Show full transcript 0:57 If they do, okay, great. 0:58 Now we might have something. 1:00 Let's see if it repeats. 1:01 Say you actually found something, something that is pulling and people are like, I need 1:05 this now. 1:06 What comes next? 1:07 Retention is super important and it's not obvious. 1:11 And so what I recommend is... 1:15 Rob, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. 1:19 Hello. 1:20 Thank you. 1:20 You are the author of The Power of Pull. I've got the book right here. 1:25 You have a newsletter called The Physics of Startups. 1:28 I don't think I told you this, but the way I learned of you is a very unusual way. 1:33 I have this Slack community for my paid subscribers, and in the Slack, just in the past month, 1:38 two different people started threads where they're like, Lenny. 1:42 You need to get Rob on the podcast. 1:44 I've been reading his book, and it's extremely useful to what I've been doing. 1:48 And these are some founders, some product people, and I'm just like, well, who is this 1:52 guy? 1:53 I gotta find out. 1:54 And so I reached out and that's how this came to be. 1:58 Essentially, what you've written in this book and what you do in your newsletter is 2:02 you've basically created a very pragmatic guide to finding product market fit and basically 2:07 going from zero to one and then one beyond. 2:11 And to give people a reason to believe you, other than what I've already said 2:15 about people saying how useful this has been. I know you've helped something like 50 different 2:20 startups get from zero to over a million an hour. Speak to just where this insight and 2:26 advice comes from. Yeah, I did not expect to be writing a book or do anything like this. 2:31 I got punched in the face as a founder, trying to go zero to one, and then randomly figured it 2:37 out. And then a bunch of my friends started pulling me in to help their startups go zero 2:42 one and just kind of got obsessed with this stage. It's super interesting, super weird. 2:47 I feel like there's not a lot of good stuff written about it. And so I've just gotten 2:51 strangely obsessed with doing zero to one as many times as possible. 2:55 I love that. I'm going to read a couple of quotes actually from my community to reinforce 2:59 the things you just said of what people have been saying about what you've done. 3:03 And this is really unusual. There's like, even though you just said there's not a lot, 3:06 there is a lot of content for founders. Here's how to find idea. Here's how to 3:09 fine product market fit. So it's really, it's a big signal to me if people are saying this is in 3:14 particular extremely useful to them more than anything else out there. So a few things that 3:19 people told me in my community. One, I remember reading the first chapter of his book and feeling 3:23 the weight lifted off my shoulders that I'm not some silly clueless outlier and that this 3:29 is a normal part of the process. Another, besides all the very tactical stuff personally, 3:35 if I'm normalizing just how painful, lonely, weird it is to go through finding product market fit. 3:44 Finally, we ran into the same zero to one traps Rob describes, building based on what 3:50 prospects said they wanted rather than what actually got them to say yes. Wow. 3:55 You're very nice people in your community. That's true. That's super kind. That's true. 4:01 All right. Anyway, so there you go. Just to give people, okay, let's pay attention. 4:06 Okay, give us an overview of the pull framework. Yeah. So the pull framework describes a person 4:13 who will pull your product out of your hands. Someone who's weird not to buy your product. 4:20 So we like know what pull feels like. It's the thing that's written about with startups. 4:25 You know, it's the thing. You have the startups that take up you, your newsletter, 4:28 had an insane pull. You grew like that, right? And everybody wants that. And most of us are in the 4:33 situation where it feels like we are pushing. We're trying to convince people to care, 4:38 convince them to buy. And there it's like, kind of maybe working. And so pull describes a person 4:45 who would be weird not to buy. The question is just like, what causes somebody to pull a 4:51 product out of your hands? And for that, I found a lot of the traditional descriptions of things, 4:57 like when I was a founder, I went out and found hair on fire pain points, big problems offered 5:03 a differentiated solution that provided real value. We had design partners using our product 5:09 every single day. And so I was like, okay, cool, check, check, check, check, check. This thing's 5:14 going to the moon and then tried to sell it and just got smashed into a wall for two years 5:20 pivoting around aimlessly, not being no clue why. And then we randomly pivoted. It took 5:25 off and I realized that it wasn't the thing that causes people to pull a product out of your hands. 5:30 It's not pain points or value props or things like that. Because I've realized that people can 5:37 basically just say, yeah, it's great that your product solves our pain points problems off 5:45 of a ton of value, but I'm not going to drop my priorities to buy it. And so I realized it's 5:50 about priorities, a certain kind of priority 5:54 where somebody's trying to do something, 5:56 they got a project on their to-do list, 5:58 trying to do it right now, 5:59 but they can't do it with their existing tools, 6:02 methods or options. 6:04 In that case, they're like a coiled spring, right? 6:07 Trying to do something stuck 6:10 and you show up and just offer something 6:12 that gets them unstuck, 6:13 that helps them get that priority done. 6:16 That's when they rip it out of your hands 6:18 and the pull framework is just an acronym for that. 6:21 This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. 6:26 What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Replit, Sierra, Clay, 6:30 and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? 6:33 They are all powered by WorkOS. 6:36 If you're building a product for the enterprise, 6:37 you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, 6:40 skim, RBAC, audit logs, 6:42 and other features required by large companies. 6:45 WorkOS turns those deal blockers 6:47 and to drop in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. 6:52 Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand up market ends up working 6:57 with WorkOS. And that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seed stage startup trying 7:02 to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest 7:07 path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking road. It's essentially striped for enterprise 7:31 Let's talk it through the acronym of pull because that goes deeper into this idea. 7:35 Yeah, so acronym PULL. 7:38 There's a P project. 7:41 They have a project on their to-do list. You can think of a project like a job to be done. It's 7:46 You know Bob Mesto you've had him on. He's amazing 7:50 Project is not like I want to buy recruitment software. It's I want to hire more employees kind of thing 7:57 You is the second one is unavoidable 8:00 This is the thing that I have to do right now. Why now why not later? There's some reason why you have to do it now 8:07 Now, first L is list of options I consider for doing the project. 8:12 Could be, again, hiring somebody. 8:15 Could be having our existing team do it. 8:16 Could be using the tools I already have or the tools out on the market. 8:20 And the second L is limitations. 8:23 Why are those options not good enough for getting me, getting my project done? 8:29 Amazing. 8:30 So the first two are really important there and it's interesting these second to feel 8:33 less important. 8:34 I'm curious why they're so important. 8:35 So the first two are essentially like I have a problem 8:38 I need to solve a job to be done and this is an urgent problem 8:41 So in a sense, this is the hair and fire problem very concretely defined 8:45 Here's what hair and fire looks like I have like a to-do my boss is waiting for me to do and it needs to happen now 8:51 It's not just like a general thing that I need to solve. Yes 8:55 Why are the second two so important this idea of other options and why those are not working? 9:00 Yeah, so you can you can imagine a case where like a product team for example 9:05 they have a really important thing 9:08 that has been mandated down. 9:09 They have a really important feature 9:10 they need to build or something. 9:12 There's an unavoidable project on their to-do list. 9:15 But they're gonna do it themselves. 9:17 So they don't need anything. 9:19 They won't buy anything unless their existing options 9:23 aren't good enough. 9:24 And so it really, really is important 9:26 that it's not just I'm trying to do something 9:29 and I can do it myself 9:30 or I can do it with a kind of category leader. 9:33 I can do it with whatever tool is out there. 9:36 It has to be something where my existing options are not good enough. 9:40 So I am like stuck. 9:42 I'm blocked. 9:44 Let's do an example to make this even more real and what's like a product or a company 9:47 that gives us a sense of what they basically use this as a template. 9:51 It's like a mad libsy thing where it's just like PULL and you fill it out. 9:54 So let's go. 9:55 Give us an example. 9:56 Yeah. 9:57 So my friends are at a company called Jump, which is an AI note taker for financial 10:01 advisors. Very interesting space. They did the same thing I did, by the way. They spent 18 months 10:07 just like hitting their head against the wall and then finally found poll, tried to sell and figured 10:12 it out. But what they found was that financial advisors have a project on their to-do list that 10:20 is to minimize the amount of time they spend taking notes for client meetings and putting 10:25 those notes into their CRMs. It's a project on their to-do list. The you, the unavoidable 10:31 is if they don't take notes and put them into their CRMs, they could go to jail. So they 10:38 have to take those notes, but when they're taking notes, they don't want to be doing 10:42 that. And so they want to minimize the amount of time because they don't enjoy doing 10:47 that. This is not a fun thing. So the list of options they considered to minimize 10:52 the amount of time were, you know, like a generic AI note-taker, there's a list of all of those out 11:00 there, but those AI note-takers were not good enough because they didn't integrate with the 11:06 financial advisors CRMs, and it wasn't clear if they were compliant with the SEC's regulations 11:13 on this. And so there's a list of options they really couldn't use. And so when jump 11:19 showed up and found that poll, people ripped the product out of their hands. Well, I think 11:23 one person literally said, this must be how Alexander Graham Bell felt when he invented 11:28 the telephone. That's a weird thing to say about a product for financial advisors. 11:34 Amazing. That's a great testimonial to stick on their website. 11:37 Okay, what would be a bad version of this? What would it look like if there wasn't poll? 11:42 Yeah, so a fun conversation with the jump team about, they said, okay, cool, 11:47 financial advisors. They have this project. You know who else meets with clients all the time? 11:52 Insurance agents. So maybe we just go and talk to them. And it turns out they also have the 11:58 project on their to-do list of minimizing the amount of time they spend taking meeting notes. 12:02 But the you isn't there because they don't have to, they're not required to put meeting 12:09 notes into their CRM. So their existing options, the first L, are not taking meeting notes, 12:15 Which they were already doing and so you can see the framework kind of doesn't fill out for them 12:21 Or it doesn't there's not the force isn't there. They're fine that and avoid a little piece 12:25 I see why that is so important and this is an example basically basically need all four here 12:30 Yes, so that's a good lesson here is all four need to exist for real pool 12:35 In the first example that you do 12:38 To me doesn't feel like it's like to do they just wrote down 12:40 It's kind of this general to do just like generally save time is that an okay? 12:45 P for a project, to be able to do just a, or was this like specifically every financial 12:50 advisor's to-do list? 12:52 Yeah. 12:52 So it was a thing that, I wouldn't say it's like actually something they wrote down on 12:57 their to-do list, but it was like a thing they were doing all the time. 13:00 It was a part of their workflow and while they were doing it, they were trying not 13:05 to do it. 13:05 Like I think there's like the action I'm doing right now on my calendar. 13:10 And then the project is my intention while I'm doing it. 13:13 And so while I'm doing it the project on my mental to-do list was like spend the least amount of time doing this annoying thing 13:19 Got it. And so if a founder or product team is listening to this and they're struggling with their product 13:24 It's probably one of these four is not 13:27 There yeah, you need all four at once if you find P without you and in the L 13:33 So you find something that somebody's trying to do 13:36 Kind of but they're not actually trying to do it right now and their existing options aren't good enough 13:41 What they'll do is they'll complain and they won't buy 13:43 If they have P and U, but their Ls are good enough, they're going to say, yeah, that's 13:48 exactly what we're doing right now. 13:50 And working with cloud code on it, we're going to figure it out. 13:53 Something along these lines that you talk about is that this poll exists. 13:57 It's like this thing that is already there, and you're just kind of this like, I don't 14:00 know, hunter looking for the poll and discovering it. 14:04 Talk a bit about that. 14:05 Yeah. 14:05 This was super liberating when I realized this because I always thought that I was 14:11 incompetent. 14:12 And I wasn't good at convincing the market to want my product. 14:16 And it was from that perspective of, okay, I'm building something that's really valuable 14:20 and people aren't buying. 14:22 How do I convince them to want it to buy? 14:24 And it turns out this poll, this project on their to-do list exists before an independent 14:30 of me, which means I just have to go out there and find it. 14:35 I don't have to convince people to have poll. 14:39 And it's like, I haven't quite figured out how to do that. 14:41 But I think it's very, very hard to do if it's possible at all. 14:44 That feels very familiar. 14:46 Just trying to convince people, look, this is so great. 14:48 It's going to solve so many of your problems. 14:49 And I love this idea. 14:51 This like I just love how very specific and concrete it makes all of these 14:55 general pieces of advice around fighting product market fit coming up with ideas. 14:59 It just tells you exactly here's what it looks like. 15:03 Something else you talk about, you mentioned this earlier, this idea 15:05 of that it needs to feel weird for them not to buy it. 15:08 That's like the sign that this is right. 15:10 that it's like, it's weird. 15:12 Why aren't you buying this? 15:13 Talk a bit about that. 15:14 Most people most of the time are like, fine. 15:18 It would be weird if they bought our product 15:19 given what's on their to-do list, 15:21 given what they have, given their options. 15:23 Like, so it would be weird if they bought. 15:25 But a person with pull is weird not to buy. 15:29 They should actually pull the product out of your hands 15:31 because they are like that coiled spring. 15:34 And so if you talk to somebody who has pull, 15:36 the conversation should basically go like, wait a second. 15:39 You can do what? 15:41 Okay, how do we get started? Does the product exist yet? 15:43 Like how do we get on board? 15:45 Where basically every other conversation you have with somebody who doesn't have pull can have anything other than that 15:51 They can be enthusiastic and nice and say, wow, that's amazing. That's super interesting 15:55 That's totally the future of our industry. Well, I can see how that would save us so much money 16:00 But they're not saying I need this right now and that's how you know they actually have pull 16:06 Those conversations sound very familiar 16:09 Okay, so before we get into the kind of the whole journey of the startup process and how 16:14 you can use this framework in that journey, anything else around just the general idea 16:18 of the pull framework that's important to share? 16:20 One of the main mistakes people make is thinking that pull is a thing that a company has. 16:27 It's a thing a person has. 16:28 Even if you're selling enterprise software, you're selling not to the company, you're 16:33 not selling to SpaceX. 16:35 You're selling to, just going to your Gen Able conversation, 16:38 you're selling to like the head of legal at SpaceX 16:41 who has a project on her to-do list 16:45 that they can't do themselves. 16:47 That is really useful. 16:49 So it's not like SpaceX needs this, it's like, say, Jen. 16:52 Yes. 16:53 Needs this. 16:55 And you're saying that that's often a mistake 16:56 people make, they don't think about the specific person 16:58 with this need. 16:59 Yeah, yeah. 17:00 It's super common to say, 17:01 We sell to right like mid-market private equity companies. It's like you don't you sell to a partner or an operating partner in there 17:10 Who is specifically trying to do x y and z? Awesome. Okay, so through the lens of this framework 17:16 Let's go through kind of the key moments of an early-stage startup finding product market fit 17:21 So I'm talking about coming up with an idea getting your first sales call closing your first deal and then kind of scaling from there 17:28 So let's start with coming up with an idea. 17:32 How can people use this framework to help them come up with ideas that are more likely to actually be successful? 17:38 As a founder, I have a notebook of ideas that are all like, what if we built an API for APIs kind of thing? 17:44 Like there are all these like product ideas and the product ideas all sound unhinged. 17:51 And so I can never tell between product ideas what's a good idea and what's a bad idea. 17:56 Well, fortunately, the pull framework is a thing that's upstream of your product idea 18:01 that says I believe there is a person who is trying to do X right now and who is basically 18:07 weird not to buy. 18:09 And so what I've found to be helpful is to use the pull framework to stake out a claim 18:13 and say I believe for whatever idea I have, I believe this specific person is stuck. 18:19 And so I'm going to go and talk to them and see do they want to do they try to 18:24 buy from me even before we have a product. And so for me, the the idea of the the the 18:31 poll framework is is to come up with a hypothesis of who has poll, and then go and test that. 18:39 And then the question becomes, okay, how do you find this poll idea, this poll hypothesis? 18:45 What do you do for that? I have some fairly strong opinions on this. Like, I don't think 18:50 we take this stage seriously enough, if your life depended on it, how would you be doing 18:58 like 10 customer interviews for like 30 minutes on Zoom? No. You would go all out. You would 19:05 go in person. I have like a couple of stories of friends who have done crazy things to go 19:11 and like do the job with the potential customer to feel it first hand, to find that cold 19:17 first hand and they've either built something that they would buy themselves or they've 19:21 embedded with people to find that moment when someone is trying to do something in stock. 19:29 Amazing. So the advice here is don't sit around and brainstorm. Don't just look for big markets 19:37 and figure out where there might be something massive. What you're saying here is almost 19:42 like this lens of if your life depended on and how would you find a problem that is 19:46 Likely to be a real I guess have real pull and what I'm hearing here is get like in the weeds 19:52 Get your hands dirty like get it the way this reminds me of a quote on non 19:57 Who is the head of product that linear now? He just went to open AI? 20:01 Described what he looks for when he's trying to find opportunities is he he describes as I want to feel the pain of the person 20:07 The same way they feel the pain. Yeah 20:10 Yeah, and what you're saying is the way to do that is get in there with people building thing 20:14 And is there an example of doing that? 20:17 Yeah, so a friend from school, 20:21 he had no idea what he wanted to build. 20:24 He had no product idea. 20:25 He wasn't, he didn't have my notebook. 20:27 He didn't have any of that. 20:27 He just said, you know, I like serving small businesses. 20:30 I like small business. 20:31 I'd like to just find somebody I like to serve 20:34 and I'll figure out the idea from that. 20:35 And so he wrote out a list of industries 20:38 that he thought might be interesting 20:40 and then he went and shadowed them 20:41 and like worked with them for like wrote along with them for days at a time and so he started 20:48 with solar panel installers and he hated them and they hated him so they moved on to the next one 20:53 he eventually worked his way to like independent physical therapists and he went and spent days 20:59 with them loved them they loved him and it was like okay cool what am i what is the poll here 21:04 what what should i do and so he washed over their shoulder days on end he even tried to 21:09 by a physical therapy franchise to like, 21:12 was able to see the PNL and was actually considering it. 21:15 And in that process, he came up with something, 21:18 like, wait a second, 21:20 it looks like you're trying to do X and are stuck there. 21:23 And so it's firsthand experience 21:27 is what you should do there. 21:29 Awesome, so like live it yourself and live it. 21:32 And is the reason you need to do that, 21:34 is it because people would have discovered, 21:38 If it was easy, basically somebody else would have found the idea. 21:41 Why do you think that is so important, approaching it this way? 21:45 Yeah, I'd say. 21:47 I'll give two reasons. 21:48 One is, you know, these things don't really emerge from a whiteboard. 21:53 Like, it would be weird if his idea came to him that he eventually wound up finding from brainstorming. 22:00 Like, think of how many different ideas he could have come up with. 22:02 Um, and it wasn't something that 22:04 Like it was something he saw only by observing where it's unclear that that would have emerged in an interview either 22:11 But it is second thing is like more of a philosophical thing 22:15 Which is you're building a company to serve this kind of person 22:19 the whole point of building a company is to serve somebody to help them do something and so 22:25 If you don't have first-hand experience, how are you gonna make the thousands of decisions? 22:29 it takes to actually build something that serves them. 22:33 And is the idea, once you have this insight, 22:36 say with this physical therapy company, 22:37 you write it out through the pull framework 22:39 to kind of pressure. 22:41 You call that the pull hypothesis, is that right? 22:44 So talk about that. 22:45 Just like say you have this insight, 22:46 and I'm curious what you actually found 22:48 with this physical therapy business 22:49 and how to kind of start to think about it 22:51 through the pull framework. 22:52 Yeah, so you then take that and say, 22:54 okay, this is the kind of idea. 22:56 I believe this kind of person, 22:57 is this physical therapist is trying to cut 23:00 some specific cost on their P&L. 23:02 I can't actually remember what it was. 23:03 Unavoidable for XYZ reasons 23:05 and their existing options of getting a consultant 23:09 to come in and do this wasn't good enough 23:11 for some specific reason. 23:13 It was too expensive. 23:13 It was too slow. 23:14 Wrote out that pull hypothesis. 23:17 And then what he did next was super important, 23:19 which was he showed it to that person said, 23:22 is this you? 23:24 Person said, oh my God, yeah, that's exactly the thing. 23:26 I said, okay, great. 23:28 Would you buy something if I helped you get this done? 23:31 Yeah, totally. 23:32 Okay, great. 23:33 And then he said, I need to go talk to five other physical therapists and just make sure 23:39 this repeats. 23:41 And then he did that. 23:42 And they also pulled, which was the really important thing to make sure he wasn't just 23:47 building a product for one person. 23:49 What is it that he showed this companies at the four bullet points with, here's 23:54 the project here is why it's unavoidable or is something else? 23:57 Yeah, so I actually like recommend having two slides. 23:59 One slide is basically the pull framework. 24:02 You don't have to show them the pull framework because no one's going to understand it. 24:05 You could just say, here's what I hear. 24:07 You're trying to do X right now because of Y, 24:11 and you've considered this but it's not good enough for this reason. 24:15 You say, do I have that roughly right? 24:18 Then the second slide is a conceptual overview of how I can help. 24:23 So it sounds like you're looking for a way to cut this line item that's faster than a consultant. 24:30 We could offer that for XYZ. Does that kind of fit what you're looking for? 24:35 And you're looking for the first slide, them to say, oh my god, yes. 24:39 And the second slide, yeah, how does it work? How exactly, how, you know, how do we move forward? 24:43 What I love about your stuff is it's like very plug-and-play pragmatic. 24:48 So we'll actually show a slide of the actual template you have people use to fill this out. 24:54 So the phrasing, I'll read it from this slide too. 24:56 There's a project on your to do like this is the project in your to do list and it's unavoidable right now because of this and options you looked into your this and they're lacking for this reason. 25:06 Amazing. I love this. So the idea is you have this little slide that you just create and to kind of run by people and ideas. This is the hypothesis. 25:13 And what does it look like when there's pull once you show it to them? 25:17 Is it like they're ready to send you money? Is it their pupils dilate? 25:21 What do you look for? 25:22 Yeah, you look for a couple things. 25:24 The thing that really, really matters is that they actually try to buy. 25:29 They say, okay, cool. 25:30 How do we get started? 25:32 And they will do that. 25:33 I have a friend who is selling into, he kind of pivoted around for a while, 25:38 but he knew he found pull when someone, an exec in pharma, 25:42 before he had a product said, 25:43 if you can do that, I will pay you right now. 25:47 So, okay, that's the signal you are looking for. 25:50 What you're looking for as well as they're leaning in. 25:52 Wait a second, you can do what? 25:54 What you're not looking for is kind of like 25:56 leaned out enthusiasm, okay, well, tell me more. 25:59 Well, let me, yeah, we'll think about it. 26:01 Can you send more information so our team can review that? 26:04 Like, you know, and ends, any of those kinds of things, 26:07 anything that is not like, 26:08 okay, how do we actually move forward on this? 26:10 It's just not worth your life force going after it's interesting how much body language and just like the physical 26:17 Experience of getting excited about an idea is is a sign that it is good 26:21 I just had Josh Woodward on the podcast head of Google labs 26:24 And he's similarly like you see it twinkle in their eyes and their eyes just light up and it's so interesting that that's a sign of 26:31 Pole yeah, yeah, it's what you're seeing is but is it weird for them not to buy right now? 26:36 Are they behaving as if it's weird for them not to buy? 26:42 Is there like a limit, like a, you know, 26:45 there's like the I will buy this idea, 26:47 like they say they will buy it 26:48 versus a sign they will actually buy it. 26:51 Is it the body language? 26:52 Like, how do you know they're serious about it? 26:54 So I call it like a pole-shaped action, 26:57 not a good term, but a pole-shaped action is like, 27:02 I need this right now. 27:05 Well, how do like I am pulling it out of you. How do how do we move forward right now? 27:11 It is not like a oh, I could totally see us using this in Q4 27:18 Kind of thing that's a that's a not pulling towards me 27:22 That's a kind of pushing out into the future like the urgency of like I need this now 27:27 There's always the advice of solve your own problem, which is different from what you described 27:31 Is that a path you recommend or would you recommend against it? 27:34 So a friend's so like Emily at a company called clearly a she was in security engineering at AWS and 27:43 She found something there 27:45 That she would have paid somebody to solve but there was nobody out there and so in that case 27:52 It's solve your own problem. Yes a hundred percent where the solve your own problem falls kind of flat a lot of times is 27:59 is, it's a thing that you wouldn't have paid somebody to do for you, but you just think 28:06 should exist, right? 28:08 If it's, and so you have to be honest with yourself. 28:11 I have done things where I've built things that like, oh, I think the world needs this. 28:15 I ran into this problem, but if I looked myself in the mirror, I wouldn't have said, 28:19 yeah, buy this right now. 28:20 Along those lines, is this advice mostly for B2B SaaS sort of software or is this 28:25 applicable to, say, consumer app? 28:27 So I am mostly in the BB space, but I have seen quite a few people. 28:32 I've been kind of surprised that a lot of people from the consumer space have have used this as well 28:36 And someone sent me the story of like Spanx, which was basically she she did the same thing of of 28:43 Like selling one-on-one with people seeing how they reacted to figure out all the different pieces of what became Spanx 28:50 Yeah, and she saw their own problem famously. Yes, just tore off her pantyhose area. I think that's the story 28:55 We just, I guess you needed it now. 28:58 I think it was like, yeah, she's going in a vent. 28:59 So that's a cool example. 29:02 We're gonna talk more about this, 29:03 but you have this idea of the Hail Mary approach. 29:06 Talk about that. 29:07 So the Hail Mary, so we've been talking 29:10 about the happy path here. 29:11 You find something, you're talking with people 29:13 and they're like, oh my gosh, yeah, 29:15 this is exactly what I need. 29:17 A lot of the time that's not gonna happen. 29:20 You're gonna get that kind of lukewarm feel. 29:23 And so what I've tended to find 29:25 That's also an opportunity to what I call throw the Hail Mary, which is, okay, this doesn't seem 29:31 to be a thing. Is there anything on your to-do list that you would pay me to do right now? 29:36 Like that you would pay somebody to take off your plate? And that's just an open-ended Hail Mary. 29:41 I've actually seen quite a few startups totally pivot and take off from the Hail Mary, 29:46 which has been really interesting. There's one startup. They were trying to sell an 29:50 applicant tracking system into governments and they had a call with somebody and the person was like, 29:56 yeah, that's kind of interesting. But after the Hail Mary question, yeah, what I'd actually pay you 30:02 to solve is this like job description thing right now. And that became their first contract, 30:07 that became their first customer and they've grown super fast since then. 30:10 That's awesome. So the advice here is just sometimes feel free to just ask 30:14 what problem can we solve for you? Yeah, and that like leads to 30:17 So how to think about sales? 30:20 Well, I'll just give a little move 30:21 and we can dig into this if it's interesting. 30:22 But like I always was kind of nervous to sell 30:26 as a mega introvert and overthinker. 30:28 Like it just feels like a lot of pressure 30:32 and it like I need to convince you to buy. 30:35 And so that question feels uncomfortable. 30:37 But if you kind of reframe it in your own head of, 30:40 I'm just seeing if they need help with anything 30:43 that they are stuck on. 30:45 And if they don't, that's fine. 30:46 But if they do, cool, we can explore if I can help, then it kind of changes your orientation 30:52 towards sales. 30:54 All right. 30:54 I am in the same boat as you, and that's a really nice way of thinking about it. 30:57 I'm just trying to solve someone's problem, why is it so hard? 31:01 Before we get to the next step, which is getting your first sales call, finding someone 31:06 to talk to that you don't already know, are there any anti-patterns or just kind 31:10 of signals or just like traps people fall into when they're coming up with ideas? 31:14 is. Yeah, the infinite, but the, but the, the main ones that I 31:20 have seen that are like really, really brutal are feeling like 31:25 you need to build it yourself first. So you come up with an 31:29 idea and you're like, I don't think this is ready for primetime 31:31 or I think people have to see it to get it. And then you go 31:35 heads down and build it. Now, now with AI, you can kind of 31:38 get that out of your system in a, in hopefully a couple of 31:41 weeks instead of months or not, but you want to face the cold wind of reality as soon as 31:50 possible. 31:51 And so don't delay the customer conversations where you can actually find pull. 31:58 You're also not a fan of design partners, which is, okay, same work, this is typically 32:04 very standard advice to find design partners. 32:07 Yeah. 32:08 I don't know, maybe in some context it's helpful. 32:12 I have yet to see it be helpful. 32:14 What I've seen in basically every single time 32:16 I've seen somebody with a design partner 32:18 is that you recruit a design partner 32:20 who quote unquote buys into your vision for the product 32:23 and they give a bunch of feedback and never buy from you. 32:27 They never buy. 32:29 And you realize that all of their feedback 32:30 was just like them playing Steve Jobs. 32:34 And there's like, I'm gonna help this startup 32:36 versus I have something I'm actually trying to get done. 32:40 And if you think about it like, 32:41 the people who actually have something really important 32:44 they're trying to get done, 32:45 they don't wanna be a design partner. 32:47 They just want that thing done. 32:49 I love that. 32:50 Okay, so your advice is don't set up 32:53 a bunch of design partners and we'll go through 32:54 kind of the process you actually recommend. 32:57 Okay, so I guess just to think about this, 33:00 coming up with that idea step, 33:01 the core moment is some insight 33:05 based on being hands-on living with the people that you will be helping. The term 33:11 I've heard to describe this idea, I think it was a VC floodgate that uses this. 33:19 You're basically looking for an earned secret. Yes. And your advice here is the 33:24 way to find that earned secret. Either it's you have lived it at a company say 33:29 Amazon gave this AWS example, or you're on the ground working side-by-side 33:34 with the people dealing with it and just looking for problems that they have. 33:38 Yeah. 33:39 Yeah. 33:39 Cool. 33:39 And the method kind of doesn't matter. 33:41 It might come to you in an ayahuasca retreat. 33:44 You could get that secret from anywhere, but the things that are most likely to actually 33:49 work are like getting your hands dirty and learning it from reality versus from theory. 33:55 So just to follow that thread, say there's a pie chart of the, say, 50 companies you've 34:00 worked with where their idea came from, 34:02 what would be like the biggest chunks of the pie chart? 34:06 I would say 10% own experience, 34:11 90% going and getting first hand, like experience. 34:17 And within that, it's been a bit of like, 34:19 some of them sold the wrong product 34:22 to figure out what the right product was, 34:24 but most of them actually go and do the thing first hand. 34:27 And then what percentage ayahuasca retrieved? 34:29 There's no room for that one. 34:30 100% so that's mandatory as part of me advising you. 34:35 That's the pull hypothesis. 34:38 OK, sweet. 34:39 OK, so say at this point you've got a pull hypothesis. 34:43 There's signs that maybe there's something really good here. 34:47 The next phase in my eyes is finding someone 34:50 to talk to and sell it to. 34:51 So basically landing a first sales call. 34:54 Talk about how you go about landing that call 34:59 And what happens kind of and we'll talk about actually writing the call 35:02 But before we get there just like finding people to talk to you. Yeah, this is a fun one 35:05 So my goal is actually like I want to have two to three 35:08 Conversations per day with potential customers, but to get there you have to first get your first 35:14 Conversation so you can do warm-in truths 35:16 You can do all that kind of stuff 35:18 We'll just talk about if you don't have any of that and you need to get people to talk to you cold 35:23 The way I typically recommend founders start is to just reach out to your potential customers 35:28 on LinkedIn or via email and it's with a very specific kind of message that is 35:35 not a hey do you have XYZ pain points would you like to buy our game-changing 35:40 solution like no template you get online is going to get you any responses 35:45 except for like leaving you alone and so I call it founder magic kind of 35:50 outreach at this stage which is basically like you're interesting I'm 35:55 interesting, let's chat and see. And this is totally acceptable. 35:58 Like I have one of the startups to help their message was, Hey, 36:02 Snoop Dogg invested in us. And I thought you'd find it 36:04 interesting too. Would you be open to chat? That's a fun 36:09 message. Everyone has their own version of that. Like everyone 36:11 who listens to this or everyone who's a founder, like has an 36:14 interesting message you can send. And you don't have to 36:18 convince them in the message to buy your product, you just get 36:21 them to talk with you. This poll exists out there on their to-do list. And so the message 36:28 doesn't do anything about that. It's just to get them to talk to you. So just say something 36:33 interesting to cause them to meet with you. 36:35 Okay. This is really helpful. So your advice here is don't craft like a whole value-prog 36:39 pitch, problem identification. Don't tell them how much pain you're going to solve. 36:44 It's just like get their attention with something interesting. 36:48 The Snoop Dogg example is awesome. 36:50 Any other examples, any other kind of ways of thinking about what might be interesting 36:53 to someone? 36:55 There's been a variety of ones that I've seen, random ones that are like, hey, I dropped 37:02 out of my PhD and I'm now working on something for content marketers, right? 37:06 Like something that's just kind of interesting enough there that's not super magical. 37:12 You can have, there's a variety of different things I've seen from I, you know, I was, you 37:19 know, Sam Altman's chief of staff, right? 37:22 That you know, if anybody sends that message, that will work quite well. 37:26 It doesn't matter what the rest of the message says, I thought you'd be interesting open 37:30 to chat. 37:30 And so it's finding something interesting that's like worth the conversation with 37:35 them. 37:35 Yeah, yeah, what I'd say is it really depends on your end customer too because if you're doing outreach to like for example 37:44 HVAC companies saying hey, I'm Sam Altman's former chief of staff thought you might find it interesting 37:50 We're gonna say buddy. I have no idea what the words in this message mean 37:54 So it could be like hey, I was at my dad like I worked at my family's 37:58 plumbing company in high school and now I'm working on this kind of 38:03 Interesting thing. I thought you might find it interesting would you be open to chat and implicit element of this is keep it very short 38:08 Sounds like it's just like a sentence or two. Yeah, okay, and then what's your take on? 38:15 AI emailing a bunch of people versus individually reaching out and thinking about some unique message per person. I 38:22 Have not seen AI personalization work at this stage 38:26 Usually what it does is it tells them something they already know about themselves and they're like that looks like Claude wrote it 38:32 And so I don't usually recommend that. 38:35 I also don't, I haven't seen personalization 38:37 be super important here. 38:40 The, these messages that I, like, 38:42 I said the entire message that I would send. 38:44 You don't need to actually have 38:46 a ton of personalization in it. 38:47 Or like, hey, I'm going to X conference, 38:49 we're gonna be pitching, would you be open to chat? 38:51 Like something like that can be good enough 38:53 without any personalization at all. 38:55 All the examples you showed are very simple 38:57 and don't have anything to do with them 38:59 and just say something interesting, basically. 39:01 And what you don't recommend is basically, yeah, the idea you're not trying to sell them 39:08 immediately. 39:08 You just want to have a call. 39:10 Yeah. 39:10 And on the call, we'll see. 39:11 If you have poll, if you do, you're going to turn it into a sales call. 39:15 If you don't, nothing I do is going to change that. 39:18 Okay. 39:19 How many emails slash LinkedIn posts should you start with, say you're just getting 39:24 started to try to find some calls? 39:26 Yeah. 39:26 So I tend to start on LinkedIn because the kind of person who you and I like talk to they have interesting link dense 39:32 And so if you're reaching out to someone they're gonna say, okay 39:35 But so that's gonna do a lot of lifting you can just get started and so you can add a hundred hundred fifty people on LinkedIn per week 39:43 go for that add 20 a day and 39:46 then message them when they accept the connection request and 39:49 If you're sending like if you're connecting with I don't know 39:53 let's say you connect with 100 people per week 39:55 or you send 150. 39:57 My typical targets for that are like 39:59 30 to 40% of them should accept your connection request 40:03 and then of them, 30 to 50% should reply 40:08 and a subset of them should say yes, 40:10 the majority of them should say yes or why not. 40:12 Okay, that's an awesome benchmark. 40:14 So if you're not at that level, 40:16 basically your interesting email is not working. 40:19 You should find some more interesting. 40:20 It could be your profile 40:22 if people aren't accepting your request, like they might look at you and say, 40:25 you don't look like somebody I should accept this request. 40:28 Or it looks like you're about to pitch me, right? Or something like that. 40:31 Or your message just isn't interesting if you're deading 30 to 40% 40:35 accepts and then people aren't reply. 40:37 This season's supporting sponsor is DX. 40:40 Now that everybody at your company is finally using AI, 40:44 the question that engineering leaders face is no longer are we using AI, 40:48 but is it paying off? 40:49 With DX, you can measure and benchmark the impact of AI adoption across your full product 40:55 life cycle. 40:57 DX shows you where AI is helping developers and where it's creating new bottlenecks. 41:01 You can also use it to evaluate AI vendors, monitor costs and licenses, and see exactly 41:07 what's limiting your agents. 41:09 That's why hundreds of enterprises, including Snowflake, Sony, and BNY, use the DX platform 41:15 to measure AI's impact on developer productivity. 41:18 Visit getdx.com-lennie to get a demo of DX. 41:24 That's getdx.com-lennie. 41:27 So say you've landed a call and you're going to do a sales call. 41:31 Say your first one. 41:32 What is your advice for doing a great job on the sales call? 41:36 Mostly two steps in a sales call. 41:39 There's the pull discovery step. 41:42 And then there's the kind of conceptual pitch of how we might help step. 41:47 and so the the theory behind a sales call is again it's like if you have pull 41:55 you're gonna rip the thing out of my hands I don't come into this call like 42:01 wired up ready to try to convince you to buy like super ant no it's just if you 42:06 have pull you're gonna convince me to let you buy and so I approach this with 42:11 the vibe of just like playing back excited to chat let's let's see if I 42:16 I might be able to help you. 42:17 And so I have a very specific structure of a sales call 42:19 that I recommend for getting into discovery 42:23 and then transitioning out of discovery. 42:25 Basically, that you start the call, 42:27 hey, thanks so much for taking the time. 42:29 I'm curious, I'm sure you get a bunch of people 42:31 reaching out to you, like, 42:32 why did you take the call with me today? 42:35 That's a chance for them to say, 42:36 you know, you mentioned AI agents 42:38 and I've been thinking about this 42:40 and I've just been waiting 42:41 and I looked at your website whenever it winds up being. 42:44 And they fill out the entire poll framework for you right there. 42:49 That's ideal. 42:50 And then you can say, oh, that's interesting. 42:51 Let me ask a couple of follow-ups. 42:53 But most of the time they'll say, I don't know, you reached out to me. 42:56 Excited to hear what you have to say. 42:58 Say, great, you use what they have just told you and say, okay, great. 43:02 That sounds like a great agenda for today's call. 43:04 We can do that. 43:05 Does that sound good to you? 43:07 Get their thumbs up on the agenda. 43:09 And then you earn the right to ask them some discovery questions about their poll. 43:14 by saying, great, okay, before we get to those items 43:17 on your, you know, on our agenda, 43:20 do you mind if I ask you a few questions 43:22 to better understand your context? 43:24 And that way you've earned the right to ask questions. 43:27 It does not feel like an interrogation to them 43:29 because if it does, they're not telling you anything. 43:32 Okay, a few tactical questions. 43:34 One is just how long should you try to make this call? 43:36 How long should you invite before? 43:38 And then where does a demo fit in? 43:40 Do you recommend demo on this call 43:42 or doing a separate call for that. 43:44 Yeah, so this is almost always a 30 minute call on the calendar. 43:48 Just I've found smaller calendar blocks. 43:51 They don't see on their calendar and so they don't show. 43:55 And so 30 minutes and then iffy on doing a demo. 43:59 So if you're super early, you probably don't have a demo to show. 44:03 And so but later on, you might have a very short demo in your first call. 44:09 I guess because I'm thinking about the Jen conversation I had and her advice is wait to do the demo 44:14 But that's an enterprise sales sort of product not like an early stage just pull hypothesis phases. Yeah, totally 44:20 Okay, got it. What's a sign that the best meeting went well? 44:24 Is it this kind of leaning in pulling it from you feeling? Yeah, so so it's kind of you're able to surface pull 44:32 Or you're able to say okay, you don't have pull at all. Help me understand 44:37 and why this isn't relevant to you, what is? 44:40 And so you come away with a either filled out 44:43 pull framework of, okay, I understand this person's pull 44:46 and they are trying to pull 44:48 or you understand why they don't have pull. 44:51 How many of these calls should you do before you're like, 44:54 okay, there's no pull here, time to move on? 44:56 I don't have a hard, like what I tend to do 44:58 is if you have five calls 45:01 and everybody's leaned back and you learn nothing, 45:04 Then there's a sign that something's wrong if you have and I've seen people do like hundreds of calls 45:10 Where they still don't look at they so do five and then check in and see what you've learned from the calls 45:17 Was there any pull there? 45:19 Did we learn anything interesting like I started I was just helping out 45:21 They had done like five calls into banking and they just felt nothing 45:26 But they got an intro from one of the people 45:29 Yeah, this doesn't seem relevant to me 45:31 But you might consider defense companies and they got an intro into that 45:35 They know nothing about defense and in the first conversation defense the person's like holy are you serious? 45:41 And they're like, okay, maybe there's something here and they changed their pole hypothesis 45:45 It feels like a big part of this of your every a framework and approaches to just like be brutally honest with yourself 45:50 Whether there's something here. I imagine a lot of founders are just like so excited and convinced. This is real and 45:57 your approach is just like here's 45:59 So here's a way to validate that and be really real with what's working or not. 46:03 Yeah, I think it's thinking of it as we're selling to learn, not really to push something. 46:11 Yeah, not to push. 46:12 We're going to learn and we're seeing if they try to buy. 46:16 If they don't, cool, we've learned something. 46:18 We can kind of keep iterating from there. 46:20 If they do, okay, great. 46:22 Now we might have something. 46:23 Let's see if it repeats. 46:24 rates. 46:25 The whole idea of calling this poll is so smart because you always hear, product market fit 46:30 is you're feeling polly, you're feeling poll, this boulder is pulling you down, the wind 46:34 is pushing you. 46:36 And so not only is it this acronym of what you look for, but it's this reminder which 46:39 you're looking for is poll, something pulling. 46:42 Yeah, and you can also tell like, do I feel like I'm pushing right now? 46:46 Do I feel like I'm convincing? 46:48 That's a red flag that something either in your mind or in the conversation is off 46:53 and like, okay, cool, let's figure out what that is. 46:56 Is there an example that comes to mind 46:58 when you think about a good sales call 47:00 what that kind of feels like, 47:01 looks like what a pitch would be? 47:03 Yeah, so what you're trying to do 47:04 is you're trying to, again, get the poll out of them. 47:07 And so they say, I'm trying to make a website, 47:14 but one of those typical point and click 47:18 website design things are just like too much effort for me. 47:21 So you have something about pull there. 47:24 You've kind of pulled that out of them. 47:27 They've described that. 47:28 And so the kind of interesting thing is that 47:31 once you have pull, your pitch is like quite simple. 47:35 What you're not trying to do here 47:37 is you're not trying to describe 47:38 this massive product vision 47:39 or your theory of the problem. 47:41 You know that they're trying to do X 47:44 but blocked because of Y. 47:46 And so your pitch in that case is okay, 47:48 So it sounds like you're looking for something to make a website without all the hassle of 47:55 a point and click thing. 47:56 Is that roughly it? 47:57 And you describe it in a really, really small and simple way, not a really big way. 48:02 You describe it in a small way and they say, yeah, that sounds like it. 48:06 How exactly does that work? 48:07 Tell me more. 48:08 They're pulling more information out of you. 48:11 And that's when you know you're starting to be onto something. 48:14 And are you in your head thinking through the pull 48:17 Framework of these four points and just thinking through like okay. Is this actually a something we need right now and unavoidable 48:23 Are there what are their alternatives and kind of thinking through all that? 48:26 Yeah, those are like actually the questions I will ask you which is like 48:30 If I if they don't tell me at the very beginning when I say why'd you take the call then I'm asking a question 48:36 That's kind of like is there anything as it relates to I don't know your QA process 48:40 that you're trying to do what you've been unable to do 48:44 with your existing tools, methods, team, whatever, right? 48:48 And so that question has all the elements of pull in it 48:50 so that they can then say, oh yeah, actually, 48:53 we've been trying to automate end-to-end testing 48:55 but can't do da-da-da-da-da with our existing tools. 48:59 And so, and then if they kind of give me 49:02 some element there, then I have the framework in my mind, 49:05 and I know a lot of people actually have the framework 49:07 in like a dock during the call 49:08 And they're filling it out live and it's like I don't think I have to you and then you ask a question 49:14 You're like, okay 49:16 But like is it okay if you don't do that now like can you is there some reason you have to do this now? 49:23 Or is this okay to do another time? 49:26 You're like scared to almost ask you know, it's not gonna work. Oh and the scariest one is to say well 49:31 What have you I'm sure you've looked into other options. Are they good enough or and 49:36 And to hear that one, when they're like, actually, yeah, we can do it ourselves, and that's 49:41 good enough. 49:42 But it prevents you from, again, pushing a product the market doesn't want. 49:46 And just spending years of your life trying to make it work. 49:49 Yeah. 49:49 There's a reason I look like I'm 60 and I'm 35, right? 49:53 Like, don't push, you look great, Rob, you look great. 49:56 Filters. 49:59 Oh, man. 50:01 So, this touches on a, like, we haven't actually addressed the specific challenge, 50:04 Which is that there's a lot you have to get over for people to 50:09 Decide to try something new and to buy something new the status quo is generally fine 50:13 They have so many priorities. They have so many things they're dealing with just like the bar to get over for people to be like 50:19 I want this I'm gonna buy it now is really high and the idea here of this framework is to get over that home 50:25 Well, it's to find the people for whom stat the status quo is not okay, right? 50:29 It's to find the people, you know, everyone says like change is hard and all this kind of stuff 50:33 Well, you're looking for the people who are already trying to change, who don't need convincing. 50:39 There's this idea that your product has to be 10 times better than the existing solution 50:43 for anyone to care. 50:44 Do you feel like, like, how do you think about, okay, this is better? 50:47 They tried alternatives, none of them do it, or some of them do it okay. 50:52 Like, how much better does this have to be for them to care? 50:54 Or is it okay if it's just like, you know, just a little bit better? 50:57 The example with jump, I think, again, the AI notetaker for financial advisors 51:01 is a good one. 51:02 How much better are they than the other generic AI note takers? 51:06 Well, if those note takers don't get the job done and we do, they are infinitely better. 51:13 They unblock something. 51:15 And so that's kind of how I think about how stuck are they with their existing options? 51:19 And so I don't know. 51:20 I don't know about 10 X like that thing that doesn't quite register in my head. 51:24 It's really are they a coiled spring and how do they respond when I show up? 51:27 So I think about a company like Linear who competes with JIRA, 51:32 I don't know if you know, do you know Linear? 51:33 Yeah. 51:34 So I'm just curious if it applies through this framework. 51:38 So in my understanding, Linear wins over JIRA often because the experience is just 51:44 better. 51:45 It's just like a beautiful, smooth, well-crafted experience. 51:51 And so they win a lot of customers because it just feels nice and engineers really 51:54 like using it. 51:55 Do you feel like that works through the pull framework, or is there something else going 51:58 on there? 51:59 Again, if we use the pull framework to analyze that situation, what would have to be true 52:05 is there is a certain kind of person who is trying to do their issue tracking, but 52:10 like they are blocked from, they're trying to do something around issue tracking and 52:15 something about Jira's experience is blocking them from doing the way. 52:18 such that linear's way better experience 52:23 is actually relevant to them, right? 52:25 Like I've done, so I've made the mistake 52:27 of taking that analogy and being like, okay, 52:30 so I can just come into a category with way better UX, 52:34 way better experience and I'm gonna crush it 52:37 and like try that in HR software 52:39 and then I tried it in HR software 52:43 and it turned out the user experience 52:45 was not relevant to the buyer. 52:47 And so they didn't care that their systems look like they're still on cool ball or whatever it is. 52:54 So it wasn't relevant there. 52:56 But again, the pole theory would say that basically in the case of Jira versus Winnier, 53:03 that there was a kind of person who was kind of blocked by Jira's experience. 53:08 And I imagine the stronger the pole, the faster all this stuff happens if Rose. 53:12 I know linear took them a long time to get people using it to trust it to switch 53:16 And so maybe the pull because of maybe there wasn't as much of that blocking and there's more of just like okay 53:23 I can just move faster be happier 53:25 It took longer is that you find that just like strongly to pull the faster the company grows that yeah 53:29 I've seen a bunch of startups where like they go zero to whatever like everyone now is going zero to 53:34 Infinity super fast and and it's like not it's because they have found these like pockets of pull where people 53:42 People will rip a product out of their hands and it's like, people will see these AI pitches 53:47 now and it's like, wait a sec, it can do X and buy basically instantly and I've seen 53:53 that happen in like enterprise. 53:55 I saw an enterprise deal close in like two weeks and it's just like that thing, when 54:01 I was growing up, enterprise deals took 18 months, like what the heck? 54:06 That's growing up, I like that. 54:08 Okay, so let's move on to the next step. 54:10 So, at this point, you had your first sales call, I imagine the next step is closing the 54:16 deal and interesting because it's still early, you may not even have a product. 54:20 What does that look like going from, okay, I want to buy it now, what do you do next? 54:23 Yeah, so it's kind of going to depend on the size of the deal, but you want to come back with 54:29 some sort of a concept and some sort of a plan. And so, examples of this, so the pharma 54:34 company that I mentioned earlier, the company selling into pharma, he showed up and just 54:38 through a Hail Mary on an intro to a pharma exec. 54:42 Pharma exec was like, oh my gosh, thank you so much for asking. 54:44 Our current market research is da-da-da-da-da. 54:47 We're trying, it's just so bad, it's so slow. 54:49 And the founder was like, okay, I don't even have slides here. 54:53 I'm just hearing this for the first time. 54:55 And so it sounds like you're looking for faster market research 54:59 that looks like the current research you're getting, but kind of, 55:03 I don't know, it's just better in these kinds of ways. 55:06 Is that roughly right? 55:06 And the exec was like, yes, that's exactly it. 55:09 And so the founder is like, okay, let's do this. 55:12 What if I come back to you in a couple of days 55:14 with a kind of mock-up of what I think that could look like? 55:17 And then we can discuss if that fits 55:19 what you're really looking for 55:20 and then decide if we want to move forward. 55:23 And so in that case, no slides, no nothing 55:26 goes in five codes, kind of rough layout 55:30 of what this would look like. 55:31 Get some feedback on it, says, okay, based on that, 55:34 is there anything else you need to know 55:36 to decide whether this is a fit that you want to bring into your organization, says, like, 55:41 yeah, what's the price? And then there's a talk track you can use for price. But that's 55:47 basically it. Okay, tell me more about this price talk track. Yeah. So the interesting 55:52 thing about the pull framework is that it can help you set the bounds for pricing. 55:57 So what's the value of getting the project done? Or what are the cost of the alternatives? 56:04 What's the value of getting this market research faster? 56:09 Or what is the cost you're currently spending with your market research consultants? 56:16 Both of those can tell you, okay, the value of market research is like X, the cost with 56:21 consultants is $50,000 per year. 56:25 And so that gives me a rough boundary to say, okay, what if we charged $50,000 a 56:31 or the same price as your current market research consultants, it kind of gives a frame on price 56:37 that makes it intuitive to your potential customers. 56:41 Awesome. Okay, so the way you've kind of written about this closing step, there's kind of like 56:46 two parts. There's the fit of just like, is this a fit? And then it's just a bunch of project 56:51 management to get the deal closed. So we've spent a lot of time, I think, on the fit. 56:55 The project management, is there anything there important to talk about? 56:57 Yeah, so you did a great episode of great couple episodes with Jen on the sales process. 57:07 And so in bigger deals, enterprise deals, there's like the champion has poll and decides, yes, 57:15 I want this. 57:16 And then you have to do a set of like 17 demos. 57:19 You have to genuflect in front of four committees. 57:21 There's all of these things that you have to do. 57:23 For smaller deals, you don't have to do that kind of stuff. 57:26 it might just be the CEO who's like, yeah, cool. Next step is you send me the strike 57:30 plank and we schedule an onboarding call. And so the project management step will depend. 57:35 My typical recommendation for project management in larger organizations is to have a conversation 57:42 with the buyer with the champion to say kind of, okay, cool. This is the project on your 57:47 to-do list. When does this need to be showing results by? They'll say, oh, definitely 57:52 Q1 next year. Okay, cool. That's a forcing function. 57:55 you work backwards from there to say, 57:58 okay, given that we need to be live Q1, 58:01 what are the set of steps that need to happen 58:03 between now and then so we can be deployed 58:05 and showing results by then? 58:08 And that is a forcing function 58:10 for all of the steps in the sales process. 58:12 Awesome, so basically asking, 58:13 when do we need to show success 58:15 for this to be a thing that you all roll out 58:17 and then working backwards from that? 58:18 Okay, at this point, 58:20 a lot of people would create basically 58:22 design partnership and arrangements where they're like, 58:25 Okay. Well, cool. We'll build this with you. We'll figure it out as we go. We won't charge you. 58:29 Per your earlier point, you are not into design partnerships. 58:33 I imagine your advice here is just like sell it directly. Don't try to give them to them for free. 58:37 Don't set up with some kind of partnership thing. Yeah. Yeah. Well, why shoot yourself in the foot? 58:43 And again, the reason not to is because it just you find that doesn't lead to the best 58:48 to stuff that actually sells and works, building this kind of design partnership relationship. 58:52 Yeah, if they're like, it basically takes something from I need to solve this right now to like, okay 58:59 Now I'm helping you build your product. Like where what are we doing here? 59:02 So it it's a negative signal to the most to people with who actually have pull and it's a positive signal to people who don't 59:10 Awesome. Okay, and that totally makes sense. Like if there's pull just go with it 59:15 Yeah, you can sell something that's like, you know, you might not have a full platform ready 59:20 You can sell something that's more service shaped early on I've seen a bunch of startups do that where they sell 59:25 You know, okay, we're gonna have an AI product manager who can do X Y Z kind of thing for now 59:31 it's delivered by us while this thing is working behind the scenes and so 59:37 You can kind of frame it so they're not expecting a full platform that like enterprise grade platform ready next week 59:45 they expect something more service-shaped 59:47 and you kind of validate that there's real pull there 59:50 and you figure out what the actual thing to build is 59:52 while delivering it a mix of manually and automated. 59:55 Okay, that's really interesting. 59:56 That's come up a lot on the podcast, 59:57 especially with go-to-market sales conversations, 60:00 this idea of services being a great place to start, 60:03 which historically has been a terrible idea 60:05 because the fear is you never actually get to a place 60:08 where you can automate it 60:09 and you're just running your consulting business forever 60:12 with terrible margins. 60:13 So, you've seen this work, this idea of starting with basically humans doing the thing and then 60:17 slowly building a product around it that increases margins. 60:21 Yeah, it definitely has downsides, right? 60:23 You definitely can get stuck in a kind of service businesses kind of thing, but everything 60:29 has downsides. 60:31 Awesome. 60:32 Yeah. 60:33 And the idea is AI kind of does more and more of the stuff and part of it is you 60:35 learn more and more of what the problem opportunities are and things like that 60:39 with people doing the work. 60:41 Okay. 60:41 Okay. 60:42 Going back to price real quick, classically, founders are afraid to ask for big numbers 60:47 and throw out high prices. 60:50 Knowing that the stuff changes and you'll learn as you go, any advice for that first 60:54 price pitch of what number to throw out? 60:57 Yeah. 60:57 So early on, I'm really more testing willingness to transact versus willingness to pay. 61:03 And so I don't care about pricing a ton in the early couple of customers. 61:08 That said, I was just working with a company that set their first deal as enterprise and they've got a big demo day coming up 61:14 And so they're like, how do we get the most possible revenue out of this so we can look like that for demo day? 61:20 Totally valid thing to do in that case 61:23 what you do is you throw out a number in a way that doesn't like get you slapped and the 61:30 Approach that I'd recommend for that is 61:33 It's almost like using a case study as a, 61:36 hey, react to this kind of case study. 61:38 And so you'd say, when we talk to others, 61:41 the way they, everyone's kind of done pricing differently. 61:44 Some of them have been, it's been, 61:46 sometimes it's been a small project for 80,000. 61:48 Other times it's been up to a million in terms of, right? 61:51 And these are kind of the levers here. 61:53 And some people, a lot of people wind up in the middle. 61:55 You tell me, how are you thinking about this? 61:58 And so what you're doing is you're not like me 62:00 on this side proposing pricing to you on this side. It's both of us looking at like an example, 62:07 semi-real example of what you've heard from others as how they think about this 62:11 and letting them throw up on that. 62:15 Throw up on that. I like that. I know this case study concept is actually an important part 62:20 of this whole framework. I'm going to come back to it. Let's talk about the next steps. 62:25 Say you have the sales call, maybe F2. What comes next after this first batch of sales calls 62:30 that you're doing. Yeah, this is where the paths might diverge. So hopefully you're right and 62:37 these people have pull. Great. You now have customers. Time to deliver and start repeating 62:43 this and start figuring out how to automate things and just systematize this. You're on the right 62:49 path. A lot of the times you get kind of a weird set of responses. You learn that the people 62:56 you thought were weird not to buy or actually weird to buy it'd be weird if they did buy they're not 63:02 behaving in a way where they have pull and in that case what I tend to recommend is you just 63:06 analyze you go back and review the calls and you say okay did one actually have pulled did zero 63:13 like what have we learned here and then you craft a new hypothesis and run it again got it 63:20 and imagine most of the time it's not it's not there and is that your experience or 63:25 What's kind of the pie chart of yes or success where it's not at the stage? Yeah, I've seen like 63:30 Maybe once or twice where it was there 63:33 From the beginning and that's magical like you feel like a hero when you when you get it right the first time a lot of times it is 63:42 it is 63:44 Like we're so wrong and backwards that we don't know and so you just ask a Hail Mary a couple times and that 63:50 Gets you on the right path or you like do something crazy where the friend just 63:55 like went to a conference and scheduled 20 meetings 63:57 and just was like, I don't know what to do. 63:59 You tell me what to build. 64:00 You were something like that. 64:02 I call that goblin mode where you just, 64:04 just going all out and doing unhealthy things to see, 64:07 like who will buy something from me right now 64:10 to then generate your hypothesis out of. 64:12 Same word about goblin mode. 64:13 This is amazing. 64:14 Yeah. You know, like when, when dogs do that, 64:16 like get the zoomies, right? 64:18 And they just like, that's, 64:19 that's the thing I have in my mind 64:21 for what goblin mode is as a founder where it's like, 64:23 And this is a good thing or not a good thing? 64:25 It's a, it's a break glass in case of emergency thing, uh, where it's, um, and I 64:30 think some founders actually operate like this all the time where it's like, okay, 64:34 there's actually a conference tomorrow in Europe that has these potential customers 64:41 there. I can't get them to talk to me. 64:43 So looks like I'm going to get on a plane right now and get there. 64:46 Right. 64:47 It's just doing, uh, kind of somewhat crazy things with the goal of getting 64:51 in front of customers right now. And yeah, some people can do this all the time. Others 64:57 like me who are getting old, I can pull this out once in a while. 65:03 Get that goblin mode out sometimes. So the idea there is, and you're saying this sometimes, 65:07 this can work, just like go nuts, just like go and talk to everyone looking for these 65:11 earned secrets. 65:12 Yeah. And one example of this, like it's kind of a crazy example, but a friend's 65:15 building a company called Tiro, which does dental staffing for dental hygienists. 65:21 His version of goblin mode was his parents went door to door to different dental offices 65:27 to just get people to talk to him about being customers, and that worked. 65:33 So it's just like weird stuff like that can work. 65:36 Amazing. 65:37 Okay. 65:37 So they do a couple sales calls. 65:39 They do five. 65:39 Is that kind of the idea? 65:40 Do like five and assess? 65:42 Is that rough heuristic? 65:43 Okay. 65:43 Okay, so say, to your point, most times you'll find, 65:46 okay, this is not, there's no pull here, sorry. 65:49 What do you do? 65:50 Do you go back to the beginning and go hands on 65:52 with some other small business sort of thing 65:54 or what do you recommend? 65:55 Yeah, so different pathways there. 65:57 Hopefully you've asked the Hail Mary question 65:59 and you've learned something there. 66:02 That's like worth double clicking into. 66:03 And the Hail Mary question is just like, 66:05 what is there anything that we can do to this? 66:07 Yeah, right now that is a problem in your to-do list. 66:10 Yeah, yeah, exactly. 66:10 And so you've generated some new information that you can then use to, like, do another 66:17 set of five. 66:19 If not, then, yeah, you just go back, get some first-hand knowledge, try it again. 66:24 Awesome. 66:25 Okay. 66:25 So this process is very straightforward. 66:28 Have a pool of hypothesis, fill out this template, schedule, basically cold outbound 66:32 with a surprising message that'll get people's attention, think you're interesting. 66:37 Do five calls, roughly. 66:39 Get a sense. 66:39 is their pull or not. If there's not pull, throw out some Hail Mary questions, maybe 66:43 enter goblin mode to look for something. Come up with another pull hypothesis, do five more calls, 66:49 and repeat until you're like, oh wow, we've got this pull. Yep. And then you have a business. 66:54 There we go. Off to the races. Okay. So say you actually found something, something 67:00 that is pulling and people are like, I need this now. What comes next? What do you kind of 67:05 of there's kind of like the building onboarding process 67:08 and then just keeping them happy. 67:09 What's that process like? 67:11 What advice do you have there? 67:12 Yeah, so I found that I didn't really have a good way 67:14 to think about what happens after people buy. 67:17 And so I felt like the dog who got a car 67:19 and I just kind of like threw the software 67:20 over the fence and like, good luck. 67:24 What I've learned since then, 67:25 the hard way obviously is that like retention 67:27 is super important and it's not obvious. 67:31 And so the way I think about like delivery, post sale, 67:34 Well, is that basically everybody who buys is guaranteed to churn until X. 67:43 In which case, they're weird to churn and all delivery is all everything is about figuring 67:50 out what is X and how do you design a bullet train so every customer gets there. 67:57 And so X is you might think of it as oh they're using the product or they have 68:03 high NPS or whatever it is. It's almost never those things. Mark Rubair has this kind of leading 68:09 indicator of retention, which for Slack was like you've sent 10,000 messages or 1,000 messages in 68:15 your first X amount of time. If you hit that, it'd be weird if you churned. It's the leading 68:22 indicator of retention. From my startup, we gave retention software to restaurants. If they 68:27 They got a notification that somebody was going to quit, that they could prevent within 68:33 the first two weeks after purchase, they would go insane. 68:38 They would tell all of their friends about it and they would be weird if they churned. 68:42 We just designed the onboarding process to that. 68:45 What I recommend is once you have a couple people who are saying yes, don't just throw 68:49 the product over and send them a login and pray, go deliver first hand as well 68:55 And you're gonna learn a ton from that and keep asking the question like are you gonna turn now? 68:59 Are you gonna turn now like what and try to find the moment when when they're like, oh, okay cool 69:04 I can't live without this. I love how your mind works or it's these formulas and these templates and just everything is this and 69:11 Obviously, it's not like this clean cut, but it's really helpful. I think for people to just think of it in these very structured ways 69:19 To take these general ideas of what it looks like when things are going well and how to find an idea to just like that 69:23 here's what you plug in, talk about the specific thing, it's working, adjust, so this is great. 69:29 On the churn piece is there, what's like a sign, okay, shoot, everyone's churning, 69:33 just like a sign of like, okay, they thought they didn't, but that it's not working, 69:36 anything there, just like what's a sign at this stage, okay, maybe it's not working versus it is. 69:42 Yeah, so if everybody's churning, it is unacceptable for you to not figure out why. 69:48 And so what I've actually seen is in a lot of cases, like for a lot of horizontal products, 69:53 you're going to have a lot of user drop-off. They were a horizontal AI workflows product. 70:00 Cool. Join the club, right? But they found through being a horizontal AI workflows product that one 70:06 or two kinds of customers kept using it while everyone else was churning. And so if a bunch of 70:11 people are churning, 90% plus of your customers are churning, first of all, I'm sorry. It 70:17 It sucks. 70:18 It really, you know, you wake up at 4am every morning just sweating. 70:23 But in that, you often can figure out why. 70:26 And is it something that you're doing or is it something about them? 70:30 And that can tell you, okay, who actually had pull that we can sell, deliver, retain 70:35 and for like that horizontal workflows product, they found that freight forwarders were 70:41 using it for one specific workflow. 70:43 And so they pivoted the entire company to focus on that. 70:46 And so they went from being this horizontal product with massive turn low price to a very premium product for freight forwarders 70:53 There's no point at which like okay, we figured it out 70:56 We're gonna be a massive success like every moment of the startup journey is a uncertain 71:01 Moment, but what's great about this process so far is every step you get it's more and more certain 71:06 There's something here at least and then there's like the in forever and doubt of like how big can this get? 71:11 I remember talking at the founder of Databricks, which is now like a bazillion trillion dollar company 71:16 I mean, he said something like, even at 100 million ARR, they were still very unclear 71:20 if this is a thing that will last. 71:23 And I think it's very common. 71:24 So that's like its own topic of just like, that's nice to know. 71:27 That's nice to know. 71:28 Because everyone, yeah, everyone's like, how will this become a big thing? 71:32 And it's like, I don't know. 71:33 We'll figure it out. 71:34 Yeah. 71:34 It's just kind of one step at a time. 71:36 And so, so in this conversation, the final step in my mind is this idea you have 71:41 of this, um, use, user case study factory, which kind of takes you 71:46 from things are starting to work. 71:47 Okay. 71:47 Now we can create a repeatable system that helps us grow. 71:51 So talk about that, what that looks like, when that's about. 71:53 Yeah. 71:54 So this is the thing that whenever I talk about everyone just like everyone's 71:57 eyes glaze over. 71:58 And so I haven't found a useful way to talk about this yet. 72:00 So just pre-warning, I think is the most important thing in all of this, 72:03 which is how do you think about your startup? 72:06 What's your conceptual model for your startup? 72:08 And like you need to have a way to think about your startup to know how to grow it as fast as humanly possible 72:13 So what winds up happening is you find somebody who has pull you give them a 72:19 Product of service or whatever that they pull out of your hands 72:23 So it turns out they were trying to do X their existing options weren't good enough for Y and 72:28 You offer Z that helps unblock them that sounds a lot like a case study that you would feature on your website 72:36 And it's a helpful thing because, okay, my job as a founder is not to produce a hundred 72:43 different case studies, totally different case studies, because that's not scalable. 72:47 That's not repeatable. 72:49 I'm looking to build one case study where a customer says, hell yes, before they buy 72:54 and after they buy and just repeat that a million times. 72:58 And so that model helped me go from thinking that startups were a bunch of different things. 73:03 I need to know all these different things to like, no, a startup is just a thing that 73:07 repeats one case study infinite times. 73:10 And all the stuff that I do is to build a factory for repeating that case study. 73:16 And if I do this right, there's a case study where customers say hell yes, and they pull 73:21 themselves through each step of the factory. 73:23 The steps are the pipeline step. 73:25 How do we get people to talk to us? 73:27 Sales step. 73:28 How do we turn potential customers into actual customers? 73:31 and the delivery step of the case study factory, 73:33 which is how do we get people who are customers 73:35 to be weird not to churn? 73:38 And so everything we do kind of fits 73:40 into this case study factoring. 73:41 If you see this in your mind, 73:42 it radically simplifies like a startup, how it works. 73:46 And then you can use like the theory of constraints. 73:49 We're gonna get really nerdy for a second 73:51 from manufacturing to like, 73:52 look at your case study factory and say, 73:54 okay, where is the bottleneck to our growth? 73:58 Is it that we're not like, we don't have enough pipeline? 74:02 Okay, cool. 74:03 If that's the bottleneck, then that's the only thing 74:05 that matters right now. 74:06 Let's solve that bottleneck and then we'll move 74:08 to the next one. 74:09 The next one is our close rate is lower than it should be. 74:11 Okay, cool. 74:12 That's our bottleneck. 74:13 Now we're going to go all in on that. 74:14 And so it lets you go like the case study factory model 74:17 gives you a way of thinking about your startup 74:19 and knowing exactly where to focus 74:21 at any one point in time. 74:23 It's a really interesting way to think about it. 74:25 where instead of we are trying to just get more customers 74:28 closed and more deals closed, instead we're looking, 74:32 we're building a case studies, 74:34 like you're almost like working backwards from, 74:35 what's the case study gonna be of this company 74:38 we're talking to, say we're talking to SpaceX? 74:40 Just like we want it to look consistent 74:42 across all the companies talking to people talk about, 74:45 call this repeatable sales motions. 74:47 But I like the idea of thinking about, 74:49 like it's almost like working backwards 74:50 from the press release, but for sales. 74:52 What is the case study we're gonna write about SpaceX? 74:54 Okay, here's how we got them, here's how we got sold them, here's how we delivered it. 74:58 And the idea is just create consistent, repeatable case studies that you will later be able to 75:02 share. 75:03 And then what sales becomes is it becomes kind of like, hey, this is the case study that 75:09 we deliver on. 75:11 Is this relevant to you or not? 75:12 And it becomes actually like, you can show the case study to people and they said, 75:17 yeah, that's actually what I want as well. 75:19 And so it becomes this kind of tool and you can say, hey, you don't look like 75:22 our case study. 75:23 So it's probably going to be a lot of work. It might not be a good fit and you can use it for qualification disqualification 75:28 And for people to understand what you do. That's that's funny. There's this whole theme now of building software factories 75:34 Where you know product build itself 75:37 But there's a really another version of a factory or building which is even the broader version of just the sales the user 75:43 The case study factory. Yeah. Yeah, we don't make software here. We make case studies 75:48 So is that is that is that your advice just like think of it that way 75:51 Yes, we make case studies here, it's interesting and it's not like you need to actually share 75:56 and write up a case study, it's just a mental model for how to think about what you're trying 76:00 to build as a sales go-to-market work. 76:02 Yeah, totally. 76:03 And the good news is if you have the pull framework, then you just describe here's how 76:08 we helped them and what they accomplished and you have a case study. 76:13 Amazing. 76:14 Okay. 76:15 There's a couple of things I want to touch on because this is the end of the process 76:17 basically. 76:18 Yes. 76:18 There's a few things I want to touch on that came out of the community and things you mentioned 76:23 real quick. 76:24 One is you, yeah, this term Hell Yes customers. 76:27 Say more about that is you mentioned it like when you're looking for someone to buy it 76:31 and then use it. 76:31 There's this idea of they want them to be Hell Yes. 76:33 Yeah. 76:34 It's basically somebody who pulls the product out of your hands before they buy. 76:39 And then afterwards, they use it as if it is addictive. 76:43 And so they might literally say Hell Yes. 76:46 But what matters is they're weird not to buy and weird to chung and that process is mostly them pulling 76:53 Versus you pushing that's your perfect fit customer. Your job is just to find more who are basically clones of them. Okay 77:02 The other kind of point I want to reinforce is you recommend no pilots no point proof of concepts 77:07 No design partners just go straight to we're gonna sell this to you and roll it out 77:11 it's going to be amazing. 77:12 Yep. 77:13 And like sometimes you're going to do that and say, okay, but the way we buy here is we 77:17 actually need to pilot it. 77:18 Okay, cool. 77:19 But don't proactively offer. 77:23 Awesome. 77:23 Okay. 77:24 Another big question that came out of the community is from an external perspective, 77:28 this feels like this just for startups and founders, but this actually applies for, 77:32 and we mentioned this at the beginning, but just to reinforce this point for larger 77:36 companies that are working on new feature, new business line sort of thing, talk 77:40 about just if there's anything that you think about differently through this process if you're at 77:44 a mature company building a new product. I'm helping a couple companies launch their second product 77:48 and what they are doing is actually the founders are like cool we're doing it again we're running 77:54 it back and the founders are taking this approach to existing customers because they're 78:00 going to try to upsell them and they are actually selling new features before they've 78:04 built them. Another example at existing companies is, I can't 78:10 share the name, but a company was a new product leader at a 78:12 company was telling me, Hey, yeah, the way we get our ideas, all 78:16 of the ideas that have worked have come from sales calls, where 78:19 they said, cool, yeah, you can do X. But could you also do 78:23 this other thing for us? And the products that came out of 78:26 the customer in the sales calls asking for something that 78:29 could do that project for them all worked all the ones 78:33 Once they whiteboard it never worked. 78:35 So the idea here is you have a product you're hearing, you're basically finding these little 78:40 nuggets of this could be a thing. 78:42 And what I'm imagining is then you go through this whole hypothesis step by step, just like 78:46 put up the hypothesis, talk to five of your existing customers, look for that poll, see 78:52 if they're going to actually buy it and then kind of go through the same process. 78:55 And an important wrinkle here that we haven't reinforced enough maybe is that it's the 78:59 founders that should be doing this, especially in a startup. 79:02 But it's interesting you said even at a mature company if it's a new product the founders ideally are doing that selling 79:09 Yeah, ideally not always the case. Yeah, there are people who are doing zero to one stuff 79:14 But I just recommend if you're in that situation and you're a non-founder 79:18 really focus on trying to sell the thing and learning through selling because 79:23 There's a lot of ways to get lost in zero to one 79:26 Awesome, and then again if things aren't 79:29 working 79:31 There's this idea you should have goblin mode of just like, okay 79:33 Just try a bunch of stuff talk to as many people get on planes 79:35 Go have 20 meetings and just look for something. Yes. Yeah. Hail Mary goblin mode 79:40 Like all of these things are just the your break class in case of emergency time is really valuable and like 79:47 Staying suck is stuck is awful if you're in this like pain cave of zero to one 79:53 It's like the worst time of your life and you just don't want to prolong that 79:57 So just get on a plane, go to the office, go in person, do whatever it takes to find something. 80:03 Rob, we did it. We went through everything. That was amazing. 80:06 Is there anything else that you think is important to share or anything you want to, 80:10 I don't know, double down on before we get to our very exciting landing round? 80:15 Hopefully, what's come across is kind of how simple this is, pull framework, 80:21 show to people, see if they pull. There's a lot of ways to like over complicate this. 80:27 And there's a lot of ways where we try to solve 80:29 every variable in our head in advance. 80:31 And I've found that just pull framework, sell, 80:36 see if they try to buy and think less in that process, 80:42 will get you there. 80:44 Awesome, that sounds very simple. 80:46 And I think it's important to note, 80:47 like this is very actually not, 80:49 like it's hard to find an idea that actually works 80:51 and this is all here to help you save 80:54 a lot of pain and suffering and building 80:55 and be kind of being disillusioned, not disillusioned, 81:00 feeling like there's something there wasting a lot of your life 81:03 and doing something that's not going to work. 81:05 Yeah, I think of it as like a metal detector on a beach. 81:09 Like this is just giving you a metal detector. 81:11 You might not find metal where you're looking right now, 81:14 but at least I'm not giving you a spoon. 81:16 At least I'm not giving you a spoon, meaning where it was actually. 81:19 For the beach, right? 81:20 Like to look for metal on the beach. 81:22 You're not. 81:22 Oh, I see. 81:23 They have a metal detector versus looking through all the sand with a spoon. Wow. I love that metaphor 81:29 And then sometimes you may find a thing that and then you realize it's not worth anything. Yeah. Okay. Wow. That's a great metaphor 81:36 Well Rob with that we reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? Let's do it 81:43 First question what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most other people? Oh, gosh the 81:50 My favorite one is the four volume nature of order series by Christopher Alexander 81:56 It's book on architecture series of books on architecture best thing ever never heard that recommendation before those are my favorite 82:03 Favorite recent movie or TV show you've really enjoyed 82:06 I have two favorite movies that we watch repeatedly 82:09 One is the pride of the most recent pride and prejudice and the second is the penguins of Madagascar movie 82:15 Don't know why there's very different in both ends of the spectrum there 82:20 Favorite or most interesting AI product that you recently discovered or use or love? 82:26 I've been using Muse and it's like, if it works for me, it can work for anyone. 82:31 Yeah, very hard right now. 82:33 Amazing. 82:34 Okay, favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life? 82:43 Life is what you make of it. 82:45 Hmm. So true. Final question. I'm curious to get your thoughts on this. So there's this idea of 82:53 tarpid ideas. So I had Dalton Caldwell on the podcast. He was a partner at YC 82:58 and he has this term tarpid ideas, which are ideas that people constantly have that are just 83:02 terrible and don't work. And people keep having these ideas and they keep trying it and they're 83:07 just like, okay, it doesn't work. Is there, are there any tarpid ideas you just find people 83:11 keep coming to you and you're like, don't do that. It's not going to work. That's interesting. 83:16 The category of ideas is to go after a space when there is already a clear winner 83:23 in that space without any theory on being different. I just keep seeing that it's just like, 83:28 oh, wow, Lemless just built a sales automation tool and they're bootstrapped and they're 83:32 growing really fast. So let me just build the exact same thing as them or something very 83:37 close. They've probably won that or they've already done that thing. Unless you're like, 83:46 oh, but this kind of customer is unblocked and so we're going to build something kind of different 83:51 for them, those ideas almost always don't work and you feel like you're going crazy because 83:57 you're like, well, it worked for them. What am I doing wrong? I imagine everyone answers, 84:01 but it's better. And as we know, it can't just be a little bit better. And basically you're saying, 84:08 like, okay, this is unblocking them. Yes. And it's better than all the alternatives, 84:12 they're just going to go with that thing. But I guess then, you know, 84:14 this goes into a whole other conversation, like, what if it's like two times better? 84:17 And I guess your advice there is it's, it's probably not good enough. 84:20 There are many things, right? You could give me a 100x better printer for my house. 84:24 And I won't buy it because I don't, I'm not blocked. That's a great example. 84:30 Oh, man. 84:31 Rob, we did it. 84:32 We did it. 84:33 Holy cow. 84:34 We did it. 84:35 Holy cow. 84:37 Okay. 84:37 How can listeners be useful to you? 84:38 That's our final question. 84:40 Oh, gosh. 84:41 If you like the framework, use it, tell other people about it. 84:45 Check out the book if it's useful, and reach out if you have any thoughts, ideas, or 84:50 this is a kind of, this is a theory framework model that is just in development. 84:56 I still feel like I'm kind of scratching the surface on it. 84:59 This is kind of like what I'm gonna be doing 85:00 for the next 10, 20 years. 85:02 So if you have ways to improve it, 85:04 like reach out and tell me. 85:05 Awesome, and your newsletter is exactly that. 85:08 It's you just, I don't know how often you're publishing, 85:10 but just like, cool, here's like another way 85:11 to think about this, here's a wrinkle here. 85:14 Just the idea of calling it physics of startups 85:15 is an awesome idea. 85:18 So I'll point people to the newsletter. 85:20 Rob, thank you so much for being here. 85:21 Thank you. 85:22 Bye everyone. 85:24 Thank you so much for listening. 85:25 If you found this valuable, 85:26 You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. 85:32 Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. 85:38 You can find all past episodes, or learn more about the show, at LenniesPodcast.com. 85:43 See you in the next episode!
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