In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey’s Emily Ludolph chats with Rob Snyder, operating partner of Grix Venture Capital and fellow at Harvard Innovation Labs, about The Power of Pull: What You Need to Know About Customer Demand to Build a Successful Startup (and Why Most Founders Get It Wrong) (Basic Venture/Hachette Book Group, July 2026). Snyder argues that the biggest obstacle facing startups isn’t building a better product—it’s misunderstanding what demand actually is. Drawing on his experience as a founder and investor, he explains why traditional assumptions about sales and market research often keep companies stuck in the “pain cave” and why a different approach to growth is a business necessity. An edited version of the conversation follows.
The core problem that opens your book is the ‘pain cave.’ What is it, and why do so many start-up founders get stuck in it?
The pain cave is a very confusing, awful place that every founder winds up spending weeks, months, and years—in my case—inhabiting. I’ve heard stories of decades in the pain cave, which is terrible. It’s the stage where start-ups should be taking off. The momentum makes sense on paper, yet it’s not working in practice, and it’s not obvious why. You approach your start-up with a thesis that says, “I believe if I build this product, these kinds of people will want it. We will provide this kind of value that is differentiated. It will solve these problems.” You write that thesis on paper, raise money, and then go out into the world. When you hear positive things from potential customers, you think, “Let’s build it. Let’s go.”
Then at some point, customers aren’t ripping the product out of your hands. You’re trying to twist arms, begging them to meet with you again. People aren’t buying. You don’t have the hockey stick growth. In that situation, everything that you thought about how and why a start-up works starts getting called into question because you’re not sure which component isn’t working.
You can spend a lot of time in the pain cave working long hours and getting nothing—or nearly nothing—out of it. Even worse, [potential customers] say, “This is a great idea,” but they disappear.
When it comes to start-ups, what are people missing about the dynamics of supply and demand?
In Econ 101, you’re taught that supply is [a company’s] willingness to produce a product or a service at given prices, and demand is a buyer’s willingness to purchase at different prices. When a founder is building something new, that is an unhelpful concept. For example, how could someone be willing to buy at given prices when they don’t know what the product is, when they haven’t seen it before?
Demand is a really powerful concept. When we define it as a willingness to pay, we’re looking at the first or second derivative of what demand really is. It’s not the case that Steve Jobs created demand for the iPhone. It’s the case that there was demand already out there in the world. Steve Jobs or Apple built the iPhone, which fit the demand that was there, such that the market ripped the product out of his hands. I found that it’s really hard to think about demand and why people actually buy products.
Why do people want products? Why do they act as if some products are irresistible, and treat most products as if they don’t matter? We have to understand the definition of demand as a standalone concept. It has nothing to do with products. There’s no such thing as demand for an iPhone. There’s no such thing as demand for supply. Demand is supply-agnostic. Roughly, it means this: What are people trying to do in their lives right now? What is a potential customer trying to do?
It’s not the case that Steve Jobs created demand for the iPhone. It’s the case that there was demand already out there in the world.
Is there a preconception of how a start-up works that’s getting people off on the wrong foot?
The movie The Social Network got everyone into start-ups. Someone in college told me about the movie and said, “We have to do a start-up.” I asked, “Why would you start a company if you don’t know what kind of company to start? That seems like a weird thing to do.”
After watching the movie, I said, “I have to start a company.” As the cultural zeitgeist came around, a flood of ideas came in, because everyone’s attention was on it.
I find that most start-ups now waste roughly 50 percent of the time in the early days doing what I call “LARPing,” or live action role playing. It’s an activity where you’re in the woods, playing with swords, reenacting medieval battles. Start-ups LARP without realizing they’re LARPing by doing several pitch competitions and customer research efforts that seem productive. But months to years later, they’ve made no progress. Then they wind up realizing that they’re in the pain cave and actually need to sell and deliver.
Your PULL framework helps get founders on the path to sell and deliver. Where did that model come from?
The PULL framework emerged because I kept trying to help my friends’ start-ups take off, and we kept running into walls when trying to implement demand thinking. We went from saying, “What’s the product’s value, and how do we convince prospective customers that they should want the value?” to saying instead, “What are they trying to do in their lives, and how do we fit their priorities?”
What we found is that it’s not just about prospective customer priority. It’s about the reason that the number one thing on that prospective customer’s to-do list right now is the priority. But even that isn’t enough because for many priorities, prospective customers can make do with their existing tools and methods.
So it has to be a project, which is a number one priority, which is unavoidable right now, for which they have a list of existing options for achieving the goal, but whose options limit them from accomplishing it. Imagine that P and U stand for: “I’m trying to do something right now. I’m pushing to accomplish something,” and L and L are: “I’m being held back from doing that thing because my existing tools, methods, and options are not good enough” for some specific reason.
If four of those characteristics are true all at once, they would be weird not to buy your product. In every other situation, they would be weird to buy your product because they would have to drop their priorities to do so. No one will say, “This start-up’s pitch is so good; I’m going to drop all of my existing priorities to buy this product.”
Sales is not about convincing at all. It’s about understanding what prospective customers are trying to do and whether they are blocked, and then seeing if they need your help in that situation.
How can you tell when you’ve found PULL?
It is amazing. It’s also confusing and horrifying because you come from a theory that says, “If I build a good and valuable product that solves a problem, they will buy it.” And then they don’t. And then customers start ripping a half-built product out of your hands, and it doesn’t make any sense. Everything stops making sense for a solid six months while you learn the physics of business.
Early on when we found PULL, I received phone calls. I did not have a product. The product was me and a spreadsheet. We did not have a login for customers. They would just receive weekly emails from me that said, “Here’s how everything’s going. I’m sorry we don’t have a login.”
Despite that, I would get phone calls from people who said, “I heard about your product. I need to buy it. How do I sign up? How do I pay?”
If you think about a deal or a purchase as requiring some percentage of buying—the buyer taking action versus the seller taking action—it was as if I went from 99 percent seller taking action and it not really working to 99 percent buyer taking action. It was working despite the fact that we didn’t have a product, a website, or anything. It was just that we had tapped into such intense [demand].
This taps into a fundamental reframe that you have about what sales is. What is ‘sales’ to you?
When you think about what sales is, you often think that it’s about persuading. Generally, we don’t have good experiences of sales in our minds. I didn’t go into start-ups to sell. I went into start-ups to build cool stuff that takes off. I think that’s actually behind a lot of the problems that founders run into in the pain cave. Though not in the book, I refer to it as “Snyder’s Law,” which is that we as founders will do anything as an excuse to avoid selling because we perceive it as uncomfortable. If I have to go in and convince you to buy, I have to construct the right messaging, twist your arm, and learn all the sales tactics.
Sales is not about convincing at all. It’s about understanding what prospective customers are trying to do and whether they are blocked, and then seeing if they need your help in that situation. That type of mindset moves from push sales to pull sales. When you move toward that [pull] direction, then you realize that component is research.
It’s not about convincing; it’s about learning. What are they trying to do that would lead them to buy or not buy your product? I view sales as one of the—if not the—best and primary forms of market research that a start-up can do. It’s just like interviewing customers.
What’s the first step you would recommend that someone take to apply the PULL framework?
Just get started. You want to apply the PULL framework to figure out who would be weird not to buy your product, who will pull something out of your hand so you don’t have to spend years pushing like I have. All you do is fill out the PULL framework with a hypothesis [that involves] the four pieces:
- What’s the project?
- Is the specific project one that they must do, that’s unavoidable right now?
- What options do they consider?
- Why do they perceive those options to have limitations or not be good enough?
That’s all you need to start. Take that hypothesis, go find that person, then others, show them the hypothesis, and see how they behave. If they say, “Wait a second, you can help me do that? How does it work? How do I get started using this?” then you know you’ve found pull. Deliver on it, and you have a business.
