If your product hasn't taken off
Radical simplification, the upstream fix
Hi! If you’re new here, I’m Rob Snyder, a founder developing the theory of product pull. Here’s an intro to the theory, and here’s the companion podcast to this newsletter: Spotify / YouTube.
Also:
My book, The Power of PULL, is coming out July 7! If you pre-order it, you get my sales call analysis Claude skill & private AMAs… order and get access HERE.
Soft-launching a professionally recorded course on “selling to find product pull”! Get early discounted access for you and your team HERE.
I help startups take off. Startups are reserving me for Q3, so if you feel like people should be buying fast, but they aren’t consistently & it’s not clear why, grab time with me HERE.
If your product hasn’t taken off, it feels like there are a million possible causes and a gazillion things you could try. When this is the case, you throw spaghetti at the wall1 under the banner of “experimentation”; most of the time, nothing works and it’s not clear why. If you’re like me, you start wondering if the real problem is you.
The PULL framework gives you a different path.
When your startup hasn’t taken off, there actually aren’t a million possible reasons why it’s not taking off. There are only two.
Reason #1: You haven’t figured out who has PULL (aka: who is weird not to buy your product).
Reason #2: You have figured out who has PULL, but you’re preventing them from buying.
Everything about not taking off is merely a symptom of one of these two things.
1 - PULL - “Who is weird not to buy our product” is the most upstream thing in startups.
If you find somebody with PULL, they are ready to buy your product before they know it exists. They will try to buy despite the current state of your product or how bad you are at sales. These people are trying to do X, but blocked from doing X by their available tools, methods, options. They are stuck, in need of an un-block so they can get X done. You show up and almost all of the work is done. Their PULL even tells you exactly what to sell them - something that unblocks them!
If you don’t find someone with PULL, nothing else matters. It wouldn’t be weird if they didn’t buy from you… so they probably won’t, and you learn nothing when they don’t!
These people aren’t prioritizing something relevant, or they have good enough options for whatever they’re prioritizing. They’re not going to drop their priorities or good-enough methods just because you want them to, and they won’t do this no matter how good you get at sales, how many hours you work, how much ROI you promise, how much they say they “like” your product, how much you raise, how great your website is, how many features you build, etc. Which is why everything else is downstream of figuring out who has PULL and is weird not to buy.
2 - When you know who has PULL, all that matters is to not prevent them from buying.
If you watched last week’s sales call teardowns, you might be surprised at the extent to which smart founders’ default approaches to sales are counterproductive. I estimate that 25 out of 30 minutes in the typical startup’s sales call I review convinces someone with PULL not to buy. A person with PULL just needs to know whether and how we can unblock them. They don’t need our theory of the market, or our differentiation statement, or to explain how their process works in detail, and they certainly don’t need to know how to configure our product.
Are your sales calls preventing customers from buying? Some indications:
You can’t review a sales call recording and fill out the potential customer’s PULL framework without guessing
Your product description and demo go for longer than 5 minutes
The potential customer doesn’t initiate a buying-adjacent action during the call (e.g., you are proposing next steps; they are not)
This goes well beyond calls, of course: Outbound convinces potential customers not to meet with us, sales processes convince them not to close, websites and products convince them we’re not for them.
Customers with PULL sometimes overcome our best efforts and buy, which is a great sign of PULL! But often, we do such a good job preventing them from buying… that they don’t buy. Once we have found PULL, we just need to design everything downstream to stop preventing them from buying and succeeding.
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So the question is: Do we actually have evidence of who’s weird not to buy? If not, figuring that out is all that matters. If so, the only thing that matters is: What’s preventing these people from buying? If you’re not sure whether it’s PULL or prevention… all that matters is figuring out which it is!
Example: The “But Claude Code” Objection
Today, tons of us are running face-first into potential customers saying: “But I can just do this with Claude Code!”
This sounds like an objection. So you will, by default, mark this as an objection and look for ways to handle this objection. Most of the time, you’ll find yourself trying to persuade everyone that actually, Claude Code can’t do this. A friend proudly showed me his 10-slide deck giving all the reasons Claude Code couldn’t do what his product did. How many times had it convinced somebody who wanted to use Claude Code to not use Claude Code? Zero. However, some people who were already convinced they couldn’t use Claude Code saw the slides and bought. But these people would have bought anyway, and probably faster, without being waterboarded by 10 slides telling them something they already believed.
When you get the “but Claude Code” objection, you’ve found somebody who is not weird not to buy your product. They believe they can just use Claude Code! Which means you have to try to push them to buy, and by default, they won’t. You can try a million different tactics and build a million different features, but this will generally not move the needle. Because no matter what you do, you’re selling to people who feel like they have a good-enough option. And so it would be weird if they bought. The only solution is to find someone who is blocked. And that might be:
Someone who has already tried using Claude Code and failed… yet still must get X done, and doesn’t believe that the next model release (or five) will get Claude Code to be able to do X. In other words, you find people for whom reality has done the heavy lifting of convincing them.
Someone for whom using Claude Code is not an option… yet still must get X done. This is behind the seasonal YC hajj from devtools to insurance or logistics: Some people just won’t build and manage their own software, at least not for the foreseeable future. Thank God for normies.
Again, look upstream: Who is weird not to buy? If you don’t know that, nothing else matters. Once you know that, design everything around it.
It is that simple, and that difficult.
Often this spaghetti-at-the-wall is well-organized in a Notion. It doesn’t matter how well-organized it is; without an underlying theory of why people buy things, it’s still just spaghetti.