Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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.
00:22:34 · Lenny Rachitsky, Rob Snyder
[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. [00:22:52] S0: Yeah, so you then take that and say, Okay, this is the kind of idea. I believe this kind of person is... This physical therapist is trying to cut some specific cost on their P and L. I can't actually remember what it was. Unavoidable for XYZ reasons, and their existing options of getting a consultant to come in and do this wasn't good enough for some specific reason. It was too expensive. It was too slow. Wrote out that poll hypothesis. And then what he did next was super important, which was he he showed it to that person and said, is this you? Person said, oh my god. Yeah. That's exactly the thing. He said, okay. Great. Would you buy something if I helped you get this done? Yeah. Totally. Okay. Great. And then he said, I need to go talk to five other physical therapists and just make sure this repeats. And then he did that, and they also pulled, which was the really important thing to make sure he wasn't just building a product for one person. [00:23:49] S1: What is it that he showed this companies at this, for the four bullet points with here's the project, here's why it's unavoidable, or is it something else?
00:23:49 · Lenny Rachitsky, Rob Snyder
[00:23:49] S1: What is it that he showed this companies at this, for the four bullet points with here's the project, here's why it's unavoidable, or is it something else? [00:23:57] S0: Yeah, so I actually like recommend having two slides. One slide is basically the pull framework. [00:24:02] S1: You don't have to [00:24:02] S0: show them the pull framework because no one's gonna understand it. You could just say, here's what I hear. You're trying to do X right now because of Y, and you've considered this, but it's not good enough for this reason. You say, do I have that roughly right? And then the second slide is a conceptual overview of how I can help. So it sounds like you're looking for a way to cut this line item that's faster than a consultant. We could offer that for x y z with... Does that kind of fit what you're looking for? And you're looking for the first slide, them to say, oh my god. Yes. And the second slide, yeah. How does it work? How exactly... How do we move forward?
00:24:02 · Rob Snyder, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:24:02] S0: show them the pull framework because no one's gonna understand it. You could just say, here's what I hear. You're trying to do X right now because of Y, and you've considered this, but it's not good enough for this reason. You say, do I have that roughly right? And then the second slide is a conceptual overview of how I can help. So it sounds like you're looking for a way to cut this line item that's faster than a consultant. We could offer that for x y z with... Does that kind of fit what you're looking for? And you're looking for the first slide, them to say, oh my god. Yes. And the second slide, yeah. How does it work? How exactly... How do we move forward? [00:24:43] S1: What I love about your stuff is it's like very plug and play pragmatic. So we'll actually show a slide of the actual template you have people use to fill this out. So the phrasing, I'll read it from this slide too. 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 are this, and they're lacking for this reason. 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 the idea is this is the hypothesis. And what does it look like when there's poll once you show it to them? Is it like they're ready to send you money? Is it their pupils dilate? What do you look for?