Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:19:29 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:19:29] S1: Amazing. So the advice here is don't sit around and brainstorm. Don't just look for big markets and figure out where there might be something massive. What you're saying here is almost like this lens of if your life depended on and how would you find a problem that is likely to be a real, I guess, have real pull. And what I'm hearing here is get like in the weeds, get your hands dirty, like get it the way, this reminds me of a quote, Non, who is the head of product at Linear, now he just went to OpenAI, described what he looks for when he's trying to find opportunities, he describes it, I want to feel the pain of the person the same way they feel the pain. Yeah. Yeah. And what you're saying is the way to do that is get in there with people building a thing. Is there an example of doing that?
00:20:17 · Rob Snyder, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:20:17] S0: Yeah. So a friend from school, he had no idea what he wanted to build. He had no product idea. He wasn't... He didn't have my notebook. He didn't have any of that. He just said, you know, I like serving small businesses. I like small business. I'd like to just find somebody I like to serve, and I'll figure out the idea from that. And so he wrote out a list of industries that he thought might be interesting, and then he went and shadowed them and, like, worked with them for... Like, rode along with them for days at a time. And so he started with solar panel installers, and he hated them and they hated him, so they moved on to the next one. He eventually worked his way to, like, independent physical therapists. And he went and spent days with them. He loved them. They loved him, and he was like, okay. Cool. What am I... What is the pull here? What what what should I do? And so he watched over their shoulder days on end. He even tried to buy a physical therapy franchise to, like... Was able to see the PNL and was actually considering it. And in that process, he came up with something. Like, wait a second. You're... It looks like you're trying to do x and and are stuck there. And so it's it's firsthand experience is is what you what you should do there. [00:21:29] S1: Awesome. So, like, live it yourself and Live it. And is the reason you need to do that... Is it part... Is it because people would have discovered... If it was easy, basically, somebody else would have found the idea? What... Why do you think that is so important, approaching it this way?
00:21:29 · Lenny Rachitsky, Rob Snyder
[00:21:29] S1: Awesome. So, like, live it yourself and Live it. And is the reason you need to do that... Is it part... Is it because people would have discovered... If it was easy, basically, somebody else would have found the idea? What... Why do you think that is so important, approaching it this way? [00:21:45] S0: Yeah. I'd I'd say... I'll I'll I'll give two reasons. One is, you know, these things don't really emerge from a whiteboard. Like, it would be weird if his idea came to him that he eventually wound up finding from brainstorming. Like, think of how many different ideas he could have come up with. And it wasn't something that... Like, it it was something he saw only by observing where... It's unclear that that would have emerged in an interview either. But I say the second thing is, like, more of a philosophical thing, which is you're building a company to serve this kind of person. The whole point of building a company is to serve somebody to help them do something. And so if you don't have firsthand experience, how are you gonna make the thousands of decisions it takes to actually build something that serves them? [00:22:34] S1: And is the idea once you have this insight, say with this physical therapy company, you write it out through the pull framework to kind of pressure, is that, you call that the pull hypothesis, is Yep. That So talk about that. Just like say you have this insight, and I'm curious what you actually found with this physical therapy business and how to kind of start to think about it through the pull framework.