Customers Can Love Your Product and Still Never Buy It
Startup adviser Rob Snyder says buyers act on an urgent project with poor options, and his test case is advisers who must file meeting notes.
Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth · An 86-minute guide to finding PMF | Rob Snyder (Author, The Power of Pull)Rob Snyder, who advises startups on finding product-market fit, was describing the failure that changed his thinking. As a founder, he said, he had done everything the manuals advise, finding urgent problems, offering something different and useful, with partners using the product every day.
Then he shared the line that explained why sales still stalled. Customers told him the product was valuable, he said, but added, “I’m not going to drop my priorities to buy it.”
Snyder uses the word pull for the buyer who does the opposite. He describes such a person as someone “who would be weird not to buy,” not someone who needs convincing.
He said sales stalled and he spent two years changing direction without understanding why, until a chance shift took off. Pain and value were not the reason, he argues. The reason, Snyder says, was whether the buyer had “a project on their to-do list” they must do now.
Snyder breaks that situation into four parts in plain words. The buyer has a project, a job she is trying to finish right now. It is unavoidable, meaning she must do it now and cannot sensibly put it off. She has a short list of ways she could get it done, including doing it herself or using what is already for sale. Those options have limits that leave her stuck.
His example is Jump, a company run by friends of Snyder's that makes what he calls “an AI note taker for financial advisors.” The advisers want to spend less time writing up client meetings and entering the notes in the database where client records live. They must do it, Snyder said, or they could face serious legal trouble. Generic automated note takers did not connect to those record systems, and it was unclear whether they met financial rules, so advisers seized on Jump. One person said, “this must be how Alexander Graham Bell felt when he invented the telephone.”
Insurance agents showed the contrast. They also meet clients all day, Snyder said, but they are not required to file meeting notes in that database. Doing little or nothing was good enough, so there was no stuck project and no force to buy.
Snyder calls that liberating. The urgent project exists before the founder arrives, he argues, so the work is to hunt for people who already have it rather than persuade people to care.
Questions people ask
How do you test for that kind of urgency before building anything?
Snyder suggests writing down the bet about the person, the project, why it cannot wait, and why current options fall short. Then he shows that back to prospects in two short slides and asks if he has it right, watching for an immediate yes and for questions about how to start.
What does real interest sound like in a first meeting?
The prospect tries to buy. Snyder says the sign is questions like how do we get started and does the product exist yet. Polite praise, requests for more material, or talk about maybe using it next quarter point the other way.