Hey, Rob, welcome back just the two of us this week.
Yep and also I hit my 400 LB deadlift.
I know you were. Wondering I I know our our
listener was wondering that, so thanks for clarifying that I.
Wanted to get that up front just to be sure that everyone,
everyone was well aware of that. Hello, You're also looking like
kind of like a weightlifter boxer with the with the hoodie
on right now, so. Yeah, I recognize it.
I realize that like everything about me blends into my
background and so my camera is like working overtime.
Yeah. That's hilarious.
And hey, maybe before we get
into that. So this week we're talking about
buying is weird and rare, which I think it's like a gut punch to
anybody who's in in shoes similar to my interviews, like
wrestling with with early sales. But before that, you dropped a
three hour voice over for your deck.
Can you just like I, we published it on YouTube.
I just want to make sure folks saw it.
Anything you want to add on that one?
Yeah, I don't know why I keep doing this to myself, which is
to say I I don't know why I did that.
I don't know why I made that whole deck.
I don't. It's I just can't not do these
things and like the next thing I see coming at me is I'm going to
write a textbook at some point. Like I, I just, I feel that
coming and it's, I don't want to do it, but I'm going to do.
And so yeah, I recorded a three hour lecture walking through the
160 slides in the deck and we just kind of put it on YouTube
and hope that it is helpful. I it is kind of a preview of the
book that's coming out in July now.
So watch the lecture or pre-order the book.
We're also working on some way to do a if you pre-order the
book, you can join some exclusive events with me to see
my radiant personality in Q and AI know that's don't drop
everything you're doing now. But but yeah, I don't know.
It's, it's, it's, I'm still trying to figure this thing out.
And this is another step. It is like this is another step
on the path. It will be useful to you.
It is incomplete, but it is far more complete than anything else
I've read or or seen on this topic.
And I think today's episode that we're going to be talking about
is a really, really critical component of it, too.
Yeah, yeah, and maybe a couple use cases.
One, if you're just with your partner on a Friday night here
you've you've completed Netflix and you you wanna put on a real
thriller. You've got a lecture about the
the the power pole. But you know, if for folks that
may have read through the deck earlier and if there was a
section that really jumped out and you're like, oh, I think
I've, you know, I think I'm miss diagnosing poor.
I'm misunderstanding what customers are saying to me or
the supply I present is wrong or something.
You know, some part of that original presentation.
I'd say like, pull this up. You can even skip to that part
of it and just hear Rob with his his voice over because the
slides are great. I love that presentation.
I've read it twice now, but going through and watching your
lecture there elucidated some of the concepts that I was, my
takeaways were different from the way that you were talking
about it. And so it can be a it can be,
yeah, just a, it's a, it's a resource that's out there.
I think 2 weeks ago we did like a short, like a short episode,
just saying like, go check it out.
It's related to that same presentation.
I think it's, I think it's called Notes on the Physics of
Startup. So we'll, we'll put that link in
the show notes. But Rob, if there's nothing else
we can, we can jump into into this week's.
So this week we're we're going to talk about buying is weird
and rare probability blindness and its implications.
Essentially, it's a reality check for anybody that's
thinking about products. And it is honestly like the post
that every pre product founder should read because it it checks
the instinct to be optimistic and unreasonably optimistic.
And that optimism can lead to months or years or, you know,
just in in Cal people suffering. So Rob, why don't we get a
little bit of context from your from your end?
Why is this on your mind? And who's this one for?
Yeah. So this one, this one's
interesting. It's something that I was
developing while making the slide deck and it's this.
I just keep coming back to this question of why is it so hard to
take off? Like what specifically is so
difficult about this and where are we?
Where do we keep getting stuck in it?
This could be pre product. I've even seen this with
companies that are stuck 1 to 3 to 5 million in revenue and just
not growing super fast. And I found that there's this
underlying assumption, right? Like the first, the first
assumption that we we really tackled like a year ago now was
the push theory of the thing that causes somebody to buy is
me convincing them to buy. And that's not the case.
Well, the second kind of fundamental assumption here is
that buying is a common and normal thing.
And this assumption, like I had been, I yeah, it's just like
it's a thing that once you kind of do this mental exercise of
the probability of buying a specific product that is
relevant to you, that you start to be a lot more skeptical and
test more and test. And, and specifically like it's
going to tighten your ICP. It's going to tighten your like
what you're selling, It's going to it's going to cut off a lot
of paths where people could buy it could benefit them, It could
it's going to cut off a lot of the like could work paths that
probably won't work. But if you believe the
probabilities are kind of at a different order of magnitude
than they are, you're going to be inclined to go down the could
work direction versus this is saying, given these
probabilities, the things that could work won't by default.
And there's only the small sliver of things that where it
would be weird if they didn't work and they they kind of fit
this shape. Yeah, why don't we?
Do you want to hit some of those probabilities real, real quick?
You you out by them and they are.
Yeah, sobering is like the the word that I would, I would say
when when reading through it. Yeah.
So let me also like I didn't put this in the post, but I've been
thinking about it, which is after you buy a product, let's
just say you you buy a product or a service, right there is
there is logic that you can apply to that where it's like,
Oh yeah, he bought that product to solve a problem.
He brought that product to get value.
And then you can say, OK, in general he buys products to
solve problems. In general he buys products to
get value and and kind of you can apply all these different
lenses to it and that will all make sense.
But what we don't see when we're looking from that perspective is
how many other products or services he could have bought,
but did it in that situation in in that particular.
And the numbers here are insane. So if we just think like how
many products or services are relevant to you right now or at
any what today, this week, this month of this year, the number
and and we could call we call relevance is like it.
People wouldn't look at you weird for buying them, right?
They they would. It would make sense if you
bought them. Yeah.
Solve problem, fix pain point. They give you some sort of
value. You want them like all of these
traditional things. OK, if you think what's the
universe of products and services where it would make
sense after the fact if I bought them, the number is not ten, the
number is not 100, it's not 1000.
It's it's not 10,000. It is almost certainly in the
millions and like just the crazy stats they're they're like, I
don't know, I just I did some like Yolo Googling.
I don't know that these stats are real, but they're.
Roughly, we're about to see some consultant math that's that's
coming out here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I have a three bullet point slide for this one.
But like, Amazon has hundreds of millions of skews apparently.
OK, if that's off by a factor of 10, cool.
Doesn't matter. That's still a lot of skews,
most of which it would not be weird if you bought them.
Like, assuming you bought them, it wouldn't be.
It wouldn't be crazy. There are 4 million books
published every year. That's so just same number.
Isn't it crazy? It's just absurd.
Every time you walk into the grocery store, there are like
30,000 skews in there that you that it.
It wouldn't be weird if you walked up like some, yes, some
subset of them If you walk through the checkout line person
give you a look, but most of them, it wouldn't be crazy if
you bought them. They're 20 million services
firms in the US, just in the US And like most of those, it
wouldn't be weird if you bought from it.
Yeah. And so like those stats should
just. I think in what one that jumped
out to me was like I think you said it was, was it 24,000
software solutions for like was it teaming or like workforce
management or something like that, like there's.
Productivity, software productivity.
Yeah, Thousands and thousands of software products out there.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that number isn't going
down. Yeah, at the moment, like even
in the software space, there are 10s of thousands.
And they're right, like. And so if you look at it that
way, the like, like even if you're a crazy person just
buying things every second of the day, you're, you're going to
buy the smallest fraction of products that it wouldn't be
weird if you bought. Them, yeah.
You're buying the smallest fraction.
So that's where I'm going to say buying is super weird and rare.
And if you recognize just how weird it is for someone to buy
something, then you're going to behave differently.
But if you think that buying is a very common thing.
Yeah. You're going to make some pretty
serious intellectual errors like like approach thinking errors
that will cause a lot of downstream problems.
Let's let's hit a couple of those.
One is you and I'll, I'll rehear from a couple of these building
the wrong products. When we assume that buying is
not weird and rare, we built things that people would be
weird to buy. Why give give us the, you know,
your take on why that happens and what it looks like when that
happens. Yeah, So what we'll often see is
just like I've done this enough times that it's awful and, and,
and this, this explains it. So you will talk to people and
you'll do discovery interviews or you'll do whatever, right?
And you will find, oh, that's a huge problem.
And you do the translation in your head from huge problem,
huge pain point to. Therefore I will buy it.
Yeah. And you build a solution to that
problem or pain point. But what you don't realize when
you're doing that is that they're like the list of huge
problems and pain points that they're not doing anything about
and will never do anything about is massive.
And so we're just not. So by focusing on these things
that are plausible explanations for why people bought after they
bought a thing, but they don't predict a purchase.
Given the number of things that could be purchased, it would be
weird if focusing on a big prop, building a solution to a big
problem actually led to a purchase.
And So what happens is we wind up going down this path,
building something, people getting like people nodding and
saying, yeah, that's it. That's totally, you totally get
it. And then them not buying and us
not understanding why. And it's like, why did we ever
assume they would buy? Yeah, it's one of the things I
wish I could like Take Me Out of my out of my body or something
like some weird thing and like being on be on the other side
and like observe what I'm pitching or the product that the
web thinking about the product. And like, even after I had AI
had a call 2 days ago and after the call, I was like, oh, like
so excited about it. And you know, we'll see I this
one might sell. I'm not not really sure.
And I was like, Robert, you're, you are like choosing to be
optimistic about the likelihood that this person is going to buy
this product. And like, don't mistake the
enthusiasm that you're hearing for it for meeting an actual
like, yeah, project that they are, they're trying and that
they're blocked from from accomplishing.
And so it's just like the the default weirdly, I don't know,
like maybe somebody can help me, Rob that you continually help me
with this. But there's got it.
Like there's something in our brain that's like, it just
chooses optimism. Maybe it's not.
Maybe that's just like you write about this at the start.
Maybe that's why we're founders of things.
It's like there's this innate optimism that's required.
It's a selection bias for human beings or for for founders.
But yeah, it it like shows up not just at the pre products,
but also like after every sale and eventually when you, you
know, maybe this was your experience, Rob, But after
running into and being confused by enough times where it was
like, I think they're going to buy, but they don't like it
starts to set in that, OK, something's like that.
The pain point, like all these other things that are popularly
held, aren't actually indicative or predictive of what's going to
work. Yeah, yeah.
I think it's so I think the experience here is roughly
similar and and what I've what I've actually been working on is
like this. We've been testing this kind of
Claude skill that I've been creating that's supposed to test
for pull components and give you give you your, you know how you
did on the call and was there a pull there.
And so that's, that's been fun to do, but it's like maybe there
is just some part of this of I want it.
I here's how I want the world to work, and therefore I'm going to
see the world that way. Yeah.
That could just be part of it and and you might have to just
get punched in the face enough times by that not working and
you haven't do the loop of OK, I'm going to try something else
that I'm sure is going to work and then it doesn't work.
And you just have to do that enough times to say, OK, I
actually don't like I've had the the optimism beaten out of me
now and I just want to do something that works.
And so how do I think about something that works that that
could be the case. I my hope my is probably a dumb
hope. This is how I want.
This is my dumb optimism is that if you like I I just don't think
we understand the shape of reality.
Yeah. And I don't think
entrepreneurship education has done a good job explaining this.
I think if you actually understand how weird and rare it
is for somebody to buy a product that is relevant to them, you're
going to, like, think a little differently.
Yeah, it's like it's in in the post and it's just right.
Like your likelihood of buying a relevant product in a given year
is roughly on the order of you being struck by lightning in a
given year. Yeah.
And so it's like if if you just embrace that and say, OK, that's
weird. Yeah, I need to now look, even
if I build something that's relevant, even if I focus on a
problem da da, da, da, da like that, it's still going to be
weird if they buy from me. Given that, I need to approach
this differently and think about the conditions under which
somebody would be weird not to buy, look for those, and then
try to convince them not to buy from me and see if they fight.
What does? What does that mean?
Yeah, yeah. So this is a, this is a post I'm
working on for the future, but it's like what you talked about,
what I saw, what I've seen in some of your calls.
Here we. Here we go.
Is you ask like positive
questions and everyone asks like positive questions.
Would this be of benefit to you? Yeah, It's like, yes, of course,
here's how this would be of benefit to me.
But it's like there's infinite other things that could be of
benefit to you that you're not doing.
Yeah. And so you have to flip the
question and basically say, could you just do nothing here?
Like, yeah, they have to convince you that they have
pulled. Yeah, I like that.
I'm going to, I'm going to start using that immediately because
I, I totally agree. I feel like I lead the witness a
little bit and they're trying to be nice with, you know, our our
American personalities. The I want to hit another one
that that that you hit. So we talked about you're
building the wrong product, also misdiagnosing why our products
aren't aren't working. And I'm going to read this real
quick and then Rob jump in and and you know, rage rant or
something about it. But because we think they should
buy with the implicit assumption that buying is not weird or
rare, we misdiagnose what's happening in this situation.
Usually we're bad. Usually we think we're bad at
sales or our product isn't good enough.
All right, go off on why, why those are wrong.
Yeah. So, OK, so by default, if
somebody doesn't buy something, it doesn't mean your product
wasn't valuable enough. It doesn't mean you weren't good
at sales. It almost always means they
weren't prioritizing something relevant because there are
infinite things they could prioritize.
They were in a situation where they could not prioritize this
thing and oh like, or if they're prioritizing something relevant,
their existing options are good enough.
Like if those two things are not true, they would be weird to buy
your product. And it's it's no amount of
changing your product, no amount of sales skills and techniques
will change this. Yeah, sure.
If you get, if you get 10X better at sales, you might
convert 5 percent, 10% of people who aren't in the the pull
situation. You're not going to convert all
of them. And in fact, if you get really
good at sales, what you're going to realize is you're selling to
the wrong kind of person in the wrong kind of situation, usually
with the wrong kind of description of a thing.
But if you think buying is a common thing, because obviously
Anthropic's selling a ton, right?
A lot of people are like people. It seems like people are buying
a lot of things. So buying, is it this common
thing? They're just not buying my
product. And so it must be something
about me or something about my product, which is not the case
given that there are infinite things, infinite other things
they are also not buying. Yeah, totally.
I maybe that that resonates with listener and and in some ways
definitely resonates with with mine like that.
And for me like in the in the marketing space, it's like when
it when I reframe from like my product is perfect for this
company to this marketing agency or this CPG brand has a trillion
options for ways to reach consumers.
What what would it would be bizarre if if like they went
with ours like that, you know, that actually is kind of
liberating and in some sense, like overwhelming in one sense,
liberating in the sense that, oh, OK, like what I have is not
a personal problem. It's like it's an understanding
of what they're trying to accomplish problem and.
And like in your case, I remember I was just watching one
of your calls like earlier, and the person was like, yeah, I'd
never respond to cold outreach. This is the first cold outreach
I've responded to in like 7 years.
Yeah. And the reason I responded is
because we're in a situation, yeah, where we're trying to find
for one of our brands some non traditional ways to reach
families. Yeah.
And we haven't found good options for that.
And so like in that situation, you just show up and say hi and
they're like, great, what's next, right?
Yeah, exactly. And even in that case, even
satisfying that it's, there's still an element of weirdness
too. If they act, if it actually like
ended up being like I, there's a, there's a step there because
she's not the buyer, it's that she's working with the buyer.
And so there's like a OK, I, I see the pool on your end.
How do I make it so that it's like actually not just achieving
you, it's like achieving like the brand needs helping you
communicate that and. OK.
And then the then the thing here is in that situation, your job
is not to sell, your job is not to it is like kind of to help
them buy. But when they're in a situation
like this, your job is really to not convince them not to buy.
It's like the, the there is just like this massive gulf between
what we think sales is, which is convincing them to buy, which
which is what you do when you don't have product market fit,
when you haven't found pull to when you have found pull the
job. And this is the reason why like
so many, if you watch sales calls of companies with extreme
product market fit, they could do anything in those sales calls
and people will buy stuff. And it's basically like we, they
had such strong pull, AKA they were trying to do something and
their existing options just didn't work to such an extent
that they, although it seems like the seller tried to
convince them not to buy, they were unable to convince them not
to. And so the kind of just entirety
like all the tactics, all the like, just the physics of the
situation totally changed. And that's that's kind of where
we talk about from push to pull. That's fascinating.
I love it and I'm actually kind of happy you brought it and that
that example. That's a good reminder that if
there is pull, you can dissuade somebody from from it if you're
if you're stupid enough or like a didn't go like me.
Rob, let's keep this one. Try to keep this one maybe
brief. Is there what are the takeaways
for you know, founders that you know, what should they do as a
result of like this insight? Yeah, I'd say two things.
One is just like think about go on a bike ride, lift some
weights, do do something while thinking about how unlikely it
is for somebody to buy your product even if it's relevant to
them. And then ask yourself the
question, OK, given that, who would be weird not to buy our
product and define your ICP that way?
Then go find them and see if you are right.
Yeah, I love it that that's all the and and lifting weights you
they can also at the same time think about how you you hit 400
on your squatter deadlift or. Deadline like that, if I have
400 on squat, I don't know, I, I, I don't know what would be
different, but I'd be able. To talk about it on the podcast.
As well. I'll let you know, Well, you
know, if we keep doing this podcast for the next 10 years,
maybe. Awesome.
Again, the the sub stack is called buying is weird and rare.
Drop your comment if you've got feedback on on this one or if
there's things that come to mind or things you want to challenge
Rob on, please drop it in the either the sub stack or on the
YouTube or or Spotify. Anything else, Rob, before we
let folks go? Nope.
Awesome. All right, we'll catch everybody
next week.