The Physics of Startups
00:32:51 · RC, Rob Snyder
[00:32:51] S0: Yeah. So that's actually a good exercise if any unfortunate founder has made it this, you know, 32 minutes into our conversation. Um the like just ask yourself, like, where where is the constraint? And if um Rob, let's say that they do founders you work with dozens, hundreds of founders at this point. Do they all know where the constraint is in their business? [00:33:12] S1: No, no, just add as a add AI Rob or whatever, like uh-huh. I've designed AI Rob so you can plug it into your data and it will tell you what your constraint is. And so um, feel free to give that a try. Or, you know, I'm happy, right. In a in a 10 minute 10 minutes of me grilling you, we can figure out what your constraint is. Um the questions I'm asking are at the end here. It's like, okay, um, what is pull? What is your case study? And then like, okay, how many meetings are you having per week? How many of those convert? How many of those, how many of those turn into actual customers? Is it's pretty straightforward. I'm just like, I'm just speccing out the factory in my head.
00:33:50 · RC
[00:33:50] S0: Yeah. Um, you know, there's one other thing that you write, Rob, here that I I wanna I want to pull in, um, because seems obvious, is actually not super intuitive, and is different, meaningfully different from what a lot of startup theory out there, or you know, what a lot of you know, popular whatever that everybody has heard um uh tells you you should be focused on. And what you're focus what you're saying is think of your startup as a uh as of a case study factory, focus on the constraint. Here are some other things. If you could just like rip rip into these real quick, um you're right. Importantly, you do not get this intuition from any other way of looking at your startup. You're either building a product or selling it, gets you none of this. Neither does thinking about the company as a quote unquote software factory or a vehicle for your vision, nor does optimizing for revenue, thinking about marketing as a funnel, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Um yeah, you mentioned uh the software factory. When I hear that, I'm like, okay, that's actually the the delivery machine is like it's like a part of that. Yes. Um thinking of the marketing as a funnel, like why are these the wrong way to be conceptualizing uh and making decisions about where to spend your time as a founder?
00:35:08 · Rob Snyder, RC
[00:35:08] S1: Yeah. So one is like if you think about marketing as a funnel and sales as something else, you're gonna be using different way, different things to analyze these different parts of the same factory. And so um uh, but also thinking of marketing as a funnel, you're not gonna like apply the theory of constraints to a funnel. It's just like, oh, here's the number of leads we get, and here's da-da-da, right? And you and this is just not how it's so so you don't you don't get to apply manufacturing thinking to that. And so you don't get all the benefit of a hundred years of manufacturing thinking about how to make things go faster and work better and eliminate waste if you don't use a factory kind of concept. [00:35:50] S0: Yeah, yeah. Well, um, Rob, let's uh we're gonna need to wrap here in a moment. Um you basically kind of gave the gave the takeaway a moment ago, but uh just to reinforce it, founder who is listening at this point, what should they do? Um, what would you tell them if you were looking at that right now? Like, what should they do as a result of starting to think about their case study as as a factory or excuse me, is their startup as a case study factory?
00:35:50 · RC, Rob Snyder
[00:35:50] S0: Yeah, yeah. Well, um, Rob, let's uh we're gonna need to wrap here in a moment. Um you basically kind of gave the gave the takeaway a moment ago, but uh just to reinforce it, founder who is listening at this point, what should they do? Um, what would you tell them if you were looking at that right now? Like, what should they do as a result of starting to think about their case study as as a factory or excuse me, is their startup as a case study factory? [00:36:18] S1: Um yeah, so uh there are basically two things, two things I want to beam into your brain. Uh thing one is pull and all the implications of pull. Thing two is the case study factory and tells you exactly where to focus right now. If you just do those two things and let those tell you what to do, then uh then you're by default gonna do the stuff to grow the fastest. And that's what I want you to do because I want you to break every damn record there is in growth. And so uh go do that.
00:36:53 · RC, Rob Snyder
[00:36:53] S0: Yeah, love it. Um and uh that's typically you mentioned this. Um any founder that's listening to this and is like trying to wrap their brain around it or thinking about like where's my uh where's my constraint, or maybe they know where their constraint is and they don't know how to attack it most efficiently. Um that's like typically your first uh session with like a founder that works with you. And so if you're if you're interested in working with Rob, um just a quick plug, drop me a note, RC at reframe bdb.com or um just yeah, reach out, go to the website robsnyder.org, and there's uh there's a button that you can click to fill out a form. Um anyways, agnostic of that. Hopefully this gives you everything that um you know you need to cause your startup to take off. Um and we'll look forward to hearing. We we get email. I love it when we get emails from time to time that are like, hey, we listened, we've been following Rob for a long time, and our startup just achieved major milestone. Those are really cool. So like send that, you know, drop it in the comments or no one sends that to me. [00:37:52] S1: Come on, send that to me too. You're getting all the love. Whatever. All right, yeah. [00:37:58] S0: Yeah, that's it's because I'm very approachable, Rob. Okay. All right, awesome. And we will uh yeah, so uh Linny Podcast will also drop that in the notes whenever it's live, but uh that that'll be coming out soon. Um, it's a big one, and we're we'll be excited to catch everybody here in a week. See y'all.