Make your product irresistible: Rob Snyder on the PULL framework

**Rob Snyder** (0:00)
How do you actually sell in a way that one, for somebody like me or somebody who's not a natural salesperson, feels natural? And two, how do you sell in a way that helps you figure out what pull is and if pull is real? People have pain points and problems, and there are a lot of solutions that offer a lot of value, and by default, they don't do anything about it. Somebody will rip something out of your hands as long as it unblocks them. When it's not present, it would be weird if they bought from you. Not impossible, but it would be weird.

**Yaniv Bernstein** (0:34)
You don't want to build a business hoping that people will make weird decisions.

**Rob Snyder** (0:38)
No, no, no, no. Like that was my dating life before I met my wife, but it's not.
You're listening to The Startup Podcast.

**Yaniv Bernstein** (0:48)
This is an educational episode. Hi, I'm Yaniv Bernstein.

**Rob Snyder** (0:53)
Hi, I'm Rob Snyder.

**Yaniv Bernstein** (0:55)
Now, you know the feeling. You do everything the books tell you. You interview your customers. You ship the MVP. You run the lean experiments. You've read all the famous books, Jobs to be Done, The Lean Startup, Disruption and still nobody buys. Today's guest thinks he knows why, and his answer is perhaps a bit surprising. He says a lot of the advice we've all absorbed is quietly keeping founders stuck, and the thing that actually works sounds backwards. Stop researching what people want and start trying to sell it to them. He spent a decade with hundreds of founders building the case for it. Can't wait to get into this discussion right after the break.
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Welcome back. My guest today is Rob Snyder, a serial founder and a fellow at Harvard Innovation Labs, where he runs a product market fit bootcamp for early stage founders. He's a recovering McKinsey consultant, a Harvard Business School grad, and an operating partner on the venture side. His own founder story is the one that started all this. He spent years doing everything right and was unable to sell a thing. The product that finally worked was an ugly spreadsheet with the three slide deck and no website and it grew to several million dollars in revenue. The part that bugged Rob was that he couldn't explain why, what was the difference? He spent years since turning that into a theory in his new book The Power of PULL, all of which of course makes Rob the perfect person to work out what demand actually is. Rob, welcome to The Startup Podcast.

**Rob Snyder** (3:03)
So excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Yaniv Bernstein** (3:05)
So as I said in the intro, you argue that founders aren't stuck because they're lazy or stupid or not following the advice that they're getting. They're stuck because they've misunderstood two key things and they're both about demand. How to find it and then how to serve it. Walk me through both.

**Rob Snyder** (3:24)
So demand is this kind of tricky thing. We think it means wanting your product. And so as a founder, what I did is I went and did a bunch of customer research because I was looking for pain points and problems that would signal that they want my product.
Turns out people can have pain points and problems, and I can build a solution that solves them and offers a ton of value, and they cannot buy it. And in fact, by default, they won't buy it because people have pain points and problems. And there are a lot of solutions that offer a lot of value.
And by default, they don't do anything about it. They can keep going with their pain points kind of forever. Life, in a way, is a series of pain points and problems. We really don't do anything about most of the time. And so the question is, what is demand? When people buy things, why do they buy them? That's where my rabbit hole kind of went very, very deep on this topic. What I came to is that demand is not wanting supply. Demand is not wanting a product. Nobody has ever or will ever want Salesforce or an ERP. Yet they buy those things. And so we have to think of demand as something that's totally separate out there that causes somebody to pull supply into their world if it fits what they're doing. So the question is, okay, what actually is demand if it's not pain points or problems? Well, the way that I've found to think about demand close to jobs to be done is not quite. It's something they're trying to do on their to-do list.