The Word That Kills Startups Is "Interesting"

Rob Snyder spent half a decade figuring out why founders chase the wrong signal. His book, The Power of Pull, came out July 7th.

A sales call for a QA automation startup. The founder is running the playbook everyone runs: walking a CTO through the pain points. Don’t flaky tests drive you crazy? Wouldn’t you love this automated? Let’s set up a demo. And the CTO, getting more irritated by the minute, finally cuts him off.

“Listen, I don’t care. I just want QA off my plate. We’ve had some big bugs lately. We need to solve this. What are we even talking about here?”

That one sentence was worth more than the entire pitch. The startup just didn’t know it yet.

Rob Snyder tells this story, and it’s the one that reorganized how I think about selling. Rob’s path to it was not gentle. McKinsey, then Harvard Business School, then the very reasonable conclusion that being a tech billionaire wouldn’t be so bad. He did all the things you’re supposed to do. Customer discovery, raised money, signed design partners, drew the clean line to a multibillion-dollar business. Then he got punched in the face for two years while none of it worked. When the company finally took off, it went zero to $4 million in ARR in two years, mostly before the product was even ready. And here’s the part that hooked me: he didn’t understand why it failed, and then he didn’t understand why it worked. He’s spent the half decade since obsessed with the answer.

I sold against pain for years and never noticed

I should’ve learned this at Concur.

We sold expense reporting, and the pain was obvious. No transparency, runaway costs, fraud, lawsuits. Our favorite prospects were companies that had just been in the news for getting sued. Pharma was the worst offender. Reps expensing dinners with doctors, “Dr. John Smith” spelled six different ways to slip past the limits on how much you could spend with any one physician. We’d walk in and say: you don’t want this exposure anymore. And we’d win.

For years I thought we were winning on the pain. We weren’t. Plenty of companies carried the exact same exposure and never bought anything. The difference in the ones who signed wasn’t the size of their pain. It was that someone inside the building had just been handed a project: make sure we never get sued for this again. The lawsuit didn’t create the pain. The pain was always sitting there. The lawsuit created a priority, and a named person who owned it.

I figured that out in real time, on the podcast, while Rob was explaining his framework. Which is a strange feeling at this point in my career.

Pain is everywhere. Pull is rare.

Here’s Rob’s core claim, and it’s heretical if you’ve absorbed the standard startup advice. Pain points are not predictive of a purchase.

He’s watched founder after founder run the same heartbreak. You do twenty-five discovery interviews. You ask people to rate their pain. Twenty of them call it a nine or a ten out of ten. You build the thing, you go to sell it, and they don’t buy. Why? Because, as Rob puts it, life is a bunch of pain points and we mostly do nothing about them. A ten-out-of-ten pain is not the same as a willingness to drop what you’re doing today and change how you work.

So Rob stopped talking about pain points. He talks about the projects on your to-do list instead. Picture everyone you’re selling to as having a Trello board. The backlog is endless. But at any given moment there’s a short list of things actually being worked on. One, maybe two or three priorities. Everything else is just sitting there being painful.

That short list is where buying happens, and it’s the basis of what he calls the pull framework. The acronym is PULL. There’s a Project the person is actively trying to get done. It’s Unavoidable, something they’re prioritizing right now. They’ve assembled a List of options they’ve tried or considered. And those options have Limitations, they’re not good enough to finish the job. When all four are present, Rob says, somebody will rip the product out of your hands. When they’re not, you’re stuck twisting arms, poking, prodding, convincing. And most of the time, you still lose.

The unlock for Rob came from a random video he stumbled onto about, of all things, product management. Ryan Singer from Basecamp, drawing the line between supply and demand. A feature request, Singer argued, is a request for supply. It isn’t demand. Demand is something already out in the world that exists whether or not your product does. Nobody actually wants your product. Nobody wants features. They’re trying to get something done in their life, and your supply either fits or it doesn’t. The job was never to convince people to want what he’d built. The job was to understand what they were already trying to do.

What it looks like when you get it right

Go back to that angry CTO. Once Rob’s team heard it correctly, everything changed. The man did not want a QA automation tool. He did not want to think about QA at all. He wanted QA off his plate, permanently. So they stopped selling “a QA automation tool” and started selling forward-deployed QA that you plug in and stop worrying about. The demo stopped making sense, so they cut it from the process entirely. The price stopped making sense too, so they raised it tenfold, then doubled it, then doubled it again. Customers bought happily, in weeks instead of six months.

Or take Jump, a company in Utah selling an AI notetaker built specifically for financial advisors. Advisors have to log notes from every client meeting into their CRM, manually, so that when regulators come knocking they don’t get fined. Nobody wants to spend their evening doing that. There’s a standing project on every advisor’s list: spend the least possible time on this. Jump shows up, fits that exact shape, and advisors are texting “I’m never going back” an hour after their first meeting.

My favorite example is the one most out of left field. A crisis-response consultant who sells to Fortune 500 CEOs in the middle of a public activist-investor fight. Building the prospect list is easy: open the newspaper. Getting the meeting is the hard part, because anyone can open the newspaper. So, the legend goes, this consultant would send a physical samurai sword to the CEO’s office with a note: I will go into battle with you. Rob calls it the tollbooth approach. Find the exact moment a person has pull, position yourself right at it, and you barely have to sell.

Monday morning

So you’re a founder chasing your first twenty-five customers. What do you actually do?

Rob’s answer costs nothing. Write out the PULL framework by hand. Then look at the customers who bought weirdly fast, or the ones who are genuinely thrilled, and study them. Go back and watch the call recordings. Listen for what they were trying to do, not the pain points they listed. What was the project? What options had they already tried? Why weren’t those good enough? Why did they move so fast?

What you build from that is a pull hypothesis: if I talk to a person with these specific characteristics, they wouldn’t just maybe buy, it would be weird if they didn’t. Then you go test it on people who fit. If they don’t buy, that’s a signal something’s off in the hypothesis, and you dig. Rob runs his tests in sets of five calls. No deep reason, he says. It’s just a good number.

His book, The Power of Pull, came out July 7. He’s rewritten it eight times from scratch, and he’s honest that it’s a working hypothesis rather than a finished theory. What it promises is not that running a startup gets easy. His own line on it stuck with me: with the pull framework, you’ll still feel like you’re failing at everything, but there will be fewer things to fail at.

Most founders solve the product and then quietly stall on go-to-market, convinced they need to do a hundred things at once. Rob’s whole argument is that you don’t. You need to find the people who already have a project, already have pull, and stop trying to manufacture it in everyone else.

The next time a prospect tells you your idea is “really interesting,” don’t celebrate. Interesting is what people say right before they ghost you. Go find the ones who are already trying to do the thing. They won’t tell you it’s interesting. They’ll ask how soon they can start.