Rob SnyderFounder & CEO

Founders routinely assume that market demand can be manufactured through persuasive sales pitches, polished marketing copy, or endless feature development. In reality, customer pull is discovered rather than created. You cannot convince an indifferent prospect to care about an abstract problem; you must search for a coiled spring of pent-up urgency where the customer is already actively looking for a way out of an untenable situation.

The PULL acronym breaks down into four sequential components: Project, Unavoidable, List of options, and Limitations. First, there must be a concrete project currently on someone's active to-do list. Second, that project must carry an unavoidable deadline or severe penalty for inaction. Third, the buyer has an existing list of workarounds they are using. Fourth, those options have severe limitations that leave the buyer stuck and eager for an immediate alternative.

Companies do not buy software; individuals with specific job responsibilities and personal reputations do. If you say you are selling to a large enterprise like SpaceX, you will fail because the company itself has no single brain or unified priority. You must identify the specific human being, such as the head of legal compliance, who personally owns an urgent deliverable and is blocked from completing it.

Design partnerships often create a dangerous illusion of progress while delaying genuine market validation. Design partners are typically polite industry acquaintances who agree to weekly calls because they enjoy discussing ideas, but they have no real skin in the game. They request bespoke features that distract you from building a repeatable product, and when it comes time to pay, they vanish because they never had unavoidable pull.

Instead of spending six months engineering software, create two simple presentation slides. The first slide articulates the exact high-stakes project the customer is attempting to execute, along with the brutal limitations of their current tools. The second slide describes your proposed workflow solution and its concrete deliverable. If the prospect leans forward and asks how quickly they can get started, you have pull; if they offer polite intellectual compliments, you do not.

When a discovery call goes cold and you realize the customer has no interest in your pitch, throw the Hail Mary question: Is there anything currently on your to-do list that you would pay me right now to solve? This sudden pivot strips away the scripted dynamic and invites radical candor. Often, the prospect will immediately describe a painful, unglamorous problem that reveals the exact direction for a high-conviction company pivot.

Structure the conversation around uncovering the customer's existing behavior rather than presenting your product. Spend the first twenty minutes diagnosing their current projects, deadlines, and workaround tools. If you present your solution and they do not ask about pricing, deployment timelines, or implementation logistics, they are merely being polite. True buying intent looks like someone trying to pull the product out of your hands.

Not necessarily. The ten times better rule applies primarily when you are asking customers to replace an entrenched system that already works reasonably well. However, if a customer is facing an unavoidable project deadline and their current options completely fail to deliver the required output, your product only needs to be the first viable solution that actually gets the job done on time.

Price your product based on the magnitude of the customer's unavoidable risk rather than the cost of your cloud hosting or development hours. When a buyer has an urgent corporate initiative with hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake, a low-cost tool signals amateur quality and introduces perceived risk. Pricing should reflect the economic value of unblocking the project immediately.

Goblin mode is an intense operational posture where a founder strips away all vanity distractions—such as networking events, redesigning websites, or tweaking pitch decks—and focuses exclusively on running rapid, unglamorous demand experiments. You reach out directly to dozens of prospects every single day, test raw hypotheses, and iterate furiously until you hit an undeniable pulse of customer pull.

Automated self-serve onboarding is a trap for nascent startups. When you send new signups a login link and hope for the best, you miss the critical moments where users get confused and abandon your tool. Founders should manually onboard their first twenty customers personally, observing every point of friction and ensuring the customer achieves their breakthrough aha moment within the first forty-eight hours.

Founders often view customer cancellations as an emotional failure and look away, but churn is your most valuable diagnostic mirror. When a customer churns, conduct a rigorous post-mortem to determine whether the problem was a product defect or improper qualification. More often than not, churn reveals that the user never had an unavoidable project in the first place, allowing you to tighten your ideal customer profile.

A case study factory is the systematic process of turning a single successful customer engagement into an undeniable sales asset. Instead of chasing disparate industries, you document the exact baseline metrics, implementation steps, and quantifiable ROI achieved by your first happy customer. You then distribute that exact blueprint to twenty identical peers who share the same unavoidable project, creating effortless reference-driven sales.

Internal corporate product leaders face the same traps as startup founders by building tools that colleagues politely praise but never adopt. To succeed inside an enterprise, internal teams must treat business unit leaders as paying clients, identifying their unavoidable quarterly mandates and building solutions that directly resolve their operational bottlenecks rather than mandating top-down software compliance.