An 86-minute guide to finding PMF | Rob Snyder (Author, The Power of Pull)
Rob Snyder, author of The Power of Pull, tells Lenny Rachitsky how founders can find product market fit by seeking buyers already stuck on an urgent project, rather than pushing a product on them.
The gist
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Snyder says pull needs four things: a project on someone's to-do list, unavoidable now, a list of options, and limitations making those options fall short.
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He recommends finding ideas by doing customers' work firsthand, then testing a two-slide pull hypothesis and asking a Hail Mary question if interest is lukewarm.
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Snyder suggests short, interesting messages on LinkedIn, 20 connection requests a day, expecting 30 to 40% to accept and 30 to 50% to reply.
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He avoids design partners and pilots, and suggests pricing against the alternatives, such as matching a $50,000 yearly consultant spend.
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Post-sale, he says find when customers become weird to churn, then run a case study factory, fixing one bottleneck at a time.
"Then you can use the theory of constraints, from manufacturing, to look at your case study factory and say, 'Okay, where is the bottleneck to our growth?'... If that's the bottleneck, then that's the only thing that matters right now."
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