The Physics of Startups
Most 0-to-1 and product-market fit advice is a pile of things that worked for someone, once. This show is built on causal relationships, not tactics.
Rob Snyder has helped 50+ startups go from $0 to $1M ARR. He's the creator of the PULL framework and author of "The Power of PULL" which explains why customers buy and why some startups scale and others stall.
For VC-backed and bootstrapping founders who are tired of advice that sounds smart but doesn't work.
More about Rob: https://www.robsnyder.org
The Physics of Startups
What happens after PMF?
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Rob's buddy found PMF a few months ago and went from ~bankrupt to more than $1M ARR in less than three months. What happens in that case?
Rob and RC discuss what changed to find PMF, and what the experience is post-PMF. Also, what do you do as a founder - where do you focus? And how does your approach pre-PMF affect your post-PMF life? (tl;dr: a lot)
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Post: The reward is harder work
Links
- Rob's Substack: The Physics of Startups
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Hey Rob. Uh here we are with emergency emergency Friday recording. If anybody was uh hopefully we haven't just ruined everybody's Friday.
SPEAKER_00By everybody I mean listener or three listeners, whatever the word three people were waiting for this podcast and they're like, what the heck is going on? I'd be kind of uh my whole Friday is ruined.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, anyways, we had a plan. We recorded something and then we scratched it. And uh and Rob put together uh um an interesting, I would say we're back in like this almost the spiritual realm of entrepreneurship uh with this one. But why don't you uh uh the the post is called The Reward is Harder Work if you think pre-PMF ain't easy. Um Rob, why don't you uh give us the context on this one?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so this this is actually something that I've been thinking about for a while. Specifically as I keep lifting heavier and heavier weights and just not looking forward to it and not, and then I just have the voice in the back of my head, which is which is the the trainer's voice, Mark Ripitto, who's just like, you have to do the fifth rep. You must do the fifth, and so I just have that in the back of my head, like, all right, well, that that's terrible. Um, and so that that's been in the back of my mind, and it's a super, it's a it's the the process of lifting increasingly awful weights has just we talked about this last year about the simple thing about hard things, um, or the hard thing about simple things or something like that. Um, and it's it's just been this like interesting thing of just how much of what we need to do is actually quite simple. And it is exceptionally difficult to do. And so what I observe is like we we create a lot of uh we create a lot of useless work to avoid doing the simple hard things, uh and then once stuff starts working, we kind of think it's going to get easier. And it doesn't. And I it was really it like came I f I it came to a head this week when I was at breakfast with a with a founder friend who who we both know, and he um he's been through the program, he's gone through it, he'd like been trying to push an HR tool onto a market that didn't care, and he'd just been grinding it out for years on this, and then kind of randomly in February, things turn he like he just kind of found pole in an adjacent space with kind of the same product, but kind of a different product. And he's gone from from like bootstrapped, was like he's like drained his retirement account with like very little revenue to you know like a million run rate now, like 90 days later or whatever. And so the growth had been awesome. But but I was like, okay, cool. And I I knew what the answer was gonna be. Um but but I was like, but I asked him, was it the bags under his eyes, or like what told you what that yeah? Uh it was so I knew what the answer was gonna be because I know the answer to this question. Uh uh, and it's it's always the same answer. But I was like, oh yeah, it's uh I'm sure it's a lot easier now, isn't it? And he was like, no, it's so much worse than before. And I thought it was bad then. And so like we we talked about this, and I was like, you know what? Given that I'm writing this on a plane last minute, why not just write about this?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And um, let's let's hit two of those things. Um one, what happened? Uh how did uh for in case the listener is in the the February version or the January version of that startup where it's like, I don't know, there's like some revenue or something like that. You you mentioned he found an adjacent vertical or an adjacent adjacent, is it like a category or a sector or something like that? Like how did he how did he take a product that wasn't really working? And then what changed? Like how did he find the pool that led him to take off?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so it was um just from a couple of anecdotes. So one of his like kind of customers, one of his customers had bought and was using it, but they weren't, they they like, they kind of needed something slightly different. They liked it, they were really valid, and he was trying to sell it to other people, but it wasn't quite right. Um, and then he got into a conversation with uh, you know, like a CHRO of a of a uh, I think it was like a plumbing or a HVAC company, who was like, oh no, you're thinking about it totally wrong. It's not about X, it's about Y. And then he was he was also trying to sell outside of plumbing and HVAC into you know all sorts of HR departments in different places. And is it like a recruiting tool, hiring tool? Um, and in all of those other places, they didn't re they weren't like structurally understaffed. In plumbing and HVAC, they are structurally understaffed. So in if you if you sell anywhere else, there's like a significant chance that they were kind of okay as is with what they were doing. In the plumbing HVAC space, they were definitely not okay with what they were doing, but they didn't have good enough options. And so, so there he had the fit, but he was just until he talked with that CHRO and got slapped basically into like it's not X, it's actually Y. Yeah. Like until then, it just didn't work. It it kind of like it was it was all grinding. It was, you know, some people weren't prioritizing it, others were prioritizing X, and he was pitching Y, and so it wasn't landing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Is there is there a generalizable lesson about that in terms of the either the way he had the conversation or the outreach and how specific the outreach is, or something like that? Like, what do you take away from that?
SPEAKER_01So um I take a so I take away that you have to find somebody who's going to tell you the truth. And so most of the way that we sell and approach sales and approach sales conversations, they don't feel comfortable telling you the truth. And so you have to find somebody who's willing to tell you the truth, what the real project is, what they're really trying to do, and and that person actually has to have pull. Because someone anyone else who tells you the truth, it's just, yeah, I don't have any, I don't have pull.
SPEAKER_02Which is useful, but it's not gonna, it's not gonna cause you to take off. Yeah. Yeah. Um, let's hit the transition. So you wrote about the reward is harder work. What is it? Why does it get harder? Like as somebody that hasn't gone to one million ARR in in 90 days, what what happens?
SPEAKER_01Like, what's the It's just like you you go from a uh you go from where like only one thing matters, and that thing is existential and terrifying, to where like a bunch of things feel like they matter. You have to keep customers happy, you have a bunch of feature requests you have to understand, you have to bring on new team members, you have to figure out, oh crap, do we need a fundraise now? And you gotta probably talk to VCs, which is always fun. And then you gotta do you just like all like all of these, and there's like a bunch of fires, and on top of that, you have that fear that, like, oh gosh, we could go we could go back to zero, or I could kick a load-bearing wall and this could all come grumbling down. And so, like, all of that is happening, and it's and it's compounded by like, oh, I could lose a custom, I could do that, right? Like this something could break here. And so there's all of these reasons why it just gets harder. The it goes from there being an obvious constraint to the constraint isn't necessarily super obvious and could be a bunch of different things, and you could approach it a bunch of different ways. And so, uh yeah, and it basically it's it is universally the experience of at least of like like people like us, where when it takes off, it gets more stressful, it gets just increasingly more stressful.
SPEAKER_02Interesting. And was that I'm guessing that was your experience at uh sort of thing. It was it was you and you don't think it's possible for it to get harder. Yeah. I remember talking to you in that, I don't know, it was like 2021 or something. I think it was in the middle of a pandemic, yeah, and it you were like bloodshot eyes, like I think you were living at the um at your wife's family's Blake house or something like that. But yeah, it was like it was like 15 hours a day of back-to-back calls. And it's like it was something crazy like that.
SPEAKER_01And it was just, you know, just think things just like keep not working. You can't fix them, you can't figure out why they're not working. It's and it's just it's just like this constant, and you you're like you're there are fires burning everywhere when you actually like hit product market fit.
SPEAKER_02And it's it's so difficult. Do you do you advise founders when they hit that point? Or how do you do you work with them? Like what do you how do you help them with that?
SPEAKER_01So it's basically um there's a really good quote, I don't know where it's from, but it's called Let Small Fires Burn. Um, and so what you what you need to do is you need to have a conceptual model of your business. I use the case study factory as that model. And so you just have to figure out what the constraint is. Because if you attack the constraint and just kind of keep everything else steady, like don't drop any balls, but attack the constraint, then the business will improve. If you don't attack the constraint, then you can do a bunch of stuff. You can work 80 hour weeks, and the business doesn't get that much better. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And so what's an example of a constraint that you attacked?
SPEAKER_01Uh yeah. So so an example was we had a bottleneck around onboarding customers. Uh it was basically like we would send over a link for them to sell it onboard, and then they wouldn't. And it would be like going on for weeks and weeks, and we'd kind of keep following up and keep following up. And so that was the constraint, because if they didn't onboard, they were going to churn by default. And and so, um, and so that okay, that's the constraint. Question is, how do we make it such that they it would be weird if they didn't successfully onboard? Turns out we had to add an onboarding session where not only we had to take over their computer, onboard them, set them up with all the defaults, launch the product with them in that onboarding session, and then and like and then that bottleneck was solved. If we had done anything else other than that, that that it would have just we would have just kind of run off a cliff there.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And how did you know that was the fire that uh like because there were uh what what were what were other fires that were burning at the time?
SPEAKER_01Just so many other fires. I don't hiring Willie. I I can't I don't think I can articulate there's so many product fires, product like we just couldn't ship a product they could log into. Like we didn't have a website. I could go down the list of other things that were were not working. Um uh it was uh we we had like one person doing sales and that person was leaving, that person had quit. Like like so it was it was all of those things all at once. And it's like okay, cool. This is the constraint. If we don't solve this, everything else breaks. Yeah. And and then it was like, okay, cool, we need to immediately ship a fix to this, then we need to immediately move to the next thing, and then it's it's just like whack a mole with constraints. Uh and now, now, uh the good thing is we have found pull. So basically, once you've found pull, attacking the constraints is a matter of roughly getting out of your own way so that you can actually serve the pull you've found. Versus, right, like what I've seen is a lot of people they don't really find pull. And so everything they do has to be perfect. It has to like, I have to perfectly convince this person to buy, and I have to, right, like, and I have to wrangle all of this. And so you don't really have the chance to do this.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's that's super interesting. And it ties to the way that you talk about in sales, um, describing your product as small as possible. Like that should be a line to pull and then delivering on such a smaller surface area that uh and maintaining that and developing it ends up like the the worst case scenario is you've you describe something big, something in the big is where pull is, but you don't actually know it. And so maintaining the entire thing becomes the work.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Yeah, you and and you're pushing them to adopt it and implement it, and you're not sure if they right and you're not sure are they not using it because they don't like it, because they don't need it, because they don't value it, or even if they are using it, will they renew on it? And so you have all and you're getting feature requests, but you're not sure why. And they're different feature requests from different customers. So yeah, you just like if you have if you're not super clear on what pull is, this phase when you're getting traction is horrible. Unless you're an idiot.
SPEAKER_02In which case you're like, yeah, I'm kidding, which I have been an idiot, and and like, yeah, I'm killing it actually fondly with uh appreciation and a certain degree of envy for uh uh for not overcomplicating the business. Uh but uh well I I love it, Rob. We're gonna keep this one relatively tight. Anything else you wanted to add? You know, there's the uh to the spiritual part of it, you're right about just loving the work. And um uh uh what what was it like um the reward for uh the reward is harder work, but if you love the work that it is, um then it actually is a reward in in some ways.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, uh so this might actually wind up being next week's uh post. The so that the analogy I use in here, there's a couple of different things that I think are the deadlift analogy, I think, is a really, really useful one, which is that like when you deadlift 405 pounds, your your personal record, you get to celebrate that for exactly three seconds.
SPEAKER_02Random, random, random, we're just gonna choose a random number. I don't know. 400 by 405 pounds.
SPEAKER_01Um four polites. Um when you do that, you get to celebrate for 30 seconds, and then you get to dread because the next weight you're gonna lift is 410 pounds. Now the intro, and and so like that's kind of how it's like when whenever you do something in a startup, whenever you like achieve some level of success, it seems like the next step is always harder. And that might it's just it's just like stepping up in in weights, right? And and in the same exact way, you are stronger. Now you have adapted to be able to handle the heavier weights. And in the exact same way, the more success you find, the heavier weights you lift, the more excuses you have to not lift the heavier weights, to not do the harder work, to just go on autopilot, to just coast. And so I think that's that's an interesting thing that I have observed. And in my view, so I don't know how this I have yet to figure out how to enjoy this in in weights in deadlifts. I I go to bed worried.
SPEAKER_02Uh your wife is like, why are you drenched in sweat and you're just like shaking, staring at the side?
SPEAKER_01Are you having nightmares?
SPEAKER_02No, I just don't want to go to like a kind of nightmare.
SPEAKER_01Okay, I'm not asleep yet. But um uh but what I know in startups is that um if you're just thinking about the financial outcome, the strain will crush you. Most a lot of founders who build really successful companies like have this massive chip on their shoulder, which is also probably not super helpful, uh, or like like mentally it's quite helpful for building a successful company. Uh what I've found is the thing in startups that causes you to enjoy the harder and harder work is the desire to build something awesome that serves the customer perfectly. And it's that aspiration that makes it worth it. And like there are other things too. I want to build a great team, I want to do that, like those things, but those are downstream of the main thing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Yeah. As somebody who has put the I want to build a great team before that, I want to serve the customer, that's a a really bad mistake that you eventually you eventually end up paying for. Um anything else, Rob, we want to add on this?
SPEAKER_01No, so the last thing I didn't write this in this one, but uh like when you think of it this way, then there are basically only two constraints in the business. There are two, there's whatever the con the active constraint is in the business is is a is a real constraint, right? The onboarding process is a real constraint. But the there's an ultimate constraint. There are two ultimate constraints. First one is pull, just like that's an external constraint. To what extent is there demand in the market? And guess what the second constraint is? It's the founder's willingness to attack the constraint. But the founder's ability to attack the current constraint. Just those two things.
SPEAKER_02And by attack the current constraint, um you I mean whatever the constraint is in the business.
SPEAKER_01If it's the internal in the factory that in the factory. Yep. Yep. There's the external constraint, which is pull. Yeah. And then there's just the founder's the founder's ability to get back under the bar.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. That's fascinating. The actually reminds me of like the Elon Musk uh in mythology or like the real stuff. I I don't know. I'm not I haven't worked for SpaceX or Tesla or or Starlink or any of this. But you know what they say is as soon as he identifies the constraint, he just goes and does that. He sits there with the person on the, you know, at the computer or on the floor, and it's like he's just moving constraint to constraint across massively valuable businesses.
SPEAKER_01And he does this at like some he just like does it. I I'm not the kind of person who's gonna be an Elon Musk. Like, I've already I'm accepted, and everyone's like, yeah, we know. Uh breaking, breaking news, everybody. But but but but you if you're if you look at him and you're like, I just I don't think I could physically work 120 hours every week. Like, you don't have to. I don't think you need to grind that hard. Yeah, if you're building seven different companies that are all trillion dollar companies, maybe you do. Um but like you, me, we don't need all, but we just like if if you think about it in terms of how often do I actually attack the main constraint in my business? Yeah, and how doggedly do I attack that constraint? The answer is not like once every three hours or once every two hours in a eight-hour working day or a 10-hour working day. It's like if we're really honest and we look in the mirror, it's like eh, once every two weeks, maybe once every week. Yeah, simmer.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you just let it simmer, you kind of delay it. And so you don't have to be Elon Musk level crazy. You just have to be willing to attack the current constraint.
SPEAKER_02Why why do you think founders do that? Like, I'm reflecting on me and thinking, like, why do I why is my instinct not to because I uh the experience of it is after you've attacked it, it's so obvious that you should have been doing that. And like it's such a relief. But beforehand, there's some amount of procrastination. I'm not really sure. I'm not really sure. Like, what is it the uncertainty? Like, why do you think uh founders have this kind of like block?
SPEAKER_01I don't I we could probably apply the pull frame of tool. Like you you don't do it because you don't have to. Um you you can you can delay it. Or you per you you perceive that you cannot do it. You can delay it, or that something else something else will come and save you, or something like that. And so that's how that's how I feel like it is with me, where it's like it's okay if I don't do this right now. And I think like Elon again is just psychologically incapable of not attacking the thing right now. And it's like, you know, that's that comes that comes with its own baggage, but it's quite effective.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. Um yeah, my mine for you know, the one easy one that comes to mind for me was like the thing I needed to be doing was fixing my outbound back, and I put that off for two months. Like I knew it early November and I put it off until January. And everything that's going on in my business is because I actually figured that out. Not not haven't totally figured it out, but like got it somewhere closer to that not being the constraint. And it's like, golly, I wish I would have started that earlier. So, anyways, I I imagine listener can uh has like something on their mind that they like kind of know like this is the constraint in my business, and I haven't I haven't figured it out yet. Or attack it. Yeah. Um awesome. Uh well, a quick reminder that Rob's got a book coming up here in six, six weeks. Is that published date? Seven weeks. Seven weeks. Um and we'll leave the link to pre-order. There's uh in the next, I don't know, week or two, we're gonna come out with like some cool pre-order uh stuff that we've got packaged. Uh Rob, anything we want to add on that now or we uh we leave folks hanging for a week.
SPEAKER_01Pre-order it and save your receipt. Which or go you can just get the receipt off Amazon or Barnes and Noble or whatever.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Don't uh do not pre-order and then immediately delete your Barnes Noble account and uh and all request that they permanently remove it from the internet. Cool. And then uh yeah, well, awesome. Maybe we leave it at that, Rob. Sounds good. All right, take care, everybody.