Hey, Rob, it's it's good to see you.
You look a little bit like death warmed over at at the moment
we're back with with girl dad Rob, who's got a one year old
who is bringing home illnesses of all from all over the world.
We're going. We're going to see how long my
voice holds out and do my best. Yeah.
Well, first of all, Congrats early.
Congrats You've you've got your book coming out here in a week
and last chance if anybody wants to pre-order it.
Anything you'd add on on the book coming out?
No, I think many lessons learned about writing and publishing a
book that I hopefully will never be dumb enough to have to use
again because writing a book is not worth doing.
But whatever. Well, I'm, I'm super excited
about it and anybody that's interested can find the link in
in the show notes. It also, it's been kind of nice
for me, as somebody who's never written a book, to get to learn
all these lessons vicariously through watching your suffering
over the last couple of months, unfortunately.
The only thing better than is a writing a book is not good.
Having written a book is good. The only thing better than
having written a book is not having written a book is.
Not having written a book is. Not having the enterprise
entirely so. Amazing well, despite the pain
that's behind the writing and the publishing and everything
like that, excited for the book to be available for the rest of
us to enjoy without having to experience that pain.
Today we've got a reflective post.
So 5 lessons from 50 zero to 1,000,000 journeys.
So Robbie, you took a step back, thought about it.
You know, at this point we've talked about the thousands of
sales calls from startups that you've watched.
You've worked probably with hundreds of of startups at this
point and more than 50 have gone zero to zero to 1,000,000, which
is kind of a crazy statistic like being part of the maybe.
What does it mean to have been part of 50 zero to 1,000,000 AR
journeys? So I've, I've done 3 as a
founder and then I have been a kind of like advisor consultant
thing some, some way, like directly involved almost always
shaping the sales pitch in the sales process for, you know,
these, these other companies for, you know, a variety too.
And it's like been interesting too.
I was thinking through the different kinds.
There's, you know, what's what's in my wheelhouse, which is the
mid market B to BAI start it up. You know, those are, those are
great. They make a ton of sense.
But then I was like, oh, wait, no, there's there's been a
consumer company or two, there's been deep tech companies, you
know, out of like out of Harvard grid thing for professors who
are building startups, which have been kind of interesting.
And, and so, yeah, it's been a variety of different things.
And so I like went back through my list and I was like, Oh,
well, it is. And it's, and it's, there's even
been a product like growth one, there's been some enterprise
one, there's been, there's been some like ones that sell into
public sector. Even have even, I used to kind
of like tap out and say, if you sell a contract that's over
100,000, I'd have no idea how to help you.
Well, cool. There's been a couple that have
sold multi $1,000,000 contracts as well.
And so it's like, all right, so it's been, it's been interesting
to see what's similar and different across all of these
different contexts across all the different industries.
And the, the, I guess we'll get to the similarities, but there
are very, there are some very striking similarities in in all
these cases. Yeah, let's let's jump into that
and we're going to hit 5 lessons.
I really enjoyed reading through these.
I think some of the themes will jump out to folks as familiar,
but also a really helpful reminder of like the core
principles of applying the pull framework of finding demand of,
you know, again, that lesson that's just like burned into my
brain. It's it's easier to build a fast
growing startup and a slow growing startup and in many ways
and for anybody that's you know, it, I think founders that are
focused on that. Is there anybody else that this
is particularly relevant for that you'd flag?
No. I think founders, generally,
anybody who's interested in entrepreneurship, why startups
take off, why people buy things, this will be helpful.
Cool. And before we jump into the five
lessons, do you have, all right, you've had, you've had 50 that
you've worked with. Do you have favorites that jump
out? I do, I do.
So the the two favorites I have were the first ones where it
worked that weren't my startup. So it was startup called MOOC
test which did AIQA automation services.
So like services as software before that was a thing and on
rant who do customer onboarding software?
And both of those were friends, startups who reached out and I
was like, I don't know if I can help you, but sure, let me let
me give it a try. And both of those cases it like
started to work and and it was very cool to see it go from not
working to working. And then I guess the other one
that's been super cool, there's been quite a few who have done
like this, but the one that I've kept closest in touch with is
Jump where they basically, you know, we do, we spin them up a
sales deck and they go zero to raise $100 million within two
years. And it's just like insane how
fast they've grown. I think they've, I think they
put this publicly like 30,000 customers or something like that
in, in two years and just, you know, it's just amazing.
And they still use the same sales deck, the and the the
exact same sales deck, maybe with a couple of, you know,
aesthetic improvements, which I am incapable of, but it, but
it's just cool to see when it's, it's been cool to see just that
it works. Like it's just kind of the first
couple times I was like, I don't know, I don't, I, I can't even
articulate what I think I learned doing this myself a
couple times. So let's see if it works.
And then. And so it was cool to see.
Oh, it actually kind of does does work and then oh wow, it
real life it. This isn't just for companies
that are desperate to get anything to work and get to 00
million after they've suffered forever.
Like this can actually create hyper growth.
Was is been neat too. Yeah, that's those are some of
the ones that I I really enjoy hearing about and interacting
with the founders kind of via you in many cases are the, are
the folks that they have a product and it's growing, but
there's just something that's not quite there.
It's like people are buying, but there may be buying slowly.
And then it's it's often something very subtle that
you'll come in and be like, oh, the the positioning is off by a
little bit or you're targeting this level.
You need to be targeting this level.
Or, or we talked about an example recently, I think on the
podcast that it was like they were targeting 1 industry.
They took the same supply, moved it to a different industry and
it just it hockey stick basically because the demand of
the pool existed there. And so they just showed up into
that space. And like seeing some of those, I
find them very inspiring, as you know, to to see how founders
have taken startups that, yeah, I like their viable and turned
it into something that's really special and just a hard but also
fun, you know, fun to do. Yeah.
And I think, I think one of the one of the other ones, I, I
can't talk about it publicly, but what what we found was they,
they were positioning, it was, it wasn't a big product and
still they were positioning it too big.
And so they had like a 7080% close rate in sales calls, but
the sales calls just went super long and it, it just wasn't.
And, and so we slimmed it down to 1 slide, one feature, 2,
maybe 2 slides, one feature they focused on and, and like, it's
just, it's just a machine now. And it's really, really cool to
see that. That's awesome.
All right, cool. Let's jump into a couple of
these. The five lessons, Rob, I'll read
through the five and then why don't we pick a couple of them
to to jump into? The first lesson is pull is
everything. The second lesson is it almost
always takes at least one unfolding.
We should, we should probably talk about that one because we
haven't talked about unfolding in a little while.
The the third one is the thing that works is almost always
embarrassingly small. The 4th is most founders are
counterproductive at sales, but so are most sales people.
And #5 is everything hinges on figuring out how to get
potential customers to talk to you, which is harder than you
think. Are there are there ones there
Rob that that jump out that are worth double clicking on?
So we have, we can't. So I say everything I every time
I think I talk about poll too much, I realize it don't
emphasize it enough. We, we therefore have to talk
about poll and then we can move on from there.
And I think we can hit all of them because I think we can give
a high level overview. There's there's this thing about
poll where Aristotle has four causes.
I don't ask me to name all of them.
I have material efficient something or something else,
obviously. And I know that there's like the
this I this idea of causality is really, really interesting and
important and not something that we really talk about a lot, but
pull in every sense of the word cause causes a startup to work.
I think it's we're just the philosophy nerds here are going
to just just Take Me Out back and beat me senseless for this.
But I think there's this thing called, Oh God, like the
ontological cause. Is that a thing?
It it probably is. You're not talking with a a
philosophy or a logic nerd, unfortunately, Rob, so I'm not
going to be helpful. Well, there's this idea that
the, the, the light emitted on a wall from a WAMP is not possible
without the existence of the WAMP, right?
Like that. And, and So what we see it when
we look at business, when we look at a business's website,
when we see its metrics, when we see its products, we see the
light reflecting on the wall. We don't see the lamp itself
pull is the lamp that is causing that, that's bringing that into
existence. And so it is this, it is the
thing that makes a startup take off that we are not taught
about, we are not taught to look for.
It is way more precise than pain points or problems.
It's not about value props, but it's what makes value props work
or not work. And basically every startup that
takes off. No, no, not basically every
startup. Every startup that takes off.
Fines pull. You can brute force your way to
a million. They are.
I've seen a bunch of startups do it with close rates of 10 to
20%, and it's kind of all founder twisting arm, all
begging. But you're convincing people to
buy and then you have to convince them to not churn and
it just always stalls out. And so at some point when you're
pushing, a lot of startups push for the first kind of 10
customers to find the one who who pulls, but you always have
to find who pulls, what is pull and how do we get that
repeatable? Like how do we find the
repeatable portion of that and and sell based on it?
That's it's just, I cannot understate that if you don't
know what pull is in your situation, your startup will
only take off by accident. Yeah.
And you know, when you, when I really like that lamp example,
embarrassingly, I thought, OK, what's the lamp while you were
still talking through that? And I was like, the lamp is like
the product of that. Like I meet like my, my default
was to go to the supply. And you know, rather than like
the lamp is actually much closer to what is going on in a
customer's life and many customers life, whether or not
you exist. And then the startup discovers
that and that is what the thing that explodes.
If you know, if folks are new to the to the pull framework or
just a refresher, go back and read.
I go back and re read your some of your original work on pull
every like so often just to refresh on the the elements of
it and such. Anything else you want to hit on
that one or should we go into the the second?
One, yeah. So just the last thing on pole
is like when pole is present, this the cost, it's a very weird
thing, but this makes everything else work, which is they're
already convinced to buy before they know about a startup and
even before the startup exists. Their case study is written,
just missing a few details. Yeah, the start up shows up and
and is basically the last couple of auto complete bullet points
on an already written case study.
And it's just, you know, how exactly did we help them do the
thing they were trying to do? That is, that is and and when
somebody has pulled they, they buy with almost no convincing,
very, very little convincing, which leads to a different
approach to like everything downstream.
What? What do you mean by the case
study is already written? So if you think about a customer
case study, right, the, the important part is the, the first
part where it's like they were struggling with XYZ and tried
ABC and didn't work. But they're trying to accomplish
this. And here's what they what they
wanted their world to look like, what their world needed to look
like, right? Those are all the parts of the
case study except for the bullet point about how you help them
overcome the limitations of their existing options.
It's just that it's like that's the bullet point that's missing.
Yeah, interesting. I really like that framing.
How about we hit the second one? It almost always takes at least
one unfolding. And let me, I'm going to read a
couple lines that you have from this one.
The startups that don't take off cling to their product or vision
in the face of market indifference.
And this is the, you know, the concept that you've embedded
into this one, which I really like, Rob, in their minds,
supply or you can think about product is fixed, but demand is
variable. Embracing pull, on the other
hand, requires realizing that demand is fixed while supply is
variable. Can you take that in whatever
direction you want to go? So I think that's really
insightful. When I see startups not take
off, it is because they have a fixed view of what their product
is, what their vision is, how they want the world to work.
And they are pitching that at people looking for people who
happen to want that. And So what winds up happening
is they have a lot of conversations with a get a lot
of head nods, but no reactions otherwise.
A start up came to me recently and and said that they had to go
through the experience of using the pull framework in their
sales calls to finally get to the point where they had to
accept they were pushing supply onto a world that didn't have
demand so that they could for a moment ignore their supply and
ask. Assuming we had no product,
assume it like just our product is totally irrelevant here.
What's actually on the demand side, who is independent of us
trying to do something and blocked their existing options
aren't good enough such that they will RIP something out of
our hands. And, and that requires you to
say, OK, cool, supply. Let's ignore, let's ignore
supply. Let's totally not focus on
supply and think just about people in their lives and in
what ways they are stuck trying to do things that they're unable
to do. And, and, and like, based on
that, that is a thing that we don't control out there in the
world. We have to find, once we find
that we can design, we can bend the world to design something to
unblock them in that case, which is basically supply is variable,
we figure out what The thing is. And so basically every startup
that that I've seen take off, they always start with this kind
of product vision. They start with this and it, it
always comes from a good place. It's always well researched,
it's always super logical, makes a ton of sense.
And in order to succeed, they almost always have to unfold
based on what they loan on the demand side to, to design
something that fits what actually is on the demand side,
which is either, right, like it's same product but kind of to
a different market or kind of same product to a different
market. It's a slice of the product like
we were talking earlier, or it's something totally new.
I've seen, I don't know, maybe 10, 10, maybe 20.
I don't know if I had to ballpark it say 10 or 20 of the
startups that I kind of like helped zero to annoying,
including including mine, my first one.
Full code base rewrites, but no nothing shared from version 1 to
version that worked. Yeah, control a delete and let's
talk. It's been a while since we've
talked about unfolding. I really like what you wrote
also in in the blog. I won't read here about the
difference between a pivot and unfolding.
We haven't, we haven't talked about unfolding a little while.
Rob, can you help us understand what, what do you mean when you
talk about a product unfolding? And then maybe you know if I can
put a recommendation for your long list and growing list of
topics like dive more in the future and the difference
between pivot and unfolding. But anyways, why don't you help
us understand unfolding real quick?
Yeah, unfolding comes from Christopher Alexander, who is an
architect. And it is about how it's, it's
an evolutionary process and it evolved, we evolved towards
something and rather than just kind of changing directions in a
variety of different ways, changing random variables in a,
in a like it doesn't like, it doesn't make sense to just
change one variable in a complex system because all the other
variables are, are connected. And so you have to evolve a
system like that. And unfolding is the process of
evolving basically what you think pull is and what you offer
on the supply side in a kind of sequential way based on what you
learn that pull this. Yeah.
And is there always, can unfolding be targeting?
Can it be messaging or like what's the yeah what, what
constitutes unfolding? So I I think of it mostly as
like if you if you imagine a case study, you have a
hypothesis of a case study. As you change one line in the
case study, the rest of the case study doesn't make sense anymore
and needs to be rewritten. And so it's just think of it as
creating sequential case studies that are closer and closer to
true pull. Interesting, interesting.
Why don't we hit that? The third one, the thing that
works is almost always embarrassingly small.
You hinted at this with one of your one of your favorites, but.
This is what you're right about that the the initial market
isn't huge and the product this market needs seems tiny.
Talking about the startups that you've seen take off.
When you understand the pull framework and pull theory, you
realize that customers don't want big.
They just want whatever is on their To Do List done.
Why don't you like, are there examples that you would call out
here or what would you say about?
Yeah, why? It's embarrassingly small.
So this is just always the reaction.
So there's a startup that that I was talking to, they're out of
YC, they're selling into insurance.
They had kind of like gone in a bunch of different directions
and they wanted to sell this like platform that can do all
these different workflows. And it turns out that the, the
potential customers, these insurance brokers, like the
product they actually want just does one simple thing.
And they, the startup came to me and this is when it clicked for
me because I keep hearing this like, but it can't just be that,
like, why not? And it, it's this common
reaction that, that, that I see of when you find something that
actually takes off the surface area of it is actually super
small. And it, it can't be super big.
It has to be, it has to be coherent.
It has to fit what's on the demand side.
But you don't want it to be big because the bigger it is, the
more they have to think about, the more features they have to
understand and all of those things and surface area for them
to be able to, one, understand it.
It's very hard for people to understand what the heck we're
talking about. And two, they understand each
piece of it. They have to assess if each
piece fits, the more things they need to have to assess if it's
going to fit or not, but less likely it is to fit.
It's just it's, you know, it's. It would be weird if all 40
features you want to highlight actually fit what they need.
Having a minor internal existential crisis about how big
my product is, right? I think I need to heed your
advice on this one. Why don't, why don't we hit #4
Most founders are counterproductive at sales, but
so are most sales people. First, you're, you're not saying
that they're bad at sales, you're saying they're
counterproductive at sales. Why not?
Why don't you go off on? That and a lot of the things
that we are taught about sales make you worse at sales, make
you more counterproductive at sales because like, yeah, I, I
had AI have a story in the book where I followed a very popular
framework for sales that caused us, that caused the potential
customer that I was pitching to. Again, we followed the
framework. We're not not idiots like me and
my head of sales. We read the book, followed the
framework and it went so poorly that they that this massive
potential customer that could have taken us from 5 to 20
million plus AR and and like months, right?
Like they were so offended that they took our pitch and gave it
to a competitor and asked them to build it.
And they did. And so it was.
And so the, in order to sell effectively consistently, you
have to have a theory about why people buy things.
And the, the theory, if you kind of read underneath our first of
all our intuitions about how sales works, but also if you
read some of the kind of typical sales books you're told to read,
it feels like, and, and it's fine.
They're designed for sales people who are given a territory
and said and given a number and said and, and said, don't worry
about customer satisfaction necessary like hit the number.
And that's OK. In that context, this the kind
of like sales advice is counterproductive but works well
enough that whatever what I've seen is just, you know, this,
all of this presupposes that sales is me convincing you to
buy something. Yeah.
And that doesn't. That's not what causes sales.
We talked about the physics of sales before.
What causes sales is if they have pull and if they have
pulled or trying to do something blocked from doing it.
All we need to do is show up and show them something that
unblocks them or even just talk about something that unblocks
them and help them assess if it fits into what they need.
Yeah, that simple. Which is basically anything more
than doing that is convincing them not to buy for the surface
area reason we just talked about, it's creating additional
surface area. Or it's like lecturing them and
say I don't need to be lectured on the future procurement and
thank you very much. Like I'm, I'm trying to do X.
And so all the anything other than just kind of finding people
who has pull, who are weird not to buy and, and offering them
something that fits and seeing what they do and like.
And, and anything other than that tends to be
counterproductive. And it's just because we have
the wrong theory in our heads about why people buy things.
You know, I went back into my three years ago go emails
looking for a link that I shared with somebody and I came across
one of my early, early decks and it was it was all I I offended
everything about like what you just talked about.
Like there was education, there was market.
This is why you should care. There was a lengthy explanation
that didn't really make sense. There was there was.
So it was all supply focused and and literally nothing that was
remotely close to what's the project that you're trying to
already accomplish and how we help you do that.
Yeah, you write something else really interesting and this in
this section about why or most founders are counterproductive
at sales. You write every startup that
grows very fast narrows their targeting and focuses more on
disqualification than persuasion in their sales process.
When they find someone with pool sales is about helping that
person buy. What do you can you, can you
just quickly Rob, tell us what do you mean?
They focus more on disqualification than
persuasion? I was talking with the founder
who has grown quite fast and, you know, I basically I help
startups kind of get figure it out at 1st.
And then they will often bring in a kind of like sales coach
for as they hire sales people to help, you know, with all this
kind of stuff. And, and what she said really
struck me, which is, yeah, my time is insanely valuable.
I only have so many hours in a day and so I can't waste time
with people who don't have poll and aren't going to buy.
So she spends none of her time persuading in early sales calls.
The early sales calls are just about like, do you actually have
poll right now and want to buy? And, and like, does our benefit?
Do you actually want to buy? If not, great follow up with us
when? When that's the case, there's no
persuasion at all. Once they say yeah no I do have
pull. You seem like a fit then.
Cool. Then it's worth her time to
invest further. But if you if if you actually
believe poll is a real thing and it governs why people, then you
don't want to waste your time with people who don't have poll
and so you're really just trying to get the people your sale.
Your goal is to only talk to people who have poll, and if
they don't have poll, you want to remove them from your
pipeline so you waste even less time with them.
Yeah, I bet our listener can think of a customer, maybe it's
current, maybe it's past one who they spent way too much time on.
I can think of like 10 right now where it should have been like,
wow, I wish I could have taken those hours and, and put them
into a much more valuable search for people that were easier, who
are there was they already had demand.
They didn't require commencing. All right, let's get to #5 real
quick. And then, and then we can, we
can wrap everything #5 everything hinges on figuring
out how to get potential customers to talk to you, which
is harder than you think. What is going on like this?
I want you to just talk about this for a second and also
answer why does this even need to be mentioned?
Which like it it does, I know it does, like I've made this
mistake, but why? Why is this something that we
even have to bring up? So I've just been talking to
startups recently and I've been comparing the startups that take
off with the ones that don't and, or the ones that just like
take forever to get there. And so the ones that just take
forever to get there are the ones that don't meet with many
people or they don't want. And like that's, that's just the
first bottleneck and it's, you know, starting with one and
they're like having five sales calls a month.
It's like, OK, I know startups that are having five sales calls
a day and, and learning from those.
And if you just like, imagine you learn one important thing
and each group of five sales calls, the the difference in
learning velocity is just, it's just obvious if you're having
more sales calls in a given day. And so like that's it's just if
you think of, if you think of the case study factory, like the
first bottleneck is pipeline. And so yeah, like if you don't
have enough conversation and then the the layer on top of
that, which is like whenever I talk to a startup in that
situation, I feel like it's a 5 alarm fire crisis.
Like I'd feel, I'd feel awful, anxious, like horrible, not have
it going a couple days without a sales call.
Like that would just be that to me, would make me just not feel
good and what I said. For the listener that you do
feel that way, then on on the receiving end of the DMS,
whatever that's happened, yeah. And it's, you should feel
paranoid when that's not happening.
Like it, it doesn't make sense not to feel that way.
And the sense that I, and so I feel that way, but I don't feel
like every founder feels that way.
And, and, and then, you know, I just like, I'll push on it and
be like, OK, So what does your calendar look like?
And it's a bunch of nonsense. And, and, and so if you ask what
does my calendar say about my philosophy?
It's like, it's often like, I think I'm going to take off even
if I don't spend any time trying to get customers made with me or
even if I outsource lead gem to somebody.
And it's just like, that's not, that's not going to happen.
And so, and so, yeah, it's it, you know, winds up being how
fast can you find pull, how fast can you find poll?
And then once you find poll, how fast can you debug the system so
that you're just stacking new customers And as as compressed a
way possible, condensing your sales process, kind of filling
your calendar with with meetings that turn into a compressed sale
with a very high conversion rate, then handing that off and
then replicating and then scaling that.
Like that's that's the whole thing.
And so the main thing I just see is that people just don't the,
the people don't treat that like it's the only thing like their
life depends on that. Yeah, yeah.
Rob, you also hit some bonus things specific to why the
prevailing, you know, pop advice basically for sales and how
startups work are wrong, which includes discovery interviews,
unpaid design partnerships, big visions and plans which are
contradictory to several of the things that you wrote earlier in
the blog. Anything else you would add here
Rob, before we before we wrap? So I would say the most of
hopefully most of what I talked to is like pretty practical and
straightforward. It's just find people who want
to buy from you and and sell them what they want to buy and
like figure out everything else out along the way.
That's always how startups have have worked.
And I feel like we have, I don't want to say over
intellectualized it, but we have like wrongly intellectualized it
or incorrectly intellectualized it into a set of theories and
playbooks and things that basically prevent you from doing
that, that like actually prevent you from doing the obvious
things and make you feel like you shouldn't be doing them.
And so, yeah, I don't know. It's a it is interesting to see
how things can be make total logical sense, be totally
reasonable, even be backed by experimental data and be wrong.
It makes you, it makes you. That's my broader thinking about
the world. But but yeah, that's that's kind
of my reflection on everything that I've been taught about
entrepreneurship. Well, why don't we wrap around
here any actions that founders should take in the meantime?
Go sell. I don't.
Know get, get 5 calls, 5 calls a day or five calls a week and,
and figure it out. We'll, we'll leave the, the link
to Rob sub SAC and the show notes as as well as links to
pre-order your book or order your book.
It'll be out here shortly. And then you've also got a
course that if folks want a deeper dive, basically you've
got a publicly available, of course that folks can can buy.
And it's, it's very similar to your PMF camps that you've done
in the past, like a lot of really great content there.
If there's nothing else to add, Rob, why don't we call it a day?
Cool, I'm gonna crawl up in a ball and die.
All right, we'll see everybody next week maybe.