The PULL Quickstart Guide

Applying PULL

The PULL Framework now covers a lot of ground, and so this week I thought I’d give you a Quickstart guide for implementing it across your business. These are the most important things to know, and if you understand the essential background you can largely intuit the rest.

This exercise has forced me to force-rank what’s important. While PULL impacts every aspect of your business, it seems to operate in a very specific hierarchical order. Said differently, there are many ways to be right downstream that are counterproductive because you are wrong upstream.¹

Essential Background:

This section helps you load the PULL framework into your brain.

On Product-Market Fit:

• We know what PMF looks like: customers buy with little/no convincing, act like the product is irresistible, pull product out of startups’ hands, and as a result we grow fast. This is what we all want.

• We know what not(PMF) looks like: customers don’t buy, or need a lot of convincing to buy, seemingly no matter what the startup does. This is what we don’t want but are often stuck with.

• We don’t know what causes not(PMF) -> PMF, so it is unclear exactly what to do. Infinite things could work and sound right - but basically nothing actually moves the needle. We can limp along like this forever. We can even build a profitable business that doesn’t have real PMF - sales are always difficult, growth is always brutal, retention is a lot of arm-twisting. It makes money, but it’s not what it could be.

• Basically every startup spends time in the not(PMF) zone. I believe that startups that go from not(PMF) → PMF figure out ONE specific thing: PULL.

Signals you’re in the not(PMF) zone:

• Customers aren’t pulling the product out of your hands - you have to convince people to buy and if that works, they don’t buy fast.

• You are struggling through pilots or long sales cycles, where you have to do all of the following up. They aren’t acting as if buying is their top priority.

• You have tried a bunch of tactics that haven’t worked - e.g., sales playbooks, outbound scripts, PLG, etc. You’ve also tried building more. It is not clear why these things haven’t worked for you, because they seem to work for other people.

The Not(PMF) Zone welcomes businesses of all shapes and sizes, from no revenue to tens of millions in revenue - software, services, AI, B2B, B2C, deep tech, etc.

PULL theory explains Not(PMF) -> PMF:

• Your potential customer has thousands of relevant products/services she could buy, all of which would solve problems + provide value that she could want. She will buy basically none of them.

• She will, of course, buy some products. But she’ll buy some things she doesn’t “want” (e.g., Netsuite), she’ll buy some products that aren’t related to pain points, etc. AKA: Pain points, problems, value, and wanting your product are NOT RELEVANT.

• Almost all people, almost all of the time, would be weird to buy your product GIVEN their priorities and their available tools/options/methods. It would be weird if someone said, “Let me drop my priorities to buy your product,” or “My current options are good enough, but I’ll buy your product anyway.”

• Inverting this: A person will only be weird NOT to buy your product if three things are true:

  • She has priority “P” right now

  • Her options for getting “P” done are not good enough because of limitation “L”

  • You offer her something that helps her overcome “L” so she can do “P”.

• This leads to the PULL framework. A person will rip the product out of your hands if she has PULL:

  • She has a Project (P) on her to-do list

  • That is Unavoidable (U) right now - she can’t not do this, it’s her #1 priority

  • She considers a List (L) of one or more available options to get her Project done

  • But her existing options don’t get her there - they have Limitations (L)

• Importantly, a “project” is not ABOUT a product/service. Nobody has a project to “buy a CRM.” Instead, a project is product-agnostic - like “Organize my sales data” (this would be a project even if there was no such thing as a CRM).

• This means PULL exists ex-ante, out there in the world, whether or not your product exists.

• If you find a person in a PULL state, she will rip the product out of your hands. If you find a person not in a PULL state, it would be weird if she bought from you, given her priorities and available options.

• Everything else about startups is downstream of this. If you don’t find PULL, nothing else matters.

• You don’t actually need very much: Just one person in a PULL state, one thing they pull out of your hands. The result = one “Hell Yes” case study.

• Startups just figure out their one “hell yes” case study and repeat it. A startup is a case study factory - a system you build to repeat one case study a bunch of times. Eventually you might add a second case study, which is like adding a second factory or line in the factory.

• When you view your business as a factory with 3 steps (get potential customers with PULL to talk to us → convert to actual customers → make them successful such that they don’t churn), you can use factory thinking to figure out what your business’s #1 bottleneck/constraint is. The founder only ever has one job: Attack the business’s constraint.

Implementation:

Here is how to implement PULL across your business - in descending order of importance.

ICP = DESTINY. (Ideal Customer Profile)

• Everything is downstream of how you define your ICP. Define your ICP as: Who has PULL right now? Not who you want to sell to, not even who would benefit the most. Given their priorities + options, who would be weird not to buy right now? Step 1 of implementing PULL has to be “Fill out the PULL framework to define your ICP.”

• It is relatively easy to fill out the PULL framework with plausible-sounding words. There are two quick sanity checks to see if your PULL framework is actually good:

  • 1 - Is it OK if this person doesn’t do this Project right now?

  • 2 - Assuming they do this project, are they OK not buying our product, doing it by other means?

  • These are sanity checks, and could be wrong because of something you can’t see - the true test is how people you THINK have PULL behave in a sales conversation.

• I have found that you have to base your PULL framework on one real person, otherwise it’s almost impossible to get right.

• This person should buy with near-zero convincing, even a junky v1 (and push you to make it better vs churning because it’s bad). They should buy even if you are bad at sales.

• This will always be a subset of who you’d like to eventually serve - that’s ok, you and the market will evolve. This ICP will earn you the right to a bigger future.

Product (Our Supply to their Demand)

• PULL defines the most upstream product requirements. They have PULL if they are trying to do P (project) but are blocked from doing it by existing options because of L (limitations). The core requirement is that our product must enable them to overcome L to accomplish P.

• There are, of course, other requirements. These downstream requirements will always emerge as objections as you try to sell and frustrations as you try to deliver.

• HOW we enable them to overcome L to accomplish P is a function of thoughtful design. Eventually we need to be thoughtful about architecture/design - specifically enabling future optionality (e.g., Clay, Rippling) - but not at the expense of fitting PULL.

• As an MVP, you can deliver something (e.g., a service / “Ratatouille” version) that confirms their PULL and what they want out of you. While designing scalable architecture is difficult, PULL is always your first constraint.

Sales - The Vibe

• If they have real PULL they will buy whatever fits, as long as we don’t convince them otherwise. They will exert the energy to purchase - they are getting unblocked on something that’s really important to them. If you don’t see them exerting the energy to purchase, they don’t have real PULL and you should figure out why they don’t.

• If they don’t have PULL, it is hard to convince them to buy/succeed even if you’re an experienced seller who’s been the #1 sales rep everywhere you’ve worked.

• So: Chill out! Don’t try to craft the legal case for purchase, show them every feature, or try to convince them your vision is infallible. See if they need help, and don’t be bothered if they don’t have PULL.

Getting people to talk to you:

• If someone has PULL, it mostly doesn’t matter how you get them to talk to you. If someone doesn’t have PULL, it also doesn’t matter how you get them to talk to you.

• Before you know what PULL is, you have ~0% of a cold product pitch working. Instead, pitch something interesting to them - e.g., make it cool for them to meet with you because you’re interesting. Consider your personal monopoly: What’s the thing that only you can say, that’s cool to them, and gives them something that’s in it for them?

• After you know what PULL is (& therefore your ICP + their situation), you should know exactly where to find them in their PULL situation. This might be something standard like cold-calling or events, but it is often something creative that only makes sense given this PULL. I call this a “toll booth”.

• If you can’t get people to talk with you, nothing else matters. Shoot for 5-15+ conversations per week (1-3 per day). Worst-case scenario, go Goblin Mode.

Sales - Discovery (= Filling out their PULL Framework)

• Start with: Thanks for meeting with me today, curious - Why did you take the call? What would be most helpful for you to get out of it?

• Then: Set agenda - confirm it’s what they want.

• Then: Before we get to the agenda, mind if I ask a few questions to understand your context? (This exact sequence is how you earn the right to discovery.)

• Ask questions to surface their PULL (and/or a slide) - don’t ask questions about context / pain points. The goal of discovery is to fill out their PULL framework.

• When you think you understand their PULL, play it back to make sure you have it right. You often don’t.

• Make it OK for them to admit they don’t really have PULL (vs. being overly enthusiastic or interrogating).

Sales - Pitch & Demo

• Once you know their PULL, describe your product with the smallest possible description using the supply framework: “We are [product category] that enables [people like ICP] to do [project] without [limitations]”

• Then explain “how it works” by way of describing their unblocked life: “Instead of XYZ, you now do ABC and get DEF as a result.” (The typical way we describe “how it works” is how it literally works versus your unblocked life with it - the former isn’t helpful.)

• The above two bullet points should be a max of 60-90 seconds and should have 1-2 simple accompanying visuals (e.g., a slide or website) you show while describing them.

• Your description should not include your theory of the world / product, the “big problem” you’re solving, etc. These things are not relevant to their PULL. The more you talk / show - especially things that are not directly related to their PULL - the more likely you are to convince them your product isn’t relevant to them.

• After describing these, stop for a “fit check” - ask them if this seems to conceptually fit what they’re looking for. Make it OK for them to say no or “I’m not sure”.

• If not “no”, ask what they need to know in order to make a decision on whether they want to bring this into the organization. This sets up either a 1-call close OR sets the agenda for the second call.

• Demos are optional, should be a max of ~3 mins and minimum possible screens. Don’t show how to set up the product, and for the love of God don’t show them a settings page.

Sales - Deal Strategy:

• Early on, optimize for velocity - usually start small to minimize surface area of objections / approvals. Especially enterprise, where deals can drag on forever with seemingly infinite stakeholders.

• Why optimize for velocity? Pace of learning if PULL is real. You can only know if PULL is real (and if you’re building the right product) with volume all the way through the system (AKA - you only know it’s real when someone buys AND commits to renew!)

• Pricing long-term is a function of the value of getting their Project done, versus the costs of relevant alternatives from their List of options.

• Early on, don’t offer for free because you won’t know if they have real PULL. But also don’t look to maximize pricing because you don’t really know what their PULL is, and want to optimize for velocity. Rough early pricing strategy: What’s enough that I know that their PULL is real, enough that they’ll yell at me if it doesn’t deliver (vs. ghosting), but not so much that it really slows down deal velocity?

• If you’re bootstrapping or short on cash, starting by selling services is a great way to not run out of cash. Many of today’s big tech companies started as services companies.

Sales Process:

• “Fit”: first call, maybe spills over to 2nd call. After they confirm it is a “fit” for their PULL that they want to bring into their org, it becomes project management.

• Every call after 1: Start by recapping their PULL + what they wanted to assess to make a decision (show on screen - slide or doc).

• Person with PULL is your champion: you are helping them accomplish their project.

• Project management: Work backwards from when they want project complete; help them define the minimum steps necessary to purchase. (Build and execute the project plan. Eventually come with a recommended template from other deals.)

• Group demos are you helping your champion convince the group, not you convincing the group. Let them intro, then generally repeat Call 1 demand + supply overview + Q&A. Ideally you should be in all the meetings they have with peers to help answer any questions - this isn’t pushy to ask for, it helps them convince their peers.

Post-sales:

• The true test of PMF is customer retention/expansion. Until you have proven consistent retention/expansion, it is not a good idea to pour a ton of fuel on the acquisition side of the house. Trust me.

• When they buy, they will churn by default. Until something happens, which changes this so they will not churn by default. This “something” is sometimes “product usage”, but it is almost always way more specific and a little weird.

• Your goal is to figure out what this “something” is, what the leading indicator of this “something” is, then turn your onboarding process into a bullet train to the leading indicator of NOT(churn-by-default). Where it would be weird if every new customer didn’t hit that leading indicator.

• Churn sucks, but it is insanely helpful to figure out what PULL really is and who has it. Don’t avoid this feedback, lean into it.

Common errors:

• Debugging at the wrong level in the hierarchy. If you have a problem with “urgency” in your sales process, you can solve that at that level of the hierarchy (e.g., trying to add urgency), or you can move up the hierarchy (e.g., defining your ICP in a way where urgency is a non-issue). It is almost always the case that a problem experienced at one level of the hierarchy is best solved at a higher level of the hierarchy.

• Companies don’t have PULL, individuals do. Often, two people in the same company will have exactly opposite PULL.

  • Corollary: Senior people in a company often have clearer PULL (and the ability to buy something) than junior people. And a junior employee’s PULL is often irrelevant to senior people, who need to be convinced to sign off on the purchase, so you wind up getting excited junior people who get stiff-armed on a $50/month purchase.

• Haven’t found PULL? Ok, go find someone with real PULL. Nothing else matters. It doesn’t just figure itself out.

• Having sales calls with people who fit your PULL hypothesis who aren’t pulling? If this happens in 3-5 calls, there’s something wrong with your PULL hypothesis and you need to go back to the drawing board. Don’t get stuck doing this for hundreds of calls.

• Confused doing “research”? Yeah, we all are. Go do the job with the potential customer to find PULL firsthand. And/or ask the Hail Mary question: What would you pay me to solve for you? It would be weird if you actually found PULL just by interviewing people.

• Not enough sales calls? Are you doing outbound? If so, it’s almost certainly a function of your messaging. But for some niches (e.g., non-technical SMBs in middle America), you’re going to have to pick up the phone and cold call.

• Some buy fast, some buy slow? Sign that you don’t quite understand PULL yet. Deal velocity = [time until PULL] + actual sales cycle length. If you have variable deal lengths, it is a function of not understanding when PULL happens or what it is.

Well, turns out maybe this quickstart guide wasn’t so quick. Anyway, start from the top, fill out the PULL framework, and get rolling from there.

And, of course, let me know if there’s anything in here you’d like a full post on!

1. “Right downstream, wrong upstream” applies in many, many places. E.g., in the American constitution, Natural Rights are upstream - we are born with rights, the government doesn’t grant us rights. This upstream concept makes a lot of downstream squabbles irrelevant.