Because / Despite

Why things that sound right don’t work (and vice versa)

Hi! I’m Rob Snyder.

Modern startup advice prevents you from going 0 → 1 → 100. Startups that succeed wind up unlearning everything, and following a different path. This newsletter, my podcast, and my book attempt to figure out how it really works.

I also run PMF Camp (next start is Sept 14!) and work with startups 1:1 to help them crack 0-1 and early traction/sales. Space is extremely limited - apply ASAP!

PS - AI Rob is now in ugly beta, get a free month HERE.

What every founder learns the hard way: Despite our extensive market research, despite finding a 10/10 pain point, despite getting a ton of enthusiasm and free pilots, despite hiring a killer team and following all the best practices, we can’t get people to buy our product and our startup doesn’t take off.

This is because we have done a series of things that sound right, but are unrelated to the things that cause a startup to take off. And that, I believe, is core to the nature of startups: So many things can sound like they should cause a startup to take off, but only one actually causes a startup to take off - finding PULL!

Startups take off because they find repeatable PULL - someone trying to do X, who can’t do X with their existing tools, and therefore will rip a product that unblocks them from doing X out of a startup’s hands.

“Because vs. despite” is a fun framework. The below “because/despite” graphic explains why every founder has to unlearn basically everything we’ve ever been taught about startups:

Now, the inverse: When a startup finds PULL, customers will buy and renew despite basically everything the startup does:

My favorite example of this is my European founder friend who essentially reads the full text of the GDPR regulation in each sales call. Customers buy despite his best efforts; they have so much pull that they would buy even if he required them to lick sandpaper.

But! When a startup finds real pull, the founders quickly hire great people who do a lot of good things. These hires professionalize the sales pitch and process. They make a real website. They make the product scalable. Which means that what we see from the outside (and what employees see from the inside!) looks like this:

The point is that after a startup is successful, it is hard to tell what is causing it to succeed, versus what is unrelated or counterproductive to its success. Successful startups do so many things! For a simple example: Did OKRs cause Google to be successful, did they prevent Google from being more successful, or were they totally unrelated to Google’s success?

In other words, that successful company we’re looking at, here’s what might actually be happening:

Basically everything this company is doing is counterproductive or irrelevant, but their customers are still buying. From the outside, however, we might just interpret their success in the exact opposite way, taking 100% counterproductive lessons from their story:

Which leads to what I call “the pain cave”, where we do a bunch of things that we think should make our startup take off, but the startup isn’t taking off, and we can’t figure out why or what to do about it:

---

The “because” of greatness

The PULL theory states that the only way to build a fast-growing company is to find PULL. PULL is out there in the world, it exists independent of our product, and explains why startups can take off despite most of the things they do. PULL is upstream of product and GTM and everything else. It’s what makes product-market fit possible.

Once we find PULL, we can then decide what to do. We can optimize for revenue, growth, profitability, lifestyle, personal glory, etc. But the because/despite framing gives us another possible goal.

We all want to build something that takes off, but I think we all want to do more than that. We want building to be an end, not just a means - to build something wonderful for the sake of building something wonderful, with customers who also believe that it is wonderful, in a way that makes us feel alive.¹

This is the project in our souls, but as stated it is quite abstract and can lead us astray. It is very easy to pursue the goal of building something wonderful in a way that leads to a product nobody buys.

So let’s make this idea more concrete. A wonderful product is one that customers buy and renew because of everything, despite nothing, with nothing irrelevant:

To get there, we need to first get PULL right, then design everything else that is downstream of PULL to “fit”. This means no individual piece of our business will be perfectly optimized per MBA standards: We will not have the perfectly profit-maximizing pricing, we may not raise the most money at the highest valuation, we will not hit all the cost benchmarks, we will not follow “best practices”, we will not have feature parity with competitors. But the whole thing will be right.

1. Not a new thing - see John Ruskin’s The Nature of Gothic