Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:01:19 · Rob Snyder, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:01:19] S0: Hello. Thank you. [00:01:21] S1: You are the author of The Power of Pull. I've got the book right here. You have a newsletter called The Physics of Startups. I don't think I told you this, but the way I learned of you is a very unusual way. I have this Slack community for my paid subscribers. And in the Slack, just in the past month, two different people started threads where they're like, Lenny, you need to get Rob on the podcast. I've been reading his book, and it's extremely useful to what I've been doing. And these are some founders, some product people, and I'm just like, well, who is this guy? I gotta find out. And so I reached out, and that's how this came to be. Essentially what you've written in this book and what you do in your newsletter is you've basically created a very pragmatic guide to finding product market fit, and basically going from zero to one and then one beyond, and to give people a reason to believe you, other than what I've already said about people, saying how useful this has been, I know you've helped something like 50 different startups get from zero to over 1,000,000 in ARR. Speak to just where this insight and and advice comes from.
00:02:27 · Rob Snyder
[00:02:27] S0: Yeah. Yes. I did not expect to be writing a book or do anything like this. I I got punched in the face as a founder trying to go zero to one and then randomly figured it out, and then a bunch of my friends started pulling me in to help their startups go zero to one and just kinda got obsessed with this stage. It's super interesting, super weird. I feel like there's not a lot of good stuff written about it. And and so I've just gotten strangely obsessed with doing zero to one as many times as possible.
00:02:55 · Lenny Rachitsky, Rob Snyder
[00:02:55] S1: I love that. I'm gonna read a couple quotes actually from my community to reinforce the things you just said of why, what people have been saying about what you've done, and this is really unusual. There's like, even though you just said there's not a lot, there is a lot of content for founders. Here's how to find idea, here's how to find product market fit. So it's really, it's a big signal to me if people are saying this is in particular extremely useful to them more than anything else out there. So a few things that people told me in my community. One, I remember reading the first chapter of his book and feeling the weight lifted off my shoulders that I'm not some silly clueless outlier and that this is a normal part of the process. Another, besides all the very tactical stuff, personally I found that I m normalizing just how painful, lonely, weird it is to go through finding product market fit. Finally, we ran into the same zero to one traps, Rob describes building based on what prospects that they wanted rather than what actually got them to say yes. Wow. [00:03:56] S0: You have very nice people in your community. That's that's a... [00:03:58] S1: That's true. [00:03:59] S0: That's super kind. [00:04:00] S1: That's true. That's true. Alright. Anyway, so there you go. Just to give people... Okay. Let's look at attention. Okay. Give us a free... An overview of the pull framework.
00:04:10 · Rob Snyder
[00:04:10] S0: Yeah. So the pull framework describes a person who will pull your product out of your hands. Someone someone who's weird not to buy your product. So we, like, know what pull feels like. It's it's the thing that's written about with startups. You know, it's the thing... You have startups that take up... You, your newsletter, had insane pull. You grew like that. Right? And everybody wants that. And most of us are in the situation where it feels like we are pushing. We're trying to convince people to care, convince them to buy, and they're... It's like kinda maybe working. And so pull describes a person who'd... It'd be weird not to buy. The question is just like, what causes somebody to pull a product out of your hands? And for that, I found a lot of the traditional descriptions of things. Like, when I was a founder, I went out and found hair on fire pain points, big problems, offered a differentiated solution that provided real value. We had design partners using our product every single day. And so I was like, okay. Cool. Check. Check. Check. Check. Check. This thing's going to the moon. And then tried to sell it and just got smashed into a wall for two years pivoting around aimlessly, not... With no clue why. And then we randomly pivoted. It took off. And I realized that it wasn't the thing that causes people to pull a product out of your hands. It's not pain points or value props or things like that. Because I realized that people can basically just say, yeah, Like, great... This... You know, it's great that your product solves our pain points, problems, offers a ton of value, but I'm not gonna drop my priorities to buy it. And so I realized it's about priorities, a certain kind of priority where somebody's trying to do something. They got a project on their to do list, trying to do it right now, but they can't do it with their existing tools, methods, or options. In that case, they're like a coiled spring, right, trying to do something stuck, and you show up and just offer something that gets them unstuck, that helps them get that priority done. That's when they rip it out of your hands, and the pull framework is just an acronym for that.
00:06:21 · Lenny Rachitsky
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00:07:35 · Rob Snyder, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:07:35] S0: Yeah. So acronym, p u l l. There's a p project. They have a project on their to do list. You can think of a project like a job to be done. It's, you know, Bob Mesto. You've had him on. He's amazing. Project is not like, I wanna buy recruitment software. It's I wanna hire more employees kind of thing. U is the second one, is unavoidable. This is a thing that I have to do right now. Why now? Why not later? There's some reason why you have to do it now. First l is list of options I consider for doing the project. Could be, again, hiring somebody. Could be having our existing team do it. Could be using the tools I already have or the tools out on the market. And the second l is limitations. Why are those options not good enough for getting me... Getting my project done? [00:08:29] S1: Amazing. So the first two are really important there, and it's interesting the second two feel less important. I'm curious why they're so important. So the first two are essentially like, I have a problem I need to solve, a job to be done, and this is an urgent problem. So in a sense, this is the hair on fire problem very concretely defined. Here's what hair on fire looks like. I have like a to do my boss is waiting for me to do, and it needs to happen now. It's not just, a general thing that [00:08:53] S0: I need to solve. Yes. [00:08:55] S1: Why are the second two so important, this idea of other options and why those are not working? Yeah. So you can