Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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
[00:06:21] S1: This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor, WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign on, SCIM, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for b to b SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with WorkOS, and that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seed stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking growth. It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise ready today. Let's talk it through the the acronym of PULL because that goes deeper into this idea.
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
00:08:55 · Lenny Rachitsky, Rob Snyder
[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 [00:09:01] S0: you can imagine a case where, like, a product team, for example, they have a really important thing that the... That has been mandated down. They have a really important feature they need to build or something that's an unavoidable project on their to do list, but they're gonna do it themselves. So they don't need anything. They won't buy anything unless they... Their existing options aren't good enough. And so it really, really is important that it's not just I'm trying to do something, and I can do it myself, or I can do it with a with a kind of category leader. I can do it with whatever tool is is out there. It has to be something where my existing options are not good enough, so I am, like, stuck. I'm I'm blocked. [00:09:44] S1: Let's do an example to make this even more real. What's like a product or a company that gives us a sense of what... I basically use this as a template. It's like a Mad Libsy thing where it's just like p u l l, and you fill it out. So let's go give us an example.
00:09:44 · Lenny Rachitsky, Rob Snyder
[00:09:44] S1: Let's do an example to make this even more real. What's like a product or a company that gives us a sense of what... I basically use this as a template. It's like a Mad Libsy thing where it's just like p u l l, and you fill it out. So let's go give us an example. [00:09:56] S0: Yeah. So my friends are at a company called Jump, which is an AI notetaker for financial advisers. Very interesting space. They did the same thing I did, by the way. They spent eighteen months just hitting their head against the wall and then finally found Pole, tried to sell, and figured it out. But what they found was that financial advisers have a project on their to do list that is to minimize the amount of time they spend taking notes for client meetings and putting those notes into their CRMs. It's a project on their to do list. The you, the unavoidable, is if they don't take notes and put them into their CRMs, they could go to jail. So they have to take those notes, but when they're taking the notes, they don't wanna be doing that. And so so they wanna minimize the amount of time because they don't enjoy doing that. It's it's not a not a fun thing. So the list of options they considered to minimize the amount of time were, [00:10:55] S1: you know,
00:10:55 · Lenny Rachitsky, Rob Snyder
[00:10:55] S1: you know, [00:10:55] S0: like a generic AI notetaker. You're you're kind of there's a list of of all of those out there. But those AI notetakers were not good enough because they didn't integrate with the financial adviser CRMs, and it wasn't clear if they were compliant with the SEC's regulations on this. And so there's a list of options they they really couldn't use. And so when JuMP showed up and found that poll, people ripped the product out of their hands. Well, I think one person literally said, this must be how Alexander Graham Bell felt when he invented the telephone. Like, that's a weird thing to say about a product for financial advisers. Amazing. [00:11:34] S1: That's a great testimonial to stick on our website. [00:11:36] S0: Yeah. [00:11:37] S1: Okay. What would be, like, a bad version of this? Like, what would it look like if it wasn't... If there wasn't pull?