now. Uh amazing.
1:22:34Okay. favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life.
1:22:43Uh life is what you make of it.
1:22:46So true. Final question. I'm curious to get your thoughts on this. So there's this idea of tarpit ideas. Uh so I had Daltton Caldwell on the podcast. He was a partner at YC and he has this term tarpet 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 does not work. Is there are there any tarpet ideas you just find people keep coming to you and you're like don't do that it's not going
1:23:14to work. Oh that's interesting. the the category is of ideas is to go after a space when there is already a clear winner in that space without any theory on being different. I just keep seeing that it's just like, oh wow, Lemless just built a sales automation tool and they're bootstrapped and they're growing really fast, so let me just build the exact same thing as them or something very close. And you know, it's like, okay, but they they've already they've already won that or they've they've
1:23:42already they've already done that thing.
1:23:44Um, and so, uh, unless you're like, "Oh, but this kind of customer is unblocked, and so we're going to build something kind of different for them," those ideas almost always don't work. And you feel like you're going crazy because you're like, "Well, it worked for them. What am I doing wrong?"
1:23:59And I imagine everyone answers, "But it's better." And as we know, it can't just be a little bit better. And basically, you're saying like, "Okay, this is unblocking them."
1:24:10And it's better than all the alternatives. They're just going to go with that thing. But I guess then, you know, this goes into a whole other conversation like what if it's like two times better? And I guess your advice there is it's it's probably not good enough.
1:24:20There are many things, right? You could give me a a 100x better printer for my house and I won't buy it because I don't I'm not blocked.
1:24:28That's a great example.
1:24:30Oh man, Rob, we did it.
1:24:33We did it. Holy cow. Um, okay. How can listeners be useful to you? That's our final question.
1:24:40Oh gosh. If you like the framework, use it. tell other people about it. Um, check out the book if it's useful and uh, reach out if you have any thoughts, ideas or this is a kind of this is a theory framework model that is just in development. I still feel like I'm kind of scratching the surface on this is kind of like what I'm what I'm going to be doing for the next 10 20 years. So, if you have ways to improve it, like reach out and tell me.
1:25:05Awesome. And your newsletter is an exact is exactly that is you just I don't know how often you're publishing, but just like cool here's like another way to think about this. Here's a wrinkle here.
1:25:13Uh just the idea of calling it physics of startups is is is an awesome idea.
1:25:18So point people to the newsletter. Uh Rob, thank you so much for being here.
1:25:24Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennispodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
