Hi! I’m Rob Snyder.

Modern startup advice prevents you from going 0 → 1 → 100. Startups that succeed wind up unlearning everything, and following a different path. This newsletter, my podcast, and my book attempt to figure out how it really works.

I also run PMF Camp (next start is Sept 14!) and work with startups 1:1 to help them crack 0-1 and early traction/sales. Space is extremely limited - apply ASAP!

PS - AI Rob is now in ugly beta, get a free month HERE.

What every founder learns the hard way: Despite our extensive market research, despite finding a 10/10 pain point, despite getting a ton of enthusiasm and free pilots, despite hiring a killer team and following all the best practices, we can’t get people to buy our product and our startup doesn’t take off.

This is because we have done a series of things that sound right, but are unrelated to the things that cause a startup to take off. And that, I believe, is core to the nature of startups: So many things can sound like they should cause a startup to take off, but only one actually causes a startup to take off - finding PULL!

Startups take off because they find repeatable PULL - someone trying to do X, who can’t do X with their existing tools, and therefore will rip a product that unblocks them from doing X out of a startup’s hands.

“Because vs. despite” is a fun framework. The below “because/despite” graphic explains why every founder has to unlearn basically everything we’ve ever been taught about startups:

Now, the inverse: When a startup finds PULL, customers will buy and renew despite basically everything the startup does:

My favorite example of this is my European founder friend who essentially reads the full text of the GDPR regulation in each sales call. Customers buy despite his best efforts; they have so much pull that they would buy even if he required them to lick sandpaper.

But! When a startup finds real pull, the founders quickly hire great people who do a lot of good things. These hires professionalize the sales pitch and process. They make a real website. They make the product scalable. Which means that what we see from the outside (and what employees see from the inside!) looks like this:

The point is that after a startup is successful, it is hard to tell what is causing it to succeed, versus what is unrelated or counterproductive to its success. Successful startups do so many things! For a simple example: Did OKRs cause Google to be successful, did they prevent Google from being more successful, or were they totally unrelated to Google’s success?

In other words, that successful company we’re looking at, here’s what might actually be happening:

Basically everything this company is doing is counterproductive or irrelevant, but their customers are still buying. From the outside, however, we might just interpret their success in the exact opposite way, taking 100% counterproductive lessons from their story:

Which leads to what I call “the pain cave”, where we do a bunch of things that we think should make our startup take off, but the startup isn’t taking off, and we can’t figure out why or what to do about it:

The “because” of greatness

The PULL theory states that the only way to build a fast-growing company is to find PULL. PULL is out there in the world, it exists independent of our product, and explains why startups can take off despite most of the things they do. PULL is upstream of product and GTM and everything else. It’s what makes product-market fit possible.

Once we find PULL, we can then decide what to do. We can optimize for revenue, growth, profitability, lifestyle, personal glory, etc. But the because/despite framing gives us another possible goal.

We all want to build something that takes off, but I think we all want to do more than that. We want building to be an end, not just a means - to build something wonderful for the sake of building something wonderful, with customers who also believe that it is wonderful, in a way that makes us feel alive.1

This is the project in our souls, but as stated it is quite abstract and can lead us astray. It is very easy to pursue the goal of building something wonderful in a way that leads to a product nobody buys.

So let’s make this idea more concrete. A wonderful product is one that customers buy and renew because of everything, despite nothing, with nothing irrelevant:

To get there, we need to first get PULL right, then design everything else that is downstream of PULL to “fit”. This means no individual piece of our business will be perfectly optimized per MBA standards: We will not have the perfectly profit-maximizing pricing, we may not raise the most money at the highest valuation, we will not hit all the cost benchmarks, we will not follow “best practices”, we will not have feature parity with competitors. But the whole thing will be right.

Hi! I’m Rob Snyder.

Modern startup advice prevents you from going 0 → 1 → 100. Startups that succeed wind up unlearning everything, and following a different path. This newsletter, my podcast, and my book attempt to document how it really works.

I also run PMF Camp (next start is Sept 14!) and work with startups 1:1 to help them crack 0-1 and early traction/sales. Space is extremely limited - apply ASAP!

PS - AI Rob is now in beta, get a free month HERE.

I can’t explain why, but I hate talking about outbound. Unfortunately for me: a16z asked me to come talk about outbound, and everybody uses AI Rob to fix their outbound message first, so I’ve spent much of the last few weeks clarifying what I’ve seen work and not work on founder outbound for the 0-1 stage. Here’s the result.

When you receive the typical outbound message, your reaction is to shake with indignation. “What kind of a psychopath thinks it’s ok to send something like this?”

Yet when you draft an outbound message that will elicit this exact same response from the recipient, your reaction is: “Hell yeah baby let’s ship it!”

This happens because outbound requires us to treat the recipient as the main character. By default, we draft outbound while focused on our goals - we want them to buy our product, meet with us, etc. And by focusing on our goals, we draft a message that prevents us from accomplishing them.

The point of the message

When you understand the physics of sales, the point of the message becomes clear. It is not:

• To convince someone to buy your product

• To see if they have relevant pain points or problems

The point of targeting is to create a list of people who have demand and are likely to buy; the point of your message is to get someone you’re targeting to meet with you.

The theory of the message

We often have theories in our heads about factors that make cold outbound messages work. And these theories are often downstream right, upstream wrong. Personalization is a great example: We tend to think that personalization makes messages work better, yet it is often the case that removing all personalization - even {firstname} - makes outbound perform better, because something else is more important than personalization.

This rhymes with my biggest pet peeve about business “knowledge” - it is all downstream “best practices” that lack any sort of unifying upstream theory. Which causes us to flail about doing stuff that doesn’t work but feels like it should work.

That said, here is my attempt to craft a theory of cold outbound messaging that fits within the broader PULL theory of the world.

There are things that CAUSE a recipient to meet with you, and there are things that PREVENT a recipient from meeting with you.

If there is nothing that will CAUSE a recipient to meet with you, they will not meet with you, even if there is nothing in the message that fits in the PREVENT category. However, if you have a good CAUSE, the presence of things that PREVENT may, well, prevent them from meeting with you.

A simple (but oddly useful) graphic:1

Causes: The hierarchy of interestingness

What causes buyers to meet with you?

Every outbound message conveys a theory in the mind of the sender about what’s in the mind of the recipient: I believe that you will meet with me because _______. In most cases, this theory is nothing more than - I believe that you will meet with me because I want you to meet with me.

Instead, imagine that each potential customer has a hierarchy of things that are interesting to them. This list might include:

• You have a super interesting/impressive background

• They might be able to become an advisor / founding customer

• Snoop Dogg invested in you

• You’re in YC / Speedrun / etc.

• You solve some hot-button problem everyone on X is talking about that they’re also trying to solve

• You’re working with some very cool logo / someone they know

• You worked as a lifeguard one summer

• You offer 10x ROI

These things and infinite others all exist in a hierarchy - a stack ranking - and there is a point on this hierarchy below which it is not interesting enough for them to meet with you. Envision it like this:

Each potential customer’s hierarchy is unique, but your target list’s hierarchies almost certainly are quite similar. If you’re selling into small plumbing companies, for example, the fact that you were Sam Altman’s chief of staff is the least interesting thing on earth; if you’re selling into developers, your message needs almost nothing else.

And sure, sometimes the problem(s) you solve are above the line on someone’s hierarchy of interestingness. Especially in cold calls - my friend Blake Harber uses a script that highlights 3 things we help with, then saying, “I’m sure you’re all set - but did any of those things resonate with you?” with the underlying theory that if we hit a hot-button thing for them without seeming pushy, it will cause them to meet with us. But this isn’t always the case. One startup books one meeting per 30 dials (!) selling into HVAC by simply saying, “We’re a partner of [important industry association] and would love to walk you through what we do”.

You figure out your target customers’ hierarchy of interestingness the same way you figure anything out - following the “no speculation” rule! Go work alongside them. Have them show you the slop that other people are sending them. Have other people who’ve sold into the same customer segment show you the messages that worked for them.

Preventers: The laundry list of landmines

Let’s say you have a theory about what will cause a potential customer to meet with you - that you were Sam Altman’s chief of staff. And let’s say you write an outbound email saying this, but you write the email in Swahili. Assuming you’re emailing someone who doesn’t speak Swahili, it would be weird if this approach worked.

The hierarchy of interestingness is what that CAUSES someone to meet with you. But there are a TON of things that will PREVENT someone from meeting with you. I think of these as the “laundry list of landmines.” There are so many landmines that it is hard to come up with a comprehensive list of them - but in general, when you know what CAUSES someone to meet with you, focus your message on THAT thing and get everything else out of the way! Anything that won’t cause them to meet with you will almost certainly add wind resistance and prevent them from meeting with you.

There are some landmines we typically don’t realize are landmines:

• Non-salesy-salesy things: “Just want your feedback” / “not selling anything” / “no pitch” / “I know you’re busy”. We treat these things as causes - I believe you will meet with me because I’m saying I’m not selling anything. Obviously this is not interesting to them, and it also sets off alarm bells in their minds that you’re definitely going to try to sell them something.

• Anything Claude drafts: If you tell Claude to write you an outbound message, Claude (rightly) decides you should be punished for not using your own brain, and gives you the perfectly tuned message to seem like it should work while getting 0% responses.

• Personalization for the sake of showing you did research: “I saw your post about leveraging AI in your new role as CFO” conveys the implicit theory that “I, the main character of the universe, have spent my precious time doing research on you, and therefore you should meet with me.”

A longer list of landmines is in the graphic below:

The method and implications

So the method is:

1. Come up with a theory of why they will meet with you, centered on their hierarchy of interestingness

2. Write a message that fully embodies that theory

You can see how this theory and method is upstream of any particular best practice. Do you need a long message or a haiku? Should you personalize or not personalize? These questions aren’t important.

For example - if your theory is, “they will meet with me because I’ve worked with every single relevant bestselling business author,” your message should be long because it includes a bunch of names of bestselling business authors!

On the other hand, if your theory is, “they will meet with me because I’m speaking at XYZ conference,” your message should be closer to: “Hey! I’m the keynote speaker at XYZ conference and wanted to run my talking points by you in advance to get your feedback - open to chat?”

Templates

You shouldn’t want my templates, because your message should be your own. However, I know if I post this without templates I’ll get 370 comments asking for templates. So here you go, with all caveats to use these as inspiration, not as literal templates:

LinkedIn Sequence

The theory of this message is that “you (CXO) will meet with me because I’m an interesting industry insider and not explicitly pitching you a product.” This template has led a startup to meet with C-level executives and very quickly close very large, EUROPEAN, ENTERPRISE customers IN A SLOW-MOVING INDUSTRY.

Step 1: Send empty connection request (no message - which means your LinkedIn needs to look interesting enough to them that they accept!)

1 day after accept:

Hi! I’m founder of XYZ and was previously [important role in the industry]; we’re backed by angel investors from [relevant company in industry] and Silicon Valley’s top investors. I’m building our Executive Advisory Board and wanted to explore adding you. It’s low-commitment, with a group of senior peers like yourself from firms like [3 relevant companies in industry]. Would you be open to a conversation?

2 days after message 1 gets no reply:

bumping this!

Email Sequence

For the same theory of why they’ll meet with you - just add a bit more context in the “PS” because they can’t see your LinkedIn profile. And a subject line that gets replies

Subject: [previous role, previous company]

Body:

Hi! I’m founder of XYZ and was previously [important role in the industry]; we’re backed by angel investors from [relevant company in industry] and Silicon Valley’s top investors.

I’m building our Executive Advisory Board and wanted to explore adding you. It’s low-commitment, with a group of senior peers like yourself from firms like [3 relevant companies in industry].

Would you be open to a conversation?

-Rob

PS, for a bit more context:

• [More relevant details

Wait 3 days, then bump the email.

Call Script 1 (Blake Harber version)

Hey John it’s Rob, the founder of Yolo AI, I sent you an email about your invoicing process, does that ring a bell at all?

I know I’m catching you out of the blue but we work with owners that are trying to follow up on late invoices, get paid by their customers sooner, and avoid factoring or collections.

WE even built an AI that does all the tracking, chasing, and escalating for you, so you and your team don’t have to waste their time on it

I assume you’re all set - but does any of this sound relevant to what you’re doing right now?

Call Script 2 (Conference version)

Hey John it’s Rob, the founder of Yolo AI, I sent you an email about [conference], does that ring a bell at all?

Yeah so I’m speaking at [conference], we’re partnered with [industry association], and would love to grab time with you in advance to get your feedback on what I’m thinking of talking about, and what we’re building here at Yolo AI. Would you be open to that?

Targets

LinkedIn:

• 150-200 connection requests sent per week

• 30-40% accept rate

• 50% of acceptances reply

• 50% of replies meet with you

Cold call:

• 1 meeting per 50-100 dials (I have seen 1:30; I have seen 1:500+)

Email:

• 3-5% meeting rate (varies WILDLY)

FAQ

“But what if they don’t expect it to be a sales call?” You’re almost certainly thinking about sales backwards if you’re concerned about it feeling like a bait-and-switch. The point is to get someone into a human conversation; if that person has PULL, they will turn it into a sales call. If they don’t have PULL, there is nothing you say that will turn it into a sales call.

“What if I’m not hitting the targets?” Read my book, there’s an entire section on “debugging.” In short: See the system, focus on the system’s bottleneck.

“What if I can’t figure out what’s interesting?” Well, that’s your bottleneck. Go goblin mode to figure this out.

“What if I want to do ads / inbound instead of outbound?” Well then, why did you read this far?

Hi! I’m Rob Snyder. I help startups figure out 0-1 GTM via this newsletter, podcast, my book, my 0-1 GTM accelerator (apply now!), AI Rob, and 1:1 advising.

I want you to picture the world as if you, your company, and your product don’t exist.

In my mind, I imagine a Sim-City-like world:

In this world, people are going about their lives. Most people are doing just fine pursuing their goals and interests, even if they have pain points here and there. These people do not need or want help, even if you were to offer it. A few people, however, are very much stuck and struggling and need help.

You need to learn to see the world as if you don’t exist. I call this the “demand lens”, and it is the most important lens for building something people want.

I have been writing about demand forever. If you’ve followed along for longer than 72 hours, it should be clear to you that:

• Demand exists independent to supply. Demand is not “FOR” supply (e.g., there is no demand FOR iPhones, there is demand that results in the purchase of iPhones).

• Demand is the most upstream thing in startups, that causes a startup’s product to be relevant (or not) and a startup’s GTM to work (or not). If you don’t find demand, nothing else matters.

• The PULL Framework is my best attempt to describe a specific kind of demand that leads someone to be “weird not to buy a new product.”

• Demand describes, as someone recently said, “what wants to happen.” Your job is to find what wants to happen but is currently blocked from happening… and then, to simply enable that thing to happen.

But you can embrace these points and still struggle to consistently “see” the world from the demand side. As I’ve been building stuff, I’ve struggled with this too. The demand lens is the missing way to see demand clearly.

The most important feature of the demand lens is that it depicts a world in which you and your product don’t exist. This seems to be the only way you can clearly see where people are actually getting stuck.

The supply lens

Whenever we add ourselves, our products, or our ideas into our view of the world, we are unable to see reality clearly. Instead, we see the reality we want to exist - where everything becomes a means to our end:

This is what I call the “supply lens”. Through the supply lens, we see things like:

• All the people who could buy our product

• Ways they could use our product

• Value we could provide to them

• Features we could build for them

• How their life would be so much better with our product

• Reasons they should buy our product

• Problems they could solve with our product

• Ways we could make them aware of our product

• Ways we could position our product that they should like

These things seem important. They are not. Because if we don’t first establish reality through the demand lens, anything we create through the supply lens is destined to fail. It would be weird if the supply lens worked. By default, we are focusing on people who aren’t stuck and therefore don’t want or need our help. While these people could benefit from our product, it would be strange if they bought it and used it. And this is true no matter how much ROI we offer, how many features we build, and how we position our product.

You can spend your life looking through the supply lens. It can be intoxicating for a while, but it will eventually drive you insane.

So the sequence must be:

1. Learn to see the world as if you, your product, and your idea don’t exist; realize PULL must exist in THAT world

2. Generate a PULL hypothesis based on what you’re observing through the demand lens.

3. ONLY THEN incorporate the supply side - what fits given the reality we’ve observed through the demand lens.

When you can see through the demand lens, you officially join the cult of demand. Welcome. We have tee shirts.

PS: This idea, it turns out, isn’t a new thing. In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith talks about the “man of system”. He was talking about a legislator, but it is equally true to entrepreneurs who look at the world through the supply lens:

“He seems to imagine he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess–board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess–board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess–board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the [entrepreneur] might choose to impress upon it.”

Hi! I’m Rob Snyder, author of the Power of Pull. This is my weekly newsletter developing the “physics” of startups. We record a companion podcast on Spotify/YouTube.

Also, I help startups figure out pre-PMF sales - learn more & apply HERE. (You can now apply for my new GTM accelerator + access to AI Rob!)

The thing that holds extremely capable founders back is often in their own heads - it’s their tendency to overthink things.

If you’re an early-stage founder who isn’t hitting the B2B standard or calendar standard, I would bet that you’re spending far too much of your mental energy thinking.

This happens in two ways:

1. Thinking instead of acting (e.g., writing docs, long chats with AI)

2. Thinking while acting (e.g., background processing about other topics while doing outreach or while in a customer call)

There is a solution, but you’re going to hate it.

No Speculation

The “No Speculation” rule says that there are certain topics that you almost never let yourself think about. These topics fall under the umbrella of “speculation” - guessing about what you don’t, or can’t, know.

Most of the things that cause us to be overthinkers fall into the “speculation” category. The big three are:

1. The future

2. What might be true in the present

3. Abstractions

Spending your time on these things will always feel productive, but it is a fake productivity that accomplishes nothing while expending serious mental energy. And it eats into time you could have spent actually being productive.

The inverse of the “no speculation” rule: figure out what is true from firsthand experiences of individual customers’ words and actions.

When you apply the “no speculation” rule, everything gets simpler. When you find yourself speculating, you notice it and stop. Most of your “problems” disappear, and those that remain have straightforward solutions. You move much faster by applying all of your force against an infinitely smaller surface area.

1 - Avoid thinking about the future.

Ah, the future. You can spend a lifetime of mental energy trying to figure out what’s going to happen in the future. And you’ll learn that the future is impossible to predict, because you simply can’t know ex-ante what’s going to be most important in the future.

Which part of the AI value chain will be defensible in the future? This seems like an important question you should have a perspective on. But everyone’s opinion on this has changed 37 times over the past year, and it will change another 37 times in the next year. Will Harvey be defensible, or will they flame out? What does Airtable’s acquisition tell us about… something about our startup’s future? I give you permission to answer these kinds of questions with: “idk, lol, I guess we’ll find out, now let me get back to my customers.”

When you make speculating about the future off-limits, you get ~75% of your brainpower and sanity back.1

2 - Avoid thinking about “what might be true.”

If we can’t think about the future, we can think about the present. But there are ways to speculate about the present - about things that might be true, versus things you know to be true. And you can even do this in conversations with potential customers.

Imagine you’re on a sales call and a potential customer says, “Your product would save us $10M per year!” You might autocomplete this sentence in your head: “…therefore I am going to buy it!” But then you’re speculating. You have to ask the question.2

Now, if this example counts as speculation, then surely 90%+ of what we think about in the present is also speculation. I am wary of any form of reasoning that isn’t grounded in individual customer examples, as it always sounds compelling but isn’t connected to reality. This includes most of what happens at a whiteboard, most of what’s called “first principles”, and most of what I read online.

Which means if you don’t know something, there’s only one way to find out: Firsthand interactions with (potential) customers. Ideally face-to-face.

3 - Avoid thinking in abstractions.

Smart people love to think in abstractions - we talk about things like personas, niches, markets, and data. These aren’t real things, we can’t interact with them. In theory, they represent real things. But the act of creating an abstraction involves speculation.

For example, when building a product, it is very easy to think that you are building for “founders”. But “founders” is not “Harold, the founder of Sliq”; “founders” can be whatever I make it. When I create the abstraction of “founders” I speculate about what is relevant from real individuals - or what I want to be relevant - which always leads me to create a hypothetical being who just so happens to love my product.

Instead of creating abstractions, we need to find the individual example that represents others.

Building the future without speculation

This is why the PULL process for building startups is absurdly literal:3

• The PULL Framework avoids speculation. If someone has PULL, it’s weird if that person doesn’t buy your product. NOT “they could buy”.

• Your PULL hypothesis must originate from a real person. NOT the whiteboard. NOT surveys. And NOT discovery interviews - it has to originate from firsthand experience with that real person’s PULL situation.

• Testing your hypothesis requires five 1-on-1 sales calls with people who look EXACTLY LIKE the person from your PULL hypothesis. NOT customer interviews, because then you’re connecting dots. NOT a free trial or pilot for the same reason. NOT a self-serve checkout test, because then you’re just looking at session data and speculating.

• Iterating from PULL hypothesis to your repeatable “hell yes” case study requires you to compare and contrast individual people. NOT abstract reasoning or complex data analysis.

Like you, I find all of this annoying and tedious, and wish there was an easier path that allowed me to pontificate about the future of abstruse abstractions. But it seems that speculation unmoors you from reality. The second you start speculating you float away as if gravity has been turned off; one can flail about in zero-g for eternity.

You might think that “no speculation” will hold you back while your competitors are able to think bigger and more long-term than you. This isn’t true; I promise you “no speculation” will liberate you. Time is zero-sum, and speculation is a tax on your finite mental bandwidth. When you stop speculating, you’ll be shocked at how much progress you can make in a day, and how little the things you used to speculate about actually mattered.

Life without speculation

The “no speculation” rule is, in one sense, about building a startup. But I’ve found it is also a good rule for life. As I’ve applied the “no speculation” rule, I’ve realized that something like 80% of my mental bandwidth is spent on things the “no speculation” rule outlaws. In cutting much of that out, I finally get to experience the current moment. It’s nice here.

Hi! I’m Rob Snyder. This is my weekly newsletter developing the “physics” of startups. We record a companion podcast on Spotify/YouTube.

Also:

• My book is out - buy the Power of Pull anywhere!

• I help startups figure out pre-PMF sales - learn more & apply HERE.

• Join the waitlist for “AI Rob”

• I’m building a 1-day workshop that “red pills” your team on PULL - if you want more information, email RC: rc@reframeb2b.com

Enterprise sales - selling big contracts to big companies - feels like a mystical art. Like an 18-24 month dance with some ungodly number of steps and schmoozing techniques, requiring these pants:

I once felt this way, and so in preparation for the biggest deal of my life, I read the Challenger Sale to try to figure out this dark art. The result was a sales call that went so poorly, the potential customer took our presentation, gave it to another company, and paid them to build a clone of our product.

I probably didn’t apply the Challenger Sale correctly, but the point is: I was thinking about sales backwards (as I outlined in the original Physics of Sales), and I was therefore thinking about enterprise sales SUPER backwards.

Since then, I’ve learned quite a bit about enterprise sales and I can confidently say they are not that complicated. In fact, they follow the exact same physics of any other sale.

Here’s what you should know about enterprise sales. This has led, as a particularly fun example, to two ~20-year-old college dropouts selling a $100k+ contract to a massive publicly-listed media company as their first customer, from cold LinkedIn outbound, before they built a product or even had a product idea.

The physics

Enterprises are large companies with lots of people. But enterprises do not buy things - companies literally can’t buy things! A person within the enterprise buys.

That person will buy your product for the same reason anyone would buy it: they have PULL! Specifically, they are prioritizing something right now that they can’t do with their available options - and you offer them something that helps them get their priority done.

This person with PULL is the champion. The deal happens so that they can get their priority done. Their priority causes the purchase.

Your job is to sell to this person. And then you help them go through the process of buying it, which is often frustrating for all involved because of the enterprise’s buying process. Which, by the way, is why PULL is so important in enterprise: If a buyer has to jump through 37 hoops to buy, they need to have a damn good reason to do so!

Here is the standard enterprise sales process I recommend that will keep all parties sane.

The process

Here is the core process, which has three steps:

1. Call 1: A 1:1 call with the person you believe has PULL

   1. Do they have PULL?

   2. Does our product fit?

   3. What else do they need to know to decide whether they want to bring this into their organization right now?

2. Call 2: A 1:1 call with the same person from call 1

   1. Answer questions from 1c

   2. Confirm they want to bring this into their organization

   3. Plan out how they will bring this into their organization, using their timeline for getting their priority done as a forcing function to drive urgent action

3. Execute the plan

   1. E.g., group demos, legal review, POCs, procurement processes, etc.

After step 2B, your champion is “sold”, and you’re just helping them buy. I think of the tush push in football: Your champion has the ball, and you are pushing them over the goal line. They push internally, and you push them.

You get into a lot of trouble when you fight against these physics. Beyond the original sins outlined in Physics of Sales, here are common error modes in enterprise sales:

• Trying to sell to groups of people (and never finding a champion, and also winding up trying to make your product appeal to everybody, making it too big to be purchased by anybody)

• Doing group demos too early, before you have a champion (= lunch and learn)

• Making your champion look bad because you try to take the ball and run with it (e.g.,: you try to sell to their peers rather than helping them sell to their peers)

• Adding steps because you think enterprise sales requires the step, rather than figuring out what is actually necessary (e.g., proposing pilots, business cases, etc.)

I increasingly believe there are only two problems: “Demand” problems and “shooting self in the foot” problems. Sales in general, and enterprise sales in particular, is a very common place for those “shooting self in foot” problems to kill what otherwise would be a fast-growing company.

Hi! I’m Rob Snyder, founder & author of The Power of Pull - now available worldwide! I help startups with pre-PMF sales in a variety of ways; learn more HERE.

We’re getting requests from founders who are trying to get their teams up to speed on PULL. If that sounds like you, we’d love to chat - email RC: rc@reframeb2b.com

One of the most beautiful (and awful) things about the Starting Strength weightlifting program is that it gives you nowhere to hide. You just do four barbell lifts, you do them in sets of five, and the weight on the bar must go up every workout. Without this program, you can spend months or even decades finding elegant ways to avoid getting stronger. Instead, Starting Strength installs mental software that closes off every single door other than “lift increasingly heavier weights.”

I am trying to do this with my B2B Standard - the metrics you need to hit in order to build a fast-growing B2B startup. The B2B Standard, much like Starting Strength, is tough love, because I’d rather you succeed cursing me than fail liking me. True friends don’t let friends fail.

This week, I want to make it even more difficult for you to avoid the standard.

This post lays out what your calendar should look like, specifically in the $0-$1M+ stage before you hire salespeople.

Your calendar, of course, reveals your operating philosophy - your theory about what matters. You might say you want your startup to grow fast, but your calendar might suggest otherwise. For example, your calendar might reveal that you really want to find important-seeming reasons to avoid growth-related activities. Or that you want to make work for your team. Or that you believe you need to model all aspects of the unknowable future before taking action.

Is growth the main character of your calendar? And everything else a supporting actor? Are you spending most of your time figuring out, running, and improving your case study factory? Or is that something you do on the side?

If growth IS the main character on your calendar, here’s what your calendar will look like:

In summary:

• 1.5 hours of initial sales calls per day (= 3 calls)

• 0.5 hours of later-stage sales call per day (= 1 call)

• 1 hour of post-sales calls per day (= 1-2 calls)

• 1.5 hours of GTM admin

• 2 hours of scheduling initial sales calls

• 2 hours for everything else

Where will this calendar get you? Let’s say you’re selling $10k ACV contracts, and you hit the B2B standard - where 60% of first calls pull, and 50% of those close. This means the above calendar is adding $50k ARR per week - over $2M ARR per year. With this calendar, you can bootstrap your way to an awesome company, or you can hire sales reps and replicate this calendar to scale even faster.

Of course, your calendar will look somewhat different if you’re selling enterprise, for example - it will weight more heavily towards second calls and post-sales time. But you get the general idea.

This calendar is absurdly realistic. It’s only a 42.5-hour workweek, for one. You worked more hours at McKinsey. Plus, I’ve left in 3.5 hours of admin time, which is more than you actually need: For a few months, I had back-to-back 30-min customer meetings from 9am-6pm… and then did my admin work.

Why doesn’t your calendar look like this? Three things I typically hear:

1 - But I don’t know my repeatable case study yet!

Fair point. Before you know your repeatable case study, your goal is to generate a PULL hypothesis, whether that’s by:

• Visiting potential customers in-person, doing their job with them

• Going to a conference, asking: “What did you come here to buy that you haven’t found?”

• Asking potential customers, “What would you pay someone to solve for you / take off your plate?”

• (Not recommended) Discovery interviews

Once you generate a PULL hypothesis, you then need to test if it’s real as quickly as possible. I recommend testing by scheduling five calls with people who should try to buy your product if your hypothesis is correct. And in these calls, you… see if they try to buy it!

You don’t need a bunch of fancy things at this stage - like a demo or a website. At most, you need a few slides, and you can use my template script and slides HERE.

All this means you can generate and test a PULL hypothesis within a single week. Your first few will almost certainly be wrong; the goal is to iterate based on what you learn as quickly as possible.

The reason most of our calendars DON’T look like this is simple: When you get punched in the face by market indifference on your brilliant Plan A, you think you need to think more. So, your calendar looks like this for months:

The answers you’re looking for will not emerge from the whiteboard.

2 - But I can’t get people to meet with me!

Whenever I hear this, it is almost always the result of one of two things:

1. You do virtually zero outbound (e.g., sending two messages in your one-hour “outbound block”)

2. Your messaging convinces potential customers not to meet with you

The point of outbound is not to sell the product; it’s to get the meeting. You rarely get the meeting by pitching your product or poking at their pain points.

Good outbound treats the recipient as the main character, and asks: What is most interesting to them?

Now, sometimes your market isn’t online and you need to do cold calls. Which is fine: At a 100:1 dial-to-meeting rate with a parallel dialer, 2 hours of calling can get you 2, maybe 3, calls.

And sometimes calls don’t work either. Fine: Go to conferences every week. Plenty of startups do that.

None of this working? Somebody has figured out how to get your target customer to meet with them - go find them and have them explain their playbook to you.

3 - But I have to do [something else that seems important]!

What is more important than this?

Hi! I’m Rob Snyder, founder & author of The Power of Pull - now available worldwide! I help startups with pre-PMF sales in a variety of ways; learn more HERE.

Pain points sound meaningful: “Our current workflow is extremely tedious and frustrating.”

When you hear a potential customer say this, your founder ears perk up. They shouldn’t.

Why? Because pain points don’t cause purchases - the default outcome of a pain point is not buying!

When someone says their workflow is extremely frustrating… is it OK if they don’t change their approach to this workflow right now? You can imagine them saying: “Yes, actually… this workflow is annoying and tedious, but we have other priorities right now.”

Or can they just… fix this workflow without buying your product? “Yes, actually… we just haven’t spent the time figuring that out yet.”

So then, when you look for pain points:

1. You will find pain points

2. You will pitch your product and get an enthusiastic response

3. As a result, you will think they are likely to buy, when they are not likely to buy and might not even be considering buying

My analogy is Schrodinger’s Date: Imagine two people at dinner, where one thinks it’s a date and one doesn’t. They spend dinner talking past each other, each misinterpreting the conversation and the situation, right up until the moment one leans in for a kiss………… and everything goes off the rails.

So: If your sales calls often feel awkward and uncomfortable at the end, and/or you get ghosted afterwards… well, you’re on Schrodinger’s Date. Looking for pain points basically always sends you on Schrodinger’s Date. (And worse - you wind up wasting your life on serial “dates”, when you could have pivoted towards real PULL sooner!)

We need to stop looking for pain points. What should we look for instead?

PULL Points

A founder friend told me to create PULL Points.1

As a reminder, the PULL framework is my model for “someone who is weird NOT to buy your product.” It is used by fast-growing startups to generate their ICP, product, sales process, pricing and basically everything else. And in a sales call, the part called “discovery” is not about finding pain points, it’s about filling out this potential customer’s PULL framework.

There are four components to the PULL framework:

1. The Project on a person’s to-do list (P)

2. The situation the person is in that makes this project Unavoidable right now (U)

3. The List of options available to the person to do their project (L1)

4. The Limitations of the available options that prevent the person from doing their project (L2)

For a given Project “P”, there are two PULL points. If these PULL points are both true, they would be weird NOT to buy. If the PULL points are not both true, they might buy - but it wouldn’t be weird if they didn’t.

The two PULL points are:

1. Can’t delay / avoid P

2. Can’t do P by other means

The first PULL point confirms the project is truly unavoidable; the second confirms that their existing options are truly unworkable.

Looking for PULL points is a really elegant way to fill out the PULL framework in a sales call.

Phrasing and reasoning

When filling out the PULL framework in sales calls, there is a slight but important difference between two questions:

1. “What are the limitations of the options you’re considering?”

2. “Are your existing options good enough?”

With Question 1, a potential customer can answer honestly - for example saying “yeah X is expensive” - but they still could go with X, and you might be on Schrodinger’s Date. Question 2, on the other hand, is worded in such a way where it’s not possible to be on Schrodinger’s Date - which is why I recommend asking it that way.

So: Look for PULL Points in your sales calls. Ask in ways that avoid Schrodinger’s Date. And stop wasting your life chasing pain points.

Hi! I’m Rob Snyder, founder & author of The Power of Pull - now available worldwide!

1. Want my help with pre-PMF sales? Apply for time with me HERE.

2. Want to binge my pre-PMF sales course? I professionally recorded it with a live audience of B2B founders - available HERE.

Want some very helpful pre-PMF sales skills? I’m open-sourcing:

1. My Sales Call Review Claude Skill: Paste a transcript (or five), get my feedback. Is there real pull? What is it? What should you do differently?

2. My Weekly Startup Review Claude Skill: Set a weekly ritual to see how you’re performing vs. these standards, so you don’t waste precious weeks.

Give them a try, let me know what you think!

I meet two kinds of early-stage B2B startups:

#1: The promising startup that has the chance to become an outlier. They don’t want to miss their chance, but they aren’t sure whether they’re doing all the right things.

#2: The startup that doesn’t realize they’re dying. It seems like they are on the path to hypergrowth, yet they very much aren’t.

Most startups are both, simultaneously: I talked to a founder who, in a single week, realized that, despite having real revenue and Fortune 500 customers, his pipeline was mostly fake and his company was in deep danger. If you think this is a rare thing that can’t possibly happen to you: He did too.

Me: “What could I have told you six months ago that might have caused you to realize this sooner, when you could have course-corrected?”

Him: “I wish I’d had some way to know what ‘good’ looks like. What should my expectation be? What does good traction look like? And, importantly - I want “good” defined in a way that I can’t weasel out of, so I can’t convince myself that I’m doing well when I’m actually not.”

So, to honor his request: Here is the standard - what “good” looks like - for a sales-led B2B startup.

The standard applies if you’re selling enterprise or SMB, AI or SaaS. It applies before you have hired in sales and after you’ve hired in sales. It applies from the moment you have an idea - not “when the product is ready.” (If you don’t have an idea - read THIS.)

If you don’t think the standard applies to you, please think again.

The standard has six components:

1. Repeatable Case Study

2. Pipeline

3. Pull

4. Close rate

5. Cycle time

6. Success rate

Hitting only five means you have not met the standard. And hitting this standard is the starting line, not the finish line.

The standard is tough love. We need tough love; I know exactly what it feels like the moment you realize you’ve missed your big opportunity and that you could have done something differently six months ago if only you’d known. I don’t want you to have that feeling ever.

Startups want to grow fast. Not growing fast means something is wrong. If you aren’t hitting the standard, something is wrong. Hitting the standard is the ONLY priority in the pre-PMF stage.

1 - Repeatable Case Study

A startup is just a case study factory, where we produce near-clones of a single case study. The repeatable case study is the foundation for go-to-market, product, and scale.

You must have ONE repeatable case study. This case study articulates exactly who you sell to and exactly how you describe your product. If you don’t know these things with extreme clarity, you don’t have a repeatable case study, and that means you don’t have repeatability and aren’t ready to systematize or scale sales.

Importantly: Your ONE case study must be written in a way where it would be weird if the person in the case study did anything OTHER than buy your product right now.

If they could just DIY it with Claude Code, it would be weird if they bought from you. If they could delay buying your product, it would be weird if they bought from you. If they could just do nothing, it would be weird if they bought from you.

Below is the example of a repeatable case study using the PULL framework. Fill out your own, then ask: Would it be weird if this person did anything other than buy from us right now?

2 - Pipeline

Most startups are bottlenecked on pipeline - or “meeting enough new customers.” Few treat it as their bottleneck.

The standard varies based on the size of your initial contract:

• Big contracts ($100k+): 3 first meetings per week (per person selling)

• Moderate contracts ($25k-99k): 10 first meetings per week (per person selling)

• Small contracts (sub-$25k): 15 first meetings per week (per person selling)

As an example: Before Tabs even had a product, each cofounder was scheduling 3-4 meetings per day. (See their story HERE.)

3 - Pull

The standard is that 60% of first meetings have “pull”, defined below, as graded by my sales call review skill. (HERE)

When customers have PULL, they try to buy. “Pulling” = “trying to buy.” The potential customer initiates a “trying-to-buy”-shaped action:

• If you’re selling to a startup or small business, the person you’re talking to will try to buy on the call - they’ll ask for the Stripe link and schedule an onboarding call, for example.

• If you’re selling into a bigger company, they almost certainly won’t buy right away, but they will do something close to it - for example, saying, “Ok, I need this, and here’s what needs to happen so I can bring this into my organization.” They will then walk you through who needs to approve and they’ll initiate the deal’s next steps.

From: Are they pulling?

4 - Close Rate

Of your sales meetings where there is “pull”, the standard is a 50% close rate.

(If this sounds unattainable, I have seen startups with a 75%+ close rate from meeting 1 - a metric that doesn’t exclude people who don’t have PULL! At some point, you may deliberately reduce your close rate e.g., by ‘optimizing’ pricing, but that’s a future thing.)

5 - Cycle Time

The standard varies based on initial contract size. This is from “meeting with PULL” to signed contract.

• Large contracts ($100k+): 90 days

• Moderate contracts ($25k-99k): 30 days

• Small contracts (sub-$25k): 14 days

I could include caveats here for pilots, trials, land-and-expand motions, long legal reviews, etc. But that would make the standard something you can wiggle out of. Also, hitting fast growth often means creatively designing these things OUT of your sales process.

6 - Success Rate

When a customer buys from you, they are guaranteed to churn, until X happens, in which case it would be weird if they churned.

X is your “leading indicator of retention.” Most startups don’t know what X is, or worse, we think X is “usage” or “ROI” or “satisfaction/NPS”, when it is almost never these things. I see far too many 12-month contracts where, in month 11, the founder gets blindsided.

The standard: 95% of new customers hit whatever X is within 1 month of purchase.

1 month? Can’t implementation take a long time, Rob? Yes, but long implementations should be treated as design challenges rather than as immutable features of reality. Get to X within 1 month!

How to attack the standard

This is the standard. What are you going to do about it?

My suggestion: Review your performance against the standard in a weekly ritual where you stare reality in the face, and ask, “what do I need to change next week?” You can use my Claude skill to do this - see HERE.

Hitting the standard will probably be the most difficult thing to do in your career, and will probably take quite a while. There are cheat codes - finding intense pull, or getting someone on your cap table who can solve pipeline by foie grassing you with customer intros, or selling to the kind of customer who brings in other customers - but even with a cheat code, hitting the standard is brutally difficult, takes all your time and energy, and requires a ton of iteration. You’ll take steps forward and steps backward. Such is the game.

You have the standard. You know what good looks like. Now go make it happen. I believe in you.

(PS: If you have feedback on the standard, LMK! It is a v1!)

Psst, if you’ve made it here: I will be giving five early-stage B2B founders access to “AI Rob” for one month for $50. AI Rob may eventually become a paid skill that helps startups do pre-PMF sales - it drafts your case study, drafts and iterates your call scripts, drafts your outreach, does all your call prep and follow-up emails… and basically everything else. I use AI Rob daily myself! If selected, you’ll also join a Slack channel with me. Email me if you’d like to be one of the five: rob@reframeb2b.com.

Hi! I’m Rob Snyder, a founder studying what causes $0-$1M and fast growth.

1. Get my professionally-recorded 7+ hour course on a $0-$1M playbook for B2B startups - deeply covering ICP, pipeline, sales calls, positioning, and sales process - HERE. Great thing to binge this holiday weekend.

2. Want to collab with me on your startup? Let’s figure out how to make your market pull! Learn more and grab time HERE.

If my count is right, last week marked the 50th time I’ve been part of a $0-$1M journey either as a founder or some form of advisor.

These 50 have been across enterprise software, AI, SMB, services-as-software, product-led growth, plain ol’ agencies, consumer, and deep tech.

A few of these companies have grown incredibly fast - for example, $0-$25M in two years and $0-$6M in eight weeks. A few have gotten past $1M and stalled out. And of course, I’ve also seen more than a few never make it to $1M.

Since this is my last post before my book comes out, I thought I’d reflect on the five most important things I’ve learned about the nature of 0-1 and hypergrowth… before getting back to work trying to make things go $0-$100M+!

1 - Pull is everything.

Every successful startup winds up finding a certain kind of person who is ready to buy before they’ve ever heard of the startup or its product. This person will try to buy the startup’s product with very little convincing, and even before the product is ready for primetime. This person’s case study is written before they talk to you, minus a few bullet points about how exactly you helped them.

This is “pull”. When startups take off, it’s because they find pull. If they don’t find pull, they don’t take off, no matter what else they do. I’ve seen startups brute force their way to $1M by pushing, twisting arms, and begging; they always stall out unless they find real, repeatable pull.

I created the PULL Framework to articulate what’s behind pull. It’s more nuanced than “hair-on-fire pain points” or “problems”: When someone has a pain point or problem, they could buy… but they also could not buy. And given how weird and rare buying is, if they can not buy, they probably won’t. When someone has PULL, on the other hand, it’s weird if they don’t buy. If you compare your pipeline of “people with PULL” and “people without PULL”, the former’s close rate is almost certainly 10x higher than the latter, as is their post-sale success rate.

Every time I think I talk about “pull” too much, I realize I don’t emphasize it enough. Every founder I’ve helped - even those who have read my writing for years before getting my help - admits that they didn’t realize that “pull” really is EVERYTHING until after their startup took off. And even then, they need weekly reminders to focus on pull. Pull determines who they sell to, how they position their product, how they sell, what their product needs to do, and even how the founder prioritizes their time.

2 - It almost always takes at least one unfolding.

I don’t like the word “pivot”, because it implies a mechanical change in direction, and there are infinite ways to mechanically change direction that aren’t productive. Instead, startups that work evolve to “fit” pull when they find it - this, I call unfolding (based on Christopher Alexander’s work in architecture). Nearly every startup that I’ve seen take off has gone through at least one unfolding, sometimes multiple.

The startups that don’t take off cling to their product or vision in the face of market indifference. In their minds, “supply” is fixed but “demand” is variable. “We have built a product that’s objectively valuable, now we just have to figure out who will buy it and what the right messaging is.” Everything is interpreted as a messaging problem or positioning problem or sales tactics problem or “needing more features” problem, when it is almost always a demand problem.

Embracing pull, on the other hand, requires realizing that demand is fixed, while supply is variable. We must, if only for a moment, totally forget that our product or idea or vision exists, and look at buyers’ to-do lists as part of the objective reality we do not control. Only then can we design “supply” that has any chance of succeeding, which may simply be a reframe of our current product, or may be a full rewrite.

The market eventually beats supply-side “push” thinking out of you. Life (and runway) is too short to push a product the market doesn’t pull.

3 - The thing that works is almost always embarrassingly small.

When a startup figures out what customers really want to buy, their response is almost always: “Wait, that’s it?” The initial market isn’t huge, and the product this market needs seems tiny.

We product folk are maximalists, and intuitively think that we need to build a good (= big) product that promises a lot of things to a lot of customers. What we don’t realize is that the big companies we are inspired by have gotten big over time by unfolding from smaller things and smaller markets.

When you understand the PULL Framework and pull theory, you realize that customers don’t want “big”. They just want to get whatever’s on their to-do-list done. Anything our product does or claims to do beyond that is adding surface area that potential customers need to think about, decide if it fits what they need. More thinking adds wind resistance and makes sales and post-sales less aerodynamic, less successful. Smaller - more precisely, fit - always wins.

When you find PULL, your product may not even require the absolute basics - like a user interface. In my case, when I apologized for our product not having a way to log in and, instead, only worked by sending reports via email, customers repeatedly said: “I don’t care. I don’t want to have to learn a new tool.” I stopped apologizing and started highlighting “it’s so simple, you don’t need to learn a new tool” as one of the benefits of our product.

4 - Most founders are counterproductive at sales (…but so are most salespeople).

Effective selling requires a theory of why people buy things. This theory does not seem to exist exist. “Jobs-to-be-done” is the closest - and one of my intellectual heroes, Bob Moesta, who is behind Jobs-to-be-Done with Clay Christensen and wrote Demand-Side Sales 101, blurbed The Power of PULL!1

Our default theory of sales is that someone buys because we convince them to buy. “We find their pain points and problems and offer a ton of value, and then we sell because we craft a logical, emotional, or financial argument that convinces them to buy.” This is what I call “push” sales. It leads to long presentations on “our view of the problem and solution.” It leads to 10-minute demos that seem impressive to us, and are insufferable to potential customers. It leads to websites designed to convince people who don’t want to buy that they should want to buy, which convinces people who actually have PULL that you aren’t a fit for them.

“Push” sales, to summarize, convinces customers not to buy, and prevents us from seeing why they aren’t buying. When customers do buy, it is despite how the startup sells, and the startup doesn’t actually know why or even what the customer really bought.

Pull, on the other hand, is a theory of what makes someone “weird not to buy” a particular product or service. The real job of sales is just to find these people (to define your ICP as “people who have PULL”), and simply not convince them not to buy. Which leads to an approach to sales that’s designed to find customers who convince you that they have PULL and need your help. This might sound unintuitive, but every startup that grows very fast narrows their targeting and focuses more on disqualification than persuasion in their sales process; once they find someone with PULL, sales is about helping that person buy.

Embracing pull makes sales way less stressful. You no longer fear group demos, and designing your sales process becomes intuitive. Most importantly, you no longer feel like sales is this mystical art of conjuring magic words that convince people to want your product.

5 - Everything hinges on figuring out how to get potential customers to talk to you, which is harder than you’d think.

The startup that has five sales calls per day learns so much faster than the startup that has five sales calls per month. Said differently: If you can’t get potential customers to talk to you, nothing else downstream matters.

For some reason, we almost never behave as if this is the case. If you’re not scheduling multiple sales calls per day, look at your calendar: How much time do you spend per day trying to schedule sales calls? If your answer isn’t “every minute I can possibly spend,” what does that tell you? And if you’re spending a lot of time but continue to not schedule enough sales calls, why do you continue to do things that don’t work?

We all feel like we are monstrously busy and many of us work 996, but if we’re honest, most of the work we do is work that avoids the real work. We create roadmaps and strategy docs that keep our team busy, we craft plans and theories to make ourselves feel like we have control, we go to startup events… all deep down knowing we’re avoiding our startup’s true bottleneck.

If your life depended on solving your startup’s bottleneck this week - in most cases, your startup’s bottleneck is “getting enough potential customers to meet with me, so I can figure out what ‘pull’ is” - how would you reallocate your time and effort? The startups that take off figure this out. The startups that don’t take off take forever to attack their bottleneck, as if they don’t want to.

After all - if you figure out (1) who would be weird not to buy from you, and (2) how to make it weird for those people not to meet with you, you have the two essential ingredients for hypergrowth. Everything else is for show.

So what matters? First, finding and “fitting” pull. Then, all that matters is the rate of solving whatever the bottleneck is in your “case study factory”.2 It is that simple, and that difficult.

Bonus: Modern entrepreneurship playbooks and theories are almost entirely counterproductive.

All of this would be intuitive were we not foie-grassed with bad advice that sounds right. In fact, before entrepreneurship was cool, entrepreneurs did the obvious things to build their businesses: They figured out what people needed but couldn’t get, figured out how to sell and build it, and figured out everything else along the way. Yes, even the so-called “generational” or “power-law” companies did this.

Now that entrepreneurship is cool, however, we entrepreneurs get waterboarded with so many highly logical and scientific-sounding playbooks, 72-step methodologies, and hot takes. This would be fine if they were helpful, but they all seem perfectly designed to cause us to avoid the very things that have always made new ventures successful.

By default, entrepreneurs now:

• Think we need to do tens or hundreds of discovery interviews as Step 1, and that we can’t sell in these discovery interviews.

  • This teaches us to avoid getting firsthand experience, that secondhand knowledge is adequate. It is not.

  • This also teaches us to avoid the only thing that would tell us whether what we think we’re learning is real or not → if they try to buy!

• Think we need to start with (unpaid) design partners.

  • Yet to meet a founder who’s done this and hasn’t regretted it. It gives you the appearance of demand validation, and the reason to build a product, without actually having validated anything. They can even use your product and get a lot of value/ROI out of it - but that doesn’t mean they would have bought it ex-ante, or that anybody else will!

• Think we need a big vision and plan - or, more simply, that we need “to know what we’re doing or where we’re going.”

  • This leads us to spend a ton of time and brainpower at the whiteboard because we think we need to understand things before doing them, which prevents us from spending time with potential customers “figuring it out.”

  • Whenever anything happens that’s not in line with our expectations, we feel like we need to think more to understand it - we go back to the whiteboard and waste even more precious time… and, worse, we tend to discount reality in favor of how we want reality to work!

I could craft a longer list, but you get the point.

As a result of all of this, you actually get less-counterproductive startup advice out of freaking Alex Hormozi or Russell Brunson than you get out of the ivy league, most startup accelerators, and even early-stage investors!

This isn’t to be anti-intellectual: Entrepreneurship would almost certainly benefit from good theories and playbooks. The problem is that entrepreneurs are currently steered into the iceberg by bad ones.

I have tried to create the least-harmful framework with PULL and the least-harmful zero-to-one methodology:

1. Get firsthand experience to generate a PULL hypothesis

2. Test if your hypothesis is real by having a set of 5 sales conversations with potential customers before you’ve built anything, and see if they try to buy

While these things don’t immediately lead you astray, I still find that any methodology can become a goal in itself, supplanting the actual goal. Remember: All that matters is finding pull. Do whatever it takes - knowing that the universe seems to often demand some ugly form of Goblin Mode. There are no points for style or effort.

Also:

• My book, The Power of PULL, is coming out July 7! If you pre-order it, you get my sales call analysis Claude skill & private AMAs… order and get access HERE.

• I recorded a 7-hour course with Sandbox (Utah-based entrepreneurship master’s program) on “how to position and sell early-stage products”. Get access HERE.

• I help startups figure out the best way to position and sell their products for fast growth. Learn more + grab time with me HERE.

It is very easy to mistake “enthusiasm” for “pull”.

When customers have PULL, they try to buy. “Pulling” = “trying to buy.” The potential customer initiates a “trying-to-buy”-shaped action:

• If you’re selling to a startup or small business, the person you’re talking to will try to buy on the call - they’ll ask for the Stripe link and schedule an onboarding call, for example.

• If you’re selling into a bigger company, they almost certainly won’t buy right away, but they will do something close to it - for example, saying, “Ok, I need this, and here’s what needs to happen so I can bring this into my organization.” They will then walk you through who needs to approve and they’ll initiate the deal’s next steps.

If they have PULL, they will “try to buy” even if you don’t have a product ready yet, or even if you bumble around in the sales call. Sometimes, of course, you may do such a good job convincing them not to pull that they don’t pull. But PULL doesn’t require the perfect sales pitch, demo, or process.1

Here’s the important point: Anything other than “trying to buy” is not pulling.

If you think they are pulling when they’re not, they are probably not going to buy. Worse, you’re going to think, “they’re probably going to buy.” As the deal extends… you’re going to keep pushing and following up, rather than trying to figure out who WILL pull! This is how startups waste precious months or years down a dead-end road. Sigh. Been there, not fun.

Let’s go through a few things you might hear that sound like they’re pulling, but these things are NOT indications of PULL:

“Wow!!!! This is exactly what the industry needs!”

This is a yes-sounding-“no.” Here’s what they’re not saying: “I need this right now. How do I get started?” Whenever you hear something like this on a call, it’s a sign something has gone horribly wrong.

“This would solve our biggest pain point!”

This sentence alone doesn’t indicate that they will pull. Pain points aren’t even indications of pull, because for the majority of “hair on fire” pain points… people do nothing about them even when presented with a compelling solution. And many purchases don’t require pain points. I have seen far too many startups obsess over customers who have “hair on fire” pain points… that never buy.

Is it actually a priority? If so, do they not have good enough options to get this done? If not, in Bob Moesta’s words - “bitchin’ ain’t switchin’.”

“This would make my life so much better!”

Yeah, cool, there are almost certainly a bunch of ways to make your life better that you’re not taking action on.

“This would save us $10M per year!”

Who wouldn’t want to save $10M? Who wouldn’t want to make an extra $100M? These are “value propositions” or “business cases” or whatever - and it seems like if you offer unbelievable value, they would be crazy not to buy. If they describe the value back to you, they’re sold, right?

Nope. Because, to paraphrase The Heart of Innovation, how many other ways do they have to save $10M or even make an extra $100M that they’re doing nothing about?

“If we moved forward, what would the process be?”

Not the worst signal, but not pulling. Notice the hypothetical. This is essentially saying - “imagine a world in which I had pull - which may or may not be this world, I may just be curious and bored - in such a world, what does buying look like.” You would be shocked at how many people are just curious.

So what do I do?

Treat anything that is not obviously pull as “probably not pull, and need to understand why.” You can use my favorite tactic - “playing dumb.”

Huh… I’m hearing that it would make your life so much better, but I’m not hearing “oh my gosh I need to buy this right now”… can you talk me through what you’re thinking?

Oh interesting, can you help me understand - you just said IF we moved forward… that is very much not “we are definitely moving forward” - can you help me understand how you’re thinking about this right now?

The goal, of course, is to get to ground truth - what’s in their mind? Do they really have PULL, or not? If not, why not? It is ok to sound dumb or confused, because that’s how you get them to explain how they’re thinking to you.

After all, life’s too short to push something the market doesn’t pull.

Also:

• My book, The Power of PULL, is coming out July 7! If you pre-order it, you get my sales call analysis Claude skill & private AMAs… order and get access HERE.

• Soft-launching a professionally recorded course on “selling to find product pull”! Get early discounted access for you and your team HERE.

• I help startups take off. Startups are reserving me for Q3, so if you feel like people should be buying fast, but they aren’t consistently & it’s not clear why, grab time with me HERE.

If your product hasn’t taken off, it feels like there are a million possible causes and a gazillion things you could try. When this is the case, you throw spaghetti at the wall1 under the banner of “experimentation”; most of the time, nothing works and it’s not clear why. If you’re like me, you start wondering if the real problem is you.

The PULL framework gives you a different path.

When your startup hasn’t taken off, there actually aren’t a million possible reasons why it’s not taking off. There are only two.

Reason #1: You haven’t figured out who has PULL (aka: who is weird not to buy your product).

Reason #2: You have figured out who has PULL, but you’re preventing them from buying.

Everything about not taking off is merely a symptom of one of these two things.

1 - PULL - “Who is weird not to buy our product” is the most upstream thing in startups.

If you find somebody with PULL, they are ready to buy your product before they know it exists. They will try to buy despite the current state of your product or how bad you are at sales. These people are trying to do X, but blocked from doing X by their available tools, methods, options. They are stuck, in need of an un-block so they can get X done. You show up and almost all of the work is done. Their PULL even tells you exactly what to sell them - something that unblocks them!

If you don’t find someone with PULL, nothing else matters. It wouldn’t be weird if they didn’t buy from you… so they probably won’t, and you learn nothing when they don’t!

These people aren’t prioritizing something relevant, or they have good enough options for whatever they’re prioritizing. They’re not going to drop their priorities or good-enough methods just because you want them to, and they won’t do this no matter how good you get at sales, how many hours you work, how much ROI you promise, how much they say they “like” your product, how much you raise, how great your website is, how many features you build, etc. Which is why everything else is downstream of figuring out who has PULL and is weird not to buy.

2 - When you know who has PULL, all that matters is to not prevent them from buying.

If you watched last week’s sales call teardowns, you might be surprised at the extent to which smart founders’ default approaches to sales are counterproductive. I estimate that 25 out of 30 minutes in the typical startup’s sales call I review convinces someone with PULL not to buy. A person with PULL just needs to know whether and how we can unblock them. They don’t need our theory of the market, or our differentiation statement, or to explain how their process works in detail, and they certainly don’t need to know how to configure our product.

Are your sales calls preventing customers from buying? Some indications:

• You can’t review a sales call recording and fill out the potential customer’s PULL framework without guessing

• Your product description and demo go for longer than 5 minutes

• The potential customer doesn’t initiate a buying-adjacent action during the call (e.g., you are proposing next steps; they are not)

This goes well beyond calls, of course: Outbound convinces potential customers not to meet with us, sales processes convince them not to close, websites and products convince them we’re not for them.

Customers with PULL sometimes overcome our best efforts and buy, which is a great sign of PULL! But often, we do such a good job preventing them from buying… that they don’t buy. Once we have found PULL, we just need to design everything downstream to stop preventing them from buying and succeeding.

—

So the question is: Do we actually have evidence of who’s weird not to buy? If not, figuring that out is all that matters. If so, the only thing that matters is: What’s preventing these people from buying? If you’re not sure whether it’s PULL or prevention… all that matters is figuring out which it is!

Example: The “But Claude Code” Objection

Today, tons of us are running face-first into potential customers saying: “But I can just do this with Claude Code!”

This sounds like an objection. So you will, by default, mark this as an objection and look for ways to handle this objection. Most of the time, you’ll find yourself trying to persuade everyone that actually, Claude Code can’t do this. A friend proudly showed me his 10-slide deck giving all the reasons Claude Code couldn’t do what his product did. How many times had it convinced somebody who wanted to use Claude Code to not use Claude Code? Zero. However, some people who were already convinced they couldn’t use Claude Code saw the slides and bought. But these people would have bought anyway, and probably faster, without being waterboarded by 10 slides telling them something they already believed.

When you get the “but Claude Code” objection, you’ve found somebody who is not weird not to buy your product. They believe they can just use Claude Code! Which means you have to try to push them to buy, and by default, they won’t. You can try a million different tactics and build a million different features, but this will generally not move the needle. Because no matter what you do, you’re selling to people who feel like they have a good-enough option. And so it would be weird if they bought. The only solution is to find someone who is blocked. And that might be:

1. Someone who has already tried using Claude Code and failed… yet still must get X done, and doesn’t believe that the next model release (or five) will get Claude Code to be able to do X. In other words, you find people for whom reality has done the heavy lifting of convincing them.

2. Someone for whom using Claude Code is not an option… yet still must get X done. This is behind the seasonal YC hajj from devtools to insurance or logistics: Some people just won’t build and manage their own software, at least not for the foreseeable future. Thank God for normies.

Again, look upstream: Who is weird not to buy? If you don’t know that, nothing else matters. Once you know that, design everything around it.

It is that simple, and that difficult.

• My book, The Power of PULL, is coming out July 7! If you pre-order it, you get my sales call analysis Claude skill & private AMAs… learn more + get access HERE.

• I help startups make their products easy to sell. Startups are reserving me for Q3, so if you feel like your product is not easy to sell and that needs to change, learn more & grab time here.

As a first-time founder, I watched exactly ZERO sales calls from other startups. Six years, multiple pivots, to millions in ARR - never having any clue whether our sales approach was “good”… and not knowing whether customers were buying because of, or despite, how we sold. Could we have done $0-$10M+ in that same time period? I’ll never know.

Over the past few years, it’s become the norm to record sales calls. But still, most founders have never seen another startup’s recorded sales call.

This is a shame, because sales calls are the best way to learn - and learn about way more than just sales. In a sales call, basically everything about a company comes together (or doesn’t!) - ICP, positioning, demo, sales script, the founder’s philosophy - with immediate feedback from a potential customer on what’s working and what isn’t.

I have reviewed (conservatively) 3,000 sales calls from hundreds of startups over the past two years, both to write my book and as an advisor to startup.

Until now, all of these teardowns have been private (either one-on-one, or in small founder groups - learn more about that here.)

This week, I’m doing something different.

Harold Zhu, Harvard MBA and co-founder of Sliq, offered to have me tear a few of his sales calls down publicly. This might be the first publicly available sales call teardown in history!1

In a 90-min live event, Harold was extremely candid about what he was struggling with and how he felt during the sales calls. A potential customer even joined and gave feedback, too!

I totally recorded the event and was super excited to share it publicly.

But, in the lowest-IQ act in recorded history, I somehow recorded only my face for the first call teardown… not the screenshare. YouTube, of course, refused to upload that, flagging my face as “offensive content” and “possible war crime”. So I had to re-record a solo teardown for that call. You’ll now find multiple different videos below.

CONTEXT: Sliq is an agent for doing the kind of outbound that you can’t do with other outbound tools. Sliq came through my PMF Camp a few months back. Since then, they have gone from zero to 50+ customers and are growing fast, but want to grow faster.

Call 1: Solo Teardown

This was a call with 3 people from the potential customer. Harold had “fun” trying to navigate this.

Doc with my live notes: LINK

My takeaways from this sales call:

• In discovery, know what you’re looking for (PULL!). It’s ok to play dumb when you haven’t found it yet.

• Describe your product before jumping into a demo. Make sure they get the concept.

• Describe your product only based on their PULL. Every additional idea/concept you add makes them less likely to buy.

• Make your demos uncomfortably short, if you do a demo at all.

VIDEO 2: Public Teardown of Sales Call 2

This was part call review AND part working session for Sliq to figure out their positioning + website. The customer joined and gave feedback on her buying experience - thanks, Alanna!

Doc with my live notes: LINK

My takeaways from this sales call:

• The things we feel like convince customers to buy - in this case, showing a demo tailored to Alanna’s business - actually convince them NOT to buy and make them feel uncomfortable.

• With a horizontal product - especially an agent that can theoretically do anything - you have to pick your initial attack vector to target your messaging and outbound. Other people can come inbound and be successful and that’s fine, you don’t have to fire them, you just don’t have to worry much about them.

• Website messaging is difficult, unless you treat the homepage like your sales deck, in which case it is quite straightforward.

(BONUS) VIDEO 3: Harold’s Post-Teardown Sales Call

Because Harold is an overachiever (see: Harvard MBA), he made some immediate changes after the teardown, and shared his very next sales call with us!

Here you’ll see what PULL looks like and feels like in a sales call. You’ll also see a pretty decent discovery + demo. And you’ll see Harold get a little more feedback on how he can take this to the next level :)

PSAs:

I would love to do more of these public teardowns, but only if you think they are valuable. Please:

1. Let me know if this was helpful!

2. If you’re brave, and think you can get a potential customer’s permission, reach out and volunteer to be my next teardown.

And:

• If you want to get early access to my Claude skill for sales call teardowns, preorder my book at robsnyder.org/book!

• If you want me to do a private teardown to help you figure out sales/PMF faster - check robsnyder.org/work-with-me.

• My book, The Power of PULL, is coming out July 7! If you pre-order it, you get COOL STUFF (e.g., my sales call analysis Claude skill + private AMAs) - learn more + get access HERE.

• I help startups make their products easy to sell. Startups are reserving me for Q3, so if you feel like your product is not easy to sell and that needs to change, learn more & grab time here.

• On Tuesday, June 9, I am doing a public sales call teardown where I analyze a startup’s actual recorded sales call. Harold, co-founder of Sliq, has volunteered as tribute. This is the first (and possibly only) time I’ll do a public one. Registration is free, but there are limited slots.

Question from a startup: We are getting into pilots, and they are going well - users are getting value out of the product and usage is going up - but we’re struggling to align on success criteria with our champions, and deals are kinda dragging along in the pilot stage. What do we do?

Answer from me: It seems like you’re thinking about pilots backwards.

The same is true of trials and proofs-of-concept (POCs), whether free or paid: These aren’t things that cause a purchase, they are things that can prevent a purchase. When you treat pilots as if they’ll cause a purchase, you’re going to cause yourself a lot of pain.

Let’s go down a causality rabbithole, then return to pilots/POCs/trials.

Causality’s arrows

Two things cause someone to buy your product:

1. They have PULL: They are prioritizing X right now, but can’t do it with their existing options for Y reason.

2. You offer something that unblocks them: It enables them to overcome Y to get X done.

If these causes are absent, it would be weird if they bought from you.

If these causes are present, there are many things that can PREVENT them from buying from you. For example:

1. You try to charge a trillion dollars for your product

2. You don’t pass a security review

3. It takes too much effort to implement your product

4. Your sales process convinces them not to buy (for example: two-hour walkthrough of every feature and the theory behind AI agents… or following a traditional sales script that feels like a colonoscopy)

5. You just make them feel weird (for example: signing all your emails off with “Love, Rob”… especially if your name’s not Rob)

So: Only two things can cause a purchase, but many things can prevent a purchase. This is true beyond purchases, of course: Many things will cause a startup to fail, but only one thing can cause a startup to succeed (finding PULL!) Beyond startups, this distinction also applies to job satisfaction, health, happiness, relationships - each has a different set of things that cause X and things that prevent X.

Now, the hard part: Fixing the things that prevent purchases =/= doing the things that cause purchases.1 Having a clean SOC 2 compliance report won’t cause them to buy from you, though not having it might prevent them from buying. Same with a good demo, a good sales process, or customer reference calls! We all learn this the hard way when we spend a ton of time making our product easy to adopt (e.g., adding a free tier) and realize that no matter how easy it is to adopt, nobody wants to adopt it.

Because of this, we need to approach “things that cause purchases” and “things that prevent purchases” differently:

• You should design your business around “things that cause purchases” - from your ICP to sales meeting structure to your product description to your actual product.

• “Things that prevent purchases” should be designed out when possible, and minimized and expedited otherwise.

So: Back to Pilots, POCs, and trials. These things are NOT the causes of purchases (remember, there are two: “PULL” and “fit”), they are things that can prevent a purchase - and should be avoided if possible, and if not, crushed like a checklist item.

Most of the time, pilots are unnecessary.

Why are we even doing a pilot? Usually: Because we offered it! We brought it up, the customer didn’t. Why do we do this? It is actively introducing a thing that can only prevent a purchase!

Rule #1: If the potential customer doesn’t propose a pilot, don’t propose one.

Usually, we can go straight for a big-kid sale - whether that’s a smaller initial contract or a good ol’ annual deal.

When necessary, pilots should be treated as “things that can prevent a purchase.”

Some people actually need pilots, of course. But many times they are asking for a pilot just as a way to not say “no” to an eager-beaver founder, or because they’re skeptical and don’t believe the product will actually work (if/when it does work, then they’ll decide if they want to buy it). Some of these pilots might convert. But it wouldn’t be weird if they didn’t convert, and you’ll find they tend to eat up a ton of your time and drag on forever while your investors ask increasingly uncomfortable questions about why they haven’t converted yet.

Rule #2: If the potential customer asks for a pilot, don’t just say yes.

Before committing to a pilot, you have to (1) make sure they believe there’s PULL + fit, and (2) frame the pilot so that it’s more like a security review than an audition for American Idol.

When they ask for a pilot, say something like this: “Happy to scope one out! We tend to do pilots once you are convinced that this is a fit to bring into the org and all other boxes are checked - what else do you need to assess to confirm we’re a fit?” Then: “What else needs to happen in the org to get to the point where a pilot makes sense?”

This approach will reveal deals where they’re not sold, not serious, where they would have wasted your time in a pilot - and it will give you a chance to either reset these deals or kill them.

Once you’re past this step, it’s time to frame the pilot.2

The frame is not, “What do you need to see in order to conclude that the pilot is a success and you want to proceed with the purchase?” This question frames the pilot as an audition that they are judging rather than just another checkbox after they’ve made the decision to buy that everyone expects to clear, and only won’t clear if something goes horribly wrong. Which gives them the ability to defer their purchasing decision and delay other purchasing actions (e.g., going through contract review or whatever), waiting to see what happens during the pilot. By doing this, you are making the pilot a bigger thing than it needs to be - not something you want to do with a “thing that can prevent purchases.” Hence: longer pilots, slower purchases, and lower conversion rates.

So we need to frame the pilot closer to “What are the conditions under which you won’t buy as a result of the pilot?” And then: “Assuming that doesn’t happen, is there anything else that needs to happen before you purchase?” This leads to a more tightly scoped pilot, with less chance to go off the rails or drag on forever.

And that’s what I think about pilots. And causality.

Love,

Rob

The goal is to find one thing that repeatedly works and scales via one GTM approach. This is how you’ll get to $1M-$10M+ ARR without raising a ton of money or building a massive team.

An analogy:

You start the race in party bike mode…

…but to survive and scale, you need to get to “aero” mode:

The point is to maximize pace and minimize wasted effort. But everything we do adds wind resistance:

• When we have to convince customers to buy, use, and renew, it’s like dragging people behind our bike. Not a way to get anywhere fast.

• Adding ICPs, GTM approaches, and value props is like adding seats and gadgets that slow us down.

Two questions to get to aero mode:

1. Who has PULL? Who would be weird NOT to buy?

2. What’s ONE pipeline approach that works? How do you get some subset of the people with PULL to be weird NOT to meet with you?

PULL = weird not to buy

I feel like I constantly understate the importance of PULL and the structural logic behind who would be “weird not to buy”. PULL answers 90%+ of your startup’s questions - from “who do we sell to” to “what do we build” to “how do we retain customers” - in an elegant way that requires the least amount of wasted effort from you!

Yes, many people COULD buy your product - but only people with PULL would be weird NOT to:

An example: I caught up with a friend who’s running an AI SEO company based in Asia. Many businesses should want AI search services. Who wouldn’t want to grow revenue and show up in this new channel?

He started by selling to customers of all shapes and sizes: Tech startups, mortgage brokerages, manufacturers, and healthcare services companies. Some of their customers are startups that still think “stealth mode” is a thing; others are decades-old multinationals.

But the cracks were showing in his “party bike” approach (despite his startup doubling revenue month-on-month): Some deals were closing in one call while others were dragging along for months. It wasn’t clear exactly what customers wanted - they were getting all sorts of different feedback and feature requests. Plus there was some churn, and people were churning for different reasons - many of which didn’t seem like they were within his startup’s control.

When many people can (and do!) buy and renew, it’s hard to figure out whether to narrow down, and if so, how. So many different approaches to their ICP would make sense and might even kinda work.

To get into aero mode, they need to accept the Iron Law of PULL:

Not everybody who should want it buys; not everybody who buys is sold; not everybody who benefits renews. Many customers who DO buy could have NOT bought, and many customers who DO renew could have NOT renewed.

(Read that again.)

This leads us to the simple but awfully difficult question: Who would be weird NOT to buy and renew?

In this startup’s case, is it:

• Somebody who wants to grow?

• Somebody who “gets” that AI search is the future?

• Somebody with a marketing team?

• A new startup that’s AI-native?

No - all of these people could buy and renew, but it wouldn’t be weird if they didn’t buy and renew!

Let’s dig deeper into a few examples, because I still see so few people actually understanding this:

• People believe AI search is the future won’t have a coherent theory of success, and therefore will probably just choose the coolest option and churn the second it’s no longer the cool thing to do or doesn’t lead to them instantly adding $10M ARR like the viral X post said it would. Or they won’t buy at all, because they don’t have to buy.

• People who have failed at SEO might not find success in AI search either, perhaps because people probably aren’t searching for their kind of product! For this kind of buyer, the startup would have to figure out how to make SEO work AND then make it work in AI search. (And this company probably has other non-search methods working for GTM… so they are probably OK not buying!)

• People who have never tried SEO probably have unrealistic expectations from search, like expecting leads overnight. You either need to “educate” them (AKA: convince them they shouldn’t want what they want) OR expect high churn. Both are wasted effort when there are people who don’t need education/convincing out there, who will pay more and renew without your heroics.

Said differently: Anyone for whom it is OK if they don’t buy and succeed probably won’t do either. You’ll misinterpret the signals from these people as reason to build more features you don’t actually need, add urgency to your sales process, reduce pricing to be equally inoffensive to everybody, etc. AKA: all these paths lead down “party bike” mode. Which is OK, you can get places on a party bike. You just won’t get there fast.

SO WHO HAS PULL, ROB?

The person who’d be weird NOT to buy and renew has relied on SEO and succeeded with it, but is now seeing SEO results going in the wrong direction because of AI search, and needs to replace that traffic!1 Think of the structural logic here:

1. Relied on SEO (means SEO has worked and must work, not just “would be nice if it worked”)

2. SEO results are going in the wrong direction (means something must replace SEO traffic, not just “would be nice to have more traffic”)

A person in this situation buys, almost always in one call, with zero convincing. This person has a very specific definition of success that is repeatable and attainable - “Replicate what worked in SEO, but in AI search.” Which leads to a very clear product direction, onboarding process, pricing model, and basically everything else about the business.

PIPELINE = Weird not to meet with you

If you make it weird for people with PULL NOT to meet with you: Congrats! You win!

The question now becomes: Which tactic (or set of tactics) makes it weird for someone in this PULL state NOT to meet with me?

PULL tells us the exact situation we need to own in order to make this happen. In my friend’s case, it’s when a marketing leader is seeing their search traffic going down. Imagine if they were able to put an advertisement right next to the marketer’s graph of search traffic going down month-on-month:

If they could do this, they wouldn’t need to do much else in order to grow fast! This is what I call a toll booth, a way to “own” the situation where someone has PULL. The way to figure this out is by zooming in on the people who would be weird not to buy:

Then you explore different tactics, and asking: “Which would enable me to own the situation in which they are weird not to buy?” This is how I visualized it in my case:

Sometimes the best we can do is a bunch of cold-calling to a decently targeted list. Usually we can do much better than that, at least to get to our first $1-$10M+.

SO WHAT?

The hardest part of getting into aero mode is saying “no” to:

• Good customer segments

• Solid GTM tactics

• Cool features

• A ton of good ideas

• Immediate addressable market

• Feeling cool about doing a bunch of things and being “super busy”

• A bunch of things that could work

And you put your head down and pedal hard.

And then… he found PULL. Over the past few months, his startup has gone from near-zero to $1M run-rate revenue with a clear path to $10M+ by the end of this year.

Which is awesome! But it’s weird… he is more stressed now than he was back in January when nothing was working.

This was my story too, and it’s the story of basically everyone I’ve met who has found product-market fit: You think it will get easier once you find PMF, and it actually gets harder. This surprised me: When you’re pre-PMF, it’s hard to imagine it getting more difficult! How is this possible?

Hitting a personal record, say, in your deadlift, is really difficult. And guess what’s your reward for hitting your PR? Heavier weight next time!

How can you possibly handle more weight? Well - the process of deadlifting 405lbs forces you to adapt so that you can deadlift 410 next week. It will be the hardest thing you’ve ever done… but you’ve done the hard work to be able to handle it.

And yet: When you hit 405, you have less reason to try for 410. You’ve hit 405, what a milestone! Or: You’ve run a sub-5-minute mile! You’ve hit $1M revenue! You’ve hit profitability! Isn’t that good enough?

My point: The reward is harder work.1 By doing hard work, you adapt to be able to handle harder work… but you have better and better excuses to avoid doing it.2

So the ultimate constraint is in our heads: We eventually have to find a way to stop wanting it to get easier. Perhaps even finding a way to enjoy harder work!

I would love to write about how this principle applies to “the good life” beyond startups and exercise, but alas - it’s time for deadlifts. It was nice knowing you.

This exercise has forced me to force-rank what’s important. While PULL impacts every aspect of your business, it seems to operate in a very specific hierarchical order. Said differently, there are many ways to be right downstream that are counterproductive because you are wrong upstream.1

Essential Background:

This section helps you load the PULL framework into your brain.

On Product-Market Fit:

• We know what PMF looks like: customers buy with little/no convincing, act like the product is irresistible, pull product out of startups’ hands, and as a result we grow fast. This is what we all want.

• We know what not(PMF) looks like: customers don’t buy, or need a lot of convincing to buy, seemingly no matter what the startup does. This is what we don’t want but are often stuck with.

• We don’t know what causes not(PMF) -> PMF, so it is unclear exactly what to do. Infinite things could work and sound right - but basically nothing actually moves the needle. We can limp along like this forever. We can even build a profitable business that doesn’t have real PMF - sales are always difficult, growth is always brutal, retention is a lot of arm-twisting. It makes money, but it’s not what it could be.

• Basically every startup spends time in the not(PMF) zone. I believe that startups that go from not(PMF) → PMF figure out ONE specific thing: PULL.

Signals you’re in the not(PMF) zone:

• Customers aren’t pulling the product out of your hands - you have to convince people to buy and if that works, they don’t buy fast.

• You are struggling through pilots or long sales cycles, where you have to do all of the following up. They aren’t acting as if buying is their top priority.

• You have tried a bunch of tactics that haven’t worked - e.g., sales playbooks, outbound scripts, PLG, etc. You’ve also tried building more. It is not clear why these things haven’t worked for you, because they seem to work for other people.

The Not(PMF) Zone welcomes businesses of all shapes and sizes, from no revenue to tens of millions in revenue - software, services, AI, B2B, B2C, deep tech, etc.

PULL theory explains Not(PMF) -> PMF:

• Your potential customer has thousands of relevant products/services she could buy, all of which would solve problems + provide value that she could want. She will buy basically none of them.

• She will, of course, buy some products. But she’ll buy some things she doesn’t “want” (e.g., Netsuite), she’ll buy some products that aren’t related to pain points, etc. AKA: Pain points, problems, value, and wanting your product are NOT RELEVANT.

• Almost all people, almost all of the time, would be weird to buy your product GIVEN their priorities and their available tools/options/methods. It would be weird if someone said, “Let me drop my priorities to buy your product,” or “My current options are good enough, but I’ll buy your product anyway.”

• Inverting this: A person will only be weird NOT to buy your product if three things are true:

  • She has priority “P” right now

  • Her options for getting “P” done are not good enough because of limitation “L”

  • You offer her something that helps her overcome “L” so she can do “P”.

• This leads to the PULL framework. A person will rip the product out of your hands if she has PULL:

  • She has a Project (P) on her to-do list

  • That is Unavoidable (U) right now - she can’t not do this, it’s her #1 priority

  • She considers a List (L) of one or more available options to get her Project done

  • But her existing options don’t get her there - they have Limitations (L)

• Importantly, a “project” is not ABOUT a product/service. Nobody has a project to “buy a CRM.” Instead, a project is product-agnostic - like “Organize my sales data” (this would be a project even if there was no such thing as a CRM).

• This means PULL exists ex-ante, out there in the world, whether or not your product exists.

• If you find a person in a PULL state, she will rip the product out of your hands. If you find a person not in a PULL state, it would be weird if she bought from you, given her priorities and available options.

• Everything else about startups is downstream of this. If you don’t find PULL, nothing else matters.

• You don’t actually need very much: Just one person in a PULL state, one thing they pull out of your hands. The result = one “Hell Yes” case study.

• Startups just figure out their one “hell yes” case study and repeat it. A startup is a case study factory - a system you build to repeat one case study a bunch of times. Eventually you might add a second case study, which is like adding a second factory or line in the factory.

• When you view your business as a factory with 3 steps (get potential customers with PULL to talk to us → convert to actual customers → make them successful such that they don’t churn), you can use factory thinking to figure out what your business’s #1 bottleneck/constraint is. The founder only ever has one job: Attack the business’s constraint.

Implementation:

Here is how to implement PULL across your business - in descending order of importance.

ICP = DESTINY. (Ideal Customer Profile)

• Everything is downstream of how you define your ICP. Define your ICP as: Who has PULL right now? Not who you want to sell to, not even who would benefit the most. Given their priorities + options, who would be weird not to buy right now? Step 1 of implementing PULL has to be “Fill out the PULL framework to define your ICP.”

• It is relatively easy to fill out the PULL framework with plausible-sounding words. There are two quick sanity checks to see if your PULL framework is actually good:

  • 1 - Is it OK if this person doesn’t do this Project right now?

  • 2 - Assuming they do this project, are they OK not buying our product, doing it by other means?

  • These are sanity checks, and could be wrong because of something you can’t see - the true test is how people you THINK have PULL behave in a sales conversation.

• I have found that you have to base your PULL framework on one real person, otherwise it’s almost impossible to get right.

• This person should buy with near-zero convincing, even a junky v1 (and push you to make it better vs churning because it’s bad). They should buy even if you are bad at sales.

• This will always be a subset of who you’d like to eventually serve - that’s ok, you and the market will evolve. This ICP will earn you the right to a bigger future.

Product (Our Supply to their Demand)

• PULL defines the most upstream product requirements. They have PULL if they are trying to do P (project) but are blocked from doing it by existing options because of L (limitations). The core requirement is that our product must enable them to overcome L to accomplish P.

• There are, of course, other requirements. These downstream requirements will always emerge as objections as you try to sell and frustrations as you try to deliver.

• HOW we enable them to overcome L to accomplish P is a function of thoughtful design. Eventually we need to be thoughtful about architecture/design - specifically enabling future optionality (e.g., Clay, Rippling) - but not at the expense of fitting PULL.

• As an MVP, you can deliver something (e.g., a service / “Ratatouille” version) that confirms their PULL and what they want out of you. While designing scalable architecture is difficult, PULL is always your first constraint.

Sales - The Vibe

• If they have real PULL they will buy whatever fits, as long as we don’t convince them otherwise. They will exert the energy to purchase - they are getting unblocked on something that’s really important to them. If you don’t see them exerting the energy to purchase, they don’t have real PULL and you should figure out why they don’t.

• If they don’t have PULL, it is hard to convince them to buy/succeed even if you’re an experienced seller who’s been the #1 sales rep everywhere you’ve worked.

• So: Chill out! Don’t try to craft the legal case for purchase, show them every feature, or try to convince them your vision is infallible. See if they need help, and don’t be bothered if they don’t have PULL.

Getting people to talk to you:

• If someone has PULL, it mostly doesn’t matter how you get them to talk to you. If someone doesn’t have PULL, it also doesn’t matter how you get them to talk to you.

• Before you know what PULL is, you have ~0% of a cold product pitch working. Instead, pitch something interesting to them - e.g., make it cool for them to meet with you because you’re interesting. Consider your personal monopoly: What’s the thing that only you can say, that’s cool to them, and gives them something that’s in it for them?

• After you know what PULL is (& therefore your ICP + their situation), you should know exactly where to find them in their PULL situation. This might be something standard like cold-calling or events, but it is often something creative that only makes sense given this PULL. I call this a “toll booth”.

• If you can’t get people to talk with you, nothing else matters. Shoot for 5-15+ conversations per week (1-3 per day). Worst-case scenario, go Goblin Mode.

Sales - Discovery (= Filling out their PULL Framework)

• Start with: Thanks for meeting with me today, curious - Why did you take the call? What would be most helpful for you to get out of it?

• Then: Set agenda - confirm it’s what they want.

• Then: Before we get to the agenda, mind if I ask a few questions to understand your context? (This exact sequence is how you earn the right to discovery.)

• Ask questions to surface their PULL (and/or a slide) - don’t ask questions about context / pain points. The goal of discovery is to fill out their PULL framework.

• When you think you understand their PULL, play it back to make sure you have it right. You often don’t.

• Make it OK for them to admit they don’t really have PULL (vs. being overly enthusiastic or interrogating).

Sales - Pitch & Demo

• Once you know their PULL, describe your product with the smallest possible description using the supply framework: “We are [product category] that enables [people like ICP] to do [project] without [limitations]”

• Then explain “how it works” by way of describing their unblocked life: “Instead of XYZ, you now do ABC and get DEF as a result.” (The typical way we describe “how it works” is how it literally works versus your unblocked life with it - the former isn’t helpful.)

• The above two bullet points should be a max of 60-90 seconds and should have 1-2 simple accompanying visuals (e.g., a slide or website) you show while describing them.

• Your description should not include your theory of the world / product, the “big problem” you’re solving, etc. These things are not relevant to their PULL. The more you talk / show - especially things that are not directly related to their PULL - the more likely you are to convince them your product isn’t relevant to them.

• After describing these, stop for a “fit check” - ask them if this seems to conceptually fit what they’re looking for. Make it OK for them to say no or “I’m not sure”.

• If not “no”, ask what they need to know in order to make a decision on whether they want to bring this into the organization. This sets up either a 1-call close OR sets the agenda for the second call.

• Demos are optional, should be a max of ~3 mins and minimum possible screens. Don’t show how to set up the product, and for the love of God don’t show them a settings page.

Sales - Deal Strategy:

• Early on, optimize for velocity - usually start small to minimize surface area of objections / approvals. Especially enterprise, where deals can drag on forever with seemingly infinite stakeholders.

• Why optimize for velocity? Pace of learning if PULL is real. You can only know if PULL is real (and if you’re building the right product) with volume all the way through the system (AKA - you only know it’s real when someone buys AND commits to renew!)

• Pricing long-term is a function of the value of getting their Project done, versus the costs of relevant alternatives from their List of options.

• Early on, don’t offer for free because you won’t know if they have real PULL. But also don’t look to maximize pricing because you don’t really know what their PULL is, and want to optimize for velocity. Rough early pricing strategy: What’s enough that I know that their PULL is real, enough that they’ll yell at me if it doesn’t deliver (vs. ghosting), but not so much that it really slows down deal velocity?

• If you’re bootstrapping or short on cash, starting by selling services is a great way to not run out of cash. Many of today’s big tech companies started as services companies.

Sales Process:

• “Fit”: first call, maybe spills over to 2nd call. After they confirm it is a “fit” for their PULL that they want to bring into their org, it becomes project management.

• Every call after 1: Start by recapping their PULL + what they wanted to assess to make a decision (show on screen - slide or doc).

• Person with PULL is your champion: you are helping them accomplish their project.

• Project management: Work backwards from when they want project complete; help them define the minimum steps necessary to purchase. (Build and execute the project plan. Eventually come with a recommended template from other deals.)

• Group demos are you helping your champion convince the group, not you convincing the group. Let them intro, then generally repeat Call 1 demand + supply overview + Q&A. Ideally you should be in all the meetings they have with peers to help answer any questions - this isn’t pushy to ask for, it helps them convince their peers.

Post-sales:

• The true test of PMF is customer retention/expansion. Until you have proven consistent retention/expansion, it is not a good idea to pour a ton of fuel on the acquisition side of the house. Trust me.

• When they buy, they will churn by default. Until something happens, which changes this so they will not churn by default. This “something” is sometimes “product usage”, but it is almost always way more specific and a little weird.

• Your goal is to figure out what this “something” is, what the leading indicator of this “something” is, then turn your onboarding process into a bullet train to the leading indicator of NOT(churn-by-default). Where it would be weird if every new customer didn’t hit that leading indicator.

• Churn sucks, but it is insanely helpful to figure out what PULL really is and who has it. Don’t avoid this feedback, lean into it.

Common errors:

• Debugging at the wrong level in the hierarchy. If you have a problem with “urgency” in your sales process, you can solve that at that level of the hierarchy (e.g., trying to add urgency), or you can move up the hierarchy (e.g., defining your ICP in a way where urgency is a non-issue). It is almost always the case that a problem experienced at one level of the hierarchy is best solved at a higher level of the hierarchy.

• Companies don’t have PULL, individuals do. Often, two people in the same company will have exactly opposite PULL.

  • Corollary: Senior people in a company often have clearer PULL (and the ability to buy something) than junior people. And a junior employee’s PULL is often irrelevant to senior people, who need to be convinced to sign off on the purchase, so you wind up getting excited junior people who get stiff-armed on a $50/month purchase.

• Haven’t found PULL? Ok, go find someone with real PULL. Nothing else matters. It doesn’t just figure itself out.

• Having sales calls with people who fit your PULL hypothesis who aren’t pulling? If this happens in 3-5 calls, there’s something wrong with your PULL hypothesis and you need to go back to the drawing board. Don’t get stuck doing this for hundreds of calls.

• Confused doing “research”? Yeah, we all are. Go do the job with the potential customer to find PULL firsthand. And/or ask the Hail Mary question: What would you pay me to solve for you? It would be weird if you actually found PULL just by interviewing people.

• Not enough sales calls? Are you doing outbound? If so, it’s almost certainly a function of your messaging. But for some niches (e.g., non-technical SMBs in middle America), you’re going to have to pick up the phone and cold call.

• Some buy fast, some buy slow? Sign that you don’t quite understand PULL yet. Deal velocity = [time until PULL] + actual sales cycle length. If you have variable deal lengths, it is a function of not understanding when PULL happens or what it is.

Well, turns out maybe this quickstart guide wasn’t so quick. Anyway, start from the top, fill out the PULL framework, and get rolling from there.

And, of course, let me know if there’s anything in here you’d like a full post on!

It defines a person who is trying to do something - we’ll call that thing a Project - and this person is in a situation where they can’t do nothing, can’t delay the Project, can’t do something other than the Project, and can’t do the Project with another solution. In other words, this person is stuck - when we show up, they rip the product out of our hands.

Many other people, of course, could buy from us. We would solve their problems and provide them value. But these people could also do nothing, or buy something else. Given all the other things they could do or buy, it would be weird if they bought from us. We have to convince them, and they can just not buy. Which is why every fast-growing startup finds PULL.

These Projects, though, can be tricky. Think of them like “jobs to be done” or “intentions.” Projects define the shape or substance of what a person is trying to do / accomplish in any given moment. They are often quite nuanced.

One way I explain how nuanced Projects can be is by talking about (gasp) your investor pitch. When you pitch a VC, your pitch expresses your theory of a VC’s Project.

If you read this newsletter, you’re probably the kind of founder who aspires to build a solid, fast-growing business with strong fundamentals and massive upside opportunity. Your pitch conveys this with defensible logic and rigor - and underneath that is the implicit belief that investors’ Project is “invest in solid teams with strong traction and a promising path forward.”

It turns out, this is almost certainly not VCs’ Project. Instead, their Project is closer to “not miss out on the next big thing.”

Which leads to a totally different pitch (not to mention fundraising process):

1. “Invest in a solid team with strong traction” → The “main character” of your pitch is going to be your current state: the problem you’re solving, your current traction, etc. And you’re going to share the “big vision” as a supporting character.

2. “Not miss out on the next big thing” → Your pitch is going to revolve around some nearly-insane massive story about the future, and you’re going to use your current state as a small piece of supporting evidence for that story.

I’ve drawn this diagram out multiple times to explain the two kinds of pitches:

The practical pitch makes sense… and generates yawns. And you tend to misdiagnose these yawns as reason to ADD MORE LOGIC AND DETAIL! Nope - you have to reinterpret what investors want, so you can wind up with a pitch that works, so you can get back to actually building the business.

See how nuanced Projects are? Even when we can all see VCs investing in startups - that’s really their core job, it is an observable thing we can all watch them doing - we tend to misinterpret their true Project. And when we subtly misinterpret their Project, it leads to a TOTALLY different pitch (and outcome).

The same, of course, is true of customer Projects. For example, both Gusto and Rippling watch companies struggling to pay their employees using their clunky payroll systems, but frame the “projects” in the buyers’ minds totally differently: One says “make HR delightful,” the other says “automate all HR + IT tasks”. This leads to different product architectures, ICPs, growth rates, and everything else.

What exactly are your customers trying to do?

• My book on product-market fit is coming out July 7! Pre-order it HERE.

• I advise some startups when they feel like they’re pushing and the market isn’t pulling. Learn more here (I am booked out until ~June)

Oh and PS: I recorded a 3-hour lecture on the physics of startups. Enjoy - check it out HERE.

People buy things all the time. Anthropic went from $0-$30B in revenue in like seven days; how unlikely can a purchase be?

To answer this, try to calculate this for yourself: How many products and services are relevant to you?

By “relevant”, the product or service would have to satisfy one of these three criteria:

1. It would solve problems or alleviate pain points you have

2. It would offer you value, ROI, or benefits

3. You want it, or it fits a need.

As you think about this question, a few stats might be helpful:1

• Amazon, apparently, carries hundreds of millions of SKUs.

• Something like 4 million books were published last year.

• Every grocery store you walk into has 30,000+ SKUs.

• There are maybe 20 million services firms in the US alone.

• There are over 24,000 software tools just in the productivity and collaboration space.

This is all to say, if your answer to the question of “how many products and services are relevant to you” is anything other than “many many thousands if not millions” - you’re thinking about the question wrong.

There are millions of relevant products and services that you could buy. How many of these do you buy in a given day, week, month, year? THE TINIEST FRACTION! And this would be true even if you wanted to buy a lot of things!

The internet says that your likelihood of getting struck by lightning is 1 in 1.2 million in a given year, and that your likelihood of getting bitten by a shark is 1 in 4.5 million per year. Your likelihood to purchase any particular relevant product or service in a given year is in roughly the same probability ballpark of “getting struck by lightning” and “getting bitten by a shark”!2

This is a difficult concept to wrap your mind around. Let me try to articulate it in a single sentence:

Given that there are SO MANY products and services that it wouldn’t be weird if you bought, it would be weird if you bought any particular one of them.

This, obviously, is also true of your potential customers. And it explains a lot.

“This should definitely be working”

When we assume that buying is not weird and rare, we build things that people would be weird to buy!

We assume, for example, that if we solve a big problem, alleviate pain points, provide a compelling value proposition, make an unbelievable offer, if they vibe with our mission and vision and values - they will buy.

We’re missing that there are thousands - if not MILLIONS - of other products and services that solve their many problems and pain points, offer them a cornucopia of compelling value propositions, etc., that they aren’t buying.

So we do our research, build something, maybe arm-twist some design partners, and get cornered in this awful situation where we try to sell our product, and potential customers:

• Have these pain points and problems

• Think our solution would provide real value and ROI

• Totally think our thesis is right

AND THEN THEY DON’T BUY. (Or they buy very slowly, and it feels like we’re pulling teeth.)

And worse: Because we think they should buy - with the implicit assumption that buying is not weird or rare - we misdiagnose what’s happening in this situation, usually:

1. We’re bad at sales

2. Our product isn’t good enough

NOPE!

The answer isn’t to get better at sales, or make the product “better” - it’s to figure out who is in a situation where they would be weird NOT to buy!

So… what do I do?

Admit it: Everyone, almost all of the time, would be weird to buy your product. Even if they should want it, would benefit from it, etc.

I believe there is only one case in which this is inverted - where a person would be weird NOT to buy your product:

They are trying to do X right now, but they are blocked from doing X with all the available tools/methods/options because of Y, and you offer them Z which unblocks Y so they can do X.

This is a form of the PULL framework. There is energy trapped in this person’s situation that can only be released by you unblocking them - and that energy is expressed in the form of the customer buying and pulling the product out of your hands.

This sets a pretty high bar for you, because you have to find someone in a “stuck” situation where they can’t do nothing, but can’t make it work with their existing tools/methods/options.

Not everybody is stuck in this kind of situation right now. Many will be fine if they do nothing. Or if they’re doing something, their current tools/methods/options are good enough. And when someone is in this kind of “stuck” situation, some startup usually stumbles into it, unblocks them, and takes off - in which case this situation now has a default option, and people in that situation are no longer stuck in a way that demands another new startup’s existence.

And that’s the whole point of this startup-building game: Find people in this kind of stuck situation. People in this situation will pull even a not-yet-built product out of your hands so you can grow fast and become the default option for that situation. This is true even if you’re selling enterprise, and even if you’re selling deep-tech.3

If you have customers already, especially if some bought fast (or ghosted you for 6 months then returned), reinterpret their stories through the “stuck” situation / PULL lens to understand why they actually bought. (It’s not the “pain point” or “value prop” story you’re currently telling yourself.)

If you find people who aren’t in this stuck situation, nothing they say matters. Because even if they complain about their pain points and problems, even if they like your product, it would be weird if they bought it. And making the product better and getting better at sales won’t work. Trust me: Life’s too short to push a product that nobody pulls.

Buying will always be weird and rare, but it will feel less weird and rare for your startup if you focus on who is “weird not to buy”.

• My book is coming out July 7. Pre-order it HERE.

• If you’re stuck in ‘push mode’ where sales isn’t easy, I help you sell in a way that causes customers to pull the product out of your hands. My next group program starts May 4 and has 2 slots left; learn more and grab time with me HERE.

This week, I’m sharing a guest post from Rocksalt - a Lightspeed-backed startup that was recently introduced to PULL thinking. I think their story shows all the things that change when you go from “push thinking” to “pull thinking”.

(PSA: I helped Rocksalt 1:1, and they reached out to me a few months later to share their case study. I love this format and would love to do more like this, so if “pull thinking” has changed your startup’s trajectory, reach out and share your case study!)

Some quick background on Rocksalt:

Rocksalt is a modern inbound platform that helps founders, CEOs, and subject matter experts build consistent LinkedIn and Reddit presence in just 10 minutes per day. The cofounders, Arjun and Anita, are a brother-and-sister power-duo. Both are brilliant and accomplished - Waterloo computer engineers, former consultants and MBAs, with decades of experience in fast-growing tech companies. Arjun is a GSB alum and was VP of Business Development & Channel Sales at HubSpot in its earlier years, and is a multi-time founder with a previous startup exit to Yahoo. Anita is a Sloan MBA and longtime marketing leader across a bunch of tech companies.

The thesis behind Rocksalt is that the traditional inbound motion from the early HubSpot days doesn’t work as well today as it did in years past. Instead, executives engaging on social media is “the only sustainable way to build trust with modern buyers who are inundated with AI-generated content.”

Here’s what Rocksalt has to say:

Before PULL

Before we learned about PULL, we had three problems. These were not obvious problems to us at the time - we just felt like we were doing a lot of selling, and customers weren’t selling themselves on our product.

First, we had an ICP problem. We thought anyone who cared about LinkedIn would be a fit - founders, CMOs, subject matter experts. We’d landed on CMOs as our primary persona because they owned lead gen and understood the pain. This seemed totally logical.

Second, we had a sales call problem. We opened every call with our vision of “the modern inbound platform for the age of AI.” We spent the first 15 minutes on market context, then fired qualification questions to “profile” the prospect. In retrospect, we were trying to convince them of our vision of the world, because if they believed in our vision of the world, they couldn’t not “get” our product and buy it. Or so we thought.

Finally, we had a messaging problem. Because we didn’t want to be “yet another LinkedIn tool”, we led with our big platform vision. It resonated with investors. It also seemed to resonate in sales calls - but it was a theoretical resonance rather than a “rip the product out of my hands right now” resonance.

Our PULL Insight

Rob watched our discovery calls and asked one question: Who showed up to discovery calls trying to do something right now but blocked for some reason, in a way that we could uniquely unblock?

The answer was in our sales calls, but because we were pitching our platform and vision, we couldn’t see it.

When Rob broke down our calls with us, we realized that CMOs had “pain points” that they could complain about - specifically, they wanted their CEOs and subject-matter experts to post on LinkedIn and Reddit - and they deeply resonated with our thesis about the future of inbound. But they didn’t have PULL that we could unblock! As a result, they would say nice words and might even try to get their CEOs/SMEs to try the product, but they weren’t ripping the product out of our hands.

On the other hand, there were CEOs and subject matter experts who believed they should be posting more on LinkedIn, had tried to do it but struggled to stay consistent with it. They were trying to do something but blocked in a way that we could uniquely unblock. Which means they had real PULL, unlike CMOs, and didn’t need any convincing to buy and use Rocksalt. They didn’t even need to hear our thesis on modern inbound, nor did they want to see the full platform pitch.

What Changed

When we had this realization, four things changed:

1. We changed ICP from CMO to CEO. We stopped targeting the person who “should want” and “would benefit from” our platform (the CMO) - and instead targeted the person who actually has PULL. Our ICP is super specific now: the CEO who already believes in LinkedIn as an inbound channel and is looking for a way to be consistent with LinkedIn.

2. We changed how we do discovery. We no longer feel like we need to educate them on our market vision at the beginning of the call. We open with: “What brought you here, what are you trying to do?” Once we know what their PULL is, the next step becomes obvious and simple.

3. Our sales deck went from “convincing you of our vision” to “how we fit your PULL.” It’s a much smaller deck and pitch. We added a “who this is for / who this is not for” slide at the beginning. We don’t lead with our product, we lead with their PULL.

4. LinkedIn over Reddit (for now). We thought Reddit would be a bigger sell because of all of the AI search buzz - but it turns out, most buyers we spoke to were still trying to figure out if Reddit is actually worth their time. They were already sold on LinkedIn, but struggling to do it consistently. So we lead with LinkedIn, because that’s what CEOs buy fast. Many upgrade to Reddit once they’re successful with LinkedIn.

The Outcome

We have a tighter ICP, our close rate went up >50%, and we have significantly higher success + lower churn. Plus, our targeting, pitch, onboarding, product experience is simpler and clearer.

CEOs who’ve tried LinkedIn but fallen off, and know they need to show up consistently, have pent-up energy that they release into purchasing and using our product. They pull the product out of our hands.

Everybody else? They will eventually use Rocksalt too - but for now, we’d be crazy not to focus on growing as fast as possible while focusing on CEOs who have PULL.

• My book is coming out July 7. Pre-order it HERE.

• If you’ve got a valuable product/service that customers should buy fast, but aren’t - I fix this. Learn more and reach out HERE.

I’m sorry if you had weekend plans.

Here is early access to “Notes on the Physics of Startups” - a 150+ slide introduction to what I’ve learned in the past ~decade of repeatedly navigating the pre-PMF pain cave. I will be releasing this elsewhere in the coming days, and am recording a very long lecture about it too!

The presentation is a preview of my book, which you should pre-order and tell your friends about (Amazon + Barnes & Noble).

RELATED: I am planning to do some live Zoom sessions (mix of “AMA” + bonus content) EXCLUSIVELY for people who pre-order the book. So pre-order it and save your receipt!

Overview

This presentation + book is an argument against what we’ve been taught about startups. Here is a summary:

1. Most startups find themselves in the situation where they have a valuable product that solves a big problem, that customers aren’t buying fast and as a result the startup is not taking off as fast as the founders think it should. In this situation, it is not clear why this is the case or what to do about it - the founders try many things that sound right, but they almost never move the needle.

2. There is, of course, a ton of startup playbooks out there. An analogy: Think of startup playbooks/advice like instruction guides for assembling a computer from a bunch of parts. We have assembled the computer, and it isn’t turning on. In this situation, more instruction guides will not help. We need to understand how a computer works in order to fix it. Back to startups: We need a causal model for startups, not “more playbooks and tactics.”

3. The causal model starts with the simple question: Why does anyone buy anything? It turns out, the typical answers - “they have a hair-on-fire pain point”, “we provide 10x value”, “we built something they want/need” - are related to purchases in the same way that “weighing 225+ pounds” is to “playing for the Buffalo Bills.” Not necessary, not sufficient, and certainly not predictive. Even if someone has a relevant pain point, would get real value out of your product and wants it, it would be weird if they bought it.

4. Someone would only be weird NOT to buy your product if: They are in a situation where they are trying to do X right now, but they are blocked by their existing options because of Y, and you offer something that unblocks them. This is the PULL Framework. If this is not true, there is no tactic or playbook on earth that will help you: It will always feel like you are pushing a boulder up a hill, because you’re fighting against their priorities and against their good-enough options!

5. PULL is upstream of everything: Who you serve, what you build, your “product category”, what GTM tactics work and don’t work, what your pricing needs to be, your growth rate, etc. It is the missing load-bearing concept. Every business exists atop PULL, like a person riding on an elephant: The elephant is going where the elephant wants to go, and the business succeeds if it works with the elephant. We mostly don’t realize the elephant is there, and think the rider is causing the motion, so we just copy the tactics of the rider and wonder why they don’t work for us.

6. We can think of a startup, then, as a system we build to serve PULL. Successfully served PULL is just a customer case study. So, the model of a startup we’ve been looking for is the case study factory. When we see startups this way, we understand what causes a startup to work (PULL powers the factory), why so many things we’ve done haven’t worked (they do not fit PULL or the factory), and we can know exactly what to do at any one point in time - via the Theory of Constraints. It seems like you have to do many things as a founder, but in reality, you only ever have ONE task: Attack the constraint.

7. What do you DO with this? Well, you approach basically everything about startups differently. And you realize that most of what we’re taught - from the idea stage, to product, to GTM - is literally backwards. “Wet streets cause rain” backwards. Leading us straight to the pain cave where everything should work, and nothing does.

It is still under construction, so if you see anything missing or have any questions, let me know!

Again, the link is HERE. Hope it helps!