Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:14:05 · Rob Snyder, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:14:05] S0: Yeah. This was super liberating when I, like, realized this because I always thought that I was incompetent. I wasn't good at convincing the market to want my product. And it was from that perspective of, okay, I'm building something that's really valuable and people aren't buying. How do I convince them to want it to buy? And it turns out this poll, this project on their to do list exists before and independent of me, which means I just have to go out there and find it. I don't have to convince people to have poll. And it's like, I haven't quite figured out how to do that, but I think it's very, very hard to do if it's possible at all. [00:14:44] S1: That feels very familiar. Just trying to convince people. Look, this is so great. It's gonna solve so many of problems. And I love these ideas. This like... I just love how very specific and concrete it makes all of these general pieces of advice around finding product market fit, coming up with ideas. It just tells you exactly what it looks like. Something else you talked about, you mentioned this earlier, this idea that it needs to feel weird for them not to buy it. That's like the sign that this is right. That it's like, it's weird. Why aren't you buying this?
00:14:44 · Lenny Rachitsky, Rob Snyder
[00:14:44] S1: That feels very familiar. Just trying to convince people. Look, this is so great. It's gonna solve so many of problems. And I love these ideas. This like... I just love how very specific and concrete it makes all of these general pieces of advice around finding product market fit, coming up with ideas. It just tells you exactly what it looks like. Something else you talked about, you mentioned this earlier, this idea that it needs to feel weird for them not to buy it. That's like the sign that this is right. That it's like, it's weird. Why aren't you buying this? [00:15:13] S0: Talk a bit about that. Most people, most of the time, are, like, fine. It would be weird if they bought our product given what's on their to do list, given what they have, given their options. Like, so it'd be weird if they bought. But a person with pull is weird not to buy. They should actually pull the product out of your hands because they are like that coiled spring. And so if you talk to somebody who has pull, the conversation should basically go like, wait a second. You can do what? Okay. How do we get started? Does the product exist yet? Like, do how do we get onboarded? Where basically every other conversation you have with somebody who doesn't have pull can have anything other than that. They can be enthusiastic and nice and say, wow. That's amazing. That's super interesting. That's totally the future of our industry. Wow. I can see how that would save us so much money. But they're not saying, I need this right now. And that's how you know they actually have pull.
00:15:13 · Rob Snyder, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:15:13] S0: Talk a bit about that. Most people, most of the time, are, like, fine. It would be weird if they bought our product given what's on their to do list, given what they have, given their options. Like, so it'd be weird if they bought. But a person with pull is weird not to buy. They should actually pull the product out of your hands because they are like that coiled spring. And so if you talk to somebody who has pull, the conversation should basically go like, wait a second. You can do what? Okay. How do we get started? Does the product exist yet? Like, do how do we get onboarded? Where basically every other conversation you have with somebody who doesn't have pull can have anything other than that. They can be enthusiastic and nice and say, wow. That's amazing. That's super interesting. That's totally the future of our industry. Wow. I can see how that would save us so much money. But they're not saying, I need this right now. And that's how you know they actually have pull. [00:16:06] S1: Those conversations sound very familiar. Okay. So before we get into the kind of the whole journey of the startup process and how you can use this framework in that journey, anything else around just the general idea of the pull framework that's important to share?
00:16:06 · Lenny Rachitsky, Rob Snyder
[00:16:06] S1: Those conversations sound very familiar. Okay. So before we get into the kind of the whole journey of the startup process and how you can use this framework in that journey, anything else around just the general idea of the pull framework that's important to share? [00:16:20] S0: One of the main mistakes people make is thinking that pull is a thing that a company has. It's a thing a person has. Even if you're selling enterprise software, you're selling not to the company. You're not selling to SpaceX. You're selling to... Just going to your Jen able conversation. You're send... Selling to, like, the head of legal at SpaceX who has a project on her to do list that that they can't do themselves. [00:16:47] S1: That is really useful. So it's not like SpaceX needs this. It's like, say, Jen [00:16:52] S0: Yes. [00:16:53] S1: Needs this. And you're saying that that's often a mistake people make. They don't think about the specific person with this need. [00:16:59] S0: Yeah. Yeah. It's it's super common to say we sell to, right, like, mid market private equity companies. It's like, you don't. You sell to a partner or an operating partner in there who is specifically trying to do x, y, and z. Awesome.
00:16:59 · Rob Snyder, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:16:59] S0: Yeah. Yeah. It's it's super common to say we sell to, right, like, mid market private equity companies. It's like, you don't. You sell to a partner or an operating partner in there who is specifically trying to do x, y, and z. Awesome. [00:17:13] S1: Okay. So through the lens of this framework, let's go through kind of the key moments of an early stage startup, finding product market fit. So I want to talk about coming up with an idea, getting your first sales call, closing your first deal, and then kind of scaling from there. So let's start with coming up with an idea. How how can people use this framework to help them come up with ideas that are more likely to actually be successful?
00:17:38 · Rob Snyder
[00:17:38] S0: As a founder, I I have a notebook of ideas that are all like, what if we built an API for APIs kind of thing. Like, they're they're all these, like, product ideas, and the product ideas all sound unhinged. And so I can never tell between product ideas what's a good idea and what's a bad idea. Well, fortunately, the pull framework is a thing that's upstream of your product idea that says, I believe there is a person who is trying to do X right now and who is basically weird not to buy. And so what I've found to be helpful is to use the pull framework to stake out a claim and say, I believe for whatever idea I have. I believe this specific person is stuck, and so I'm going to go and talk to them and see, do they try to buy from me even before we have a product? And so for me, the idea of the pull framework is to come up with a hypothesis of who has pull and then go and test that. And then the question becomes, okay, how do you find this poll idea, this poll hypothesis? What do you do for that? I have some fairly strong opinions on this. Like, I don't think we take this stage seriously enough. Like, if your life depended on it, how would... Would you would you be doing, like, 10 customer interviews for, like, thirty minutes on Zoom? No. You would go all out. You'd go in person. I have, like, a couple stories of friends who have done crazy things to go and, like, do the job with the potential customer, to feel it firsthand, to find that pull firsthand. And they've either built something that they would buy themselves, or they've, like, embedded with people to find that, like, that moment when someone will act is like trying to do something and stuck.