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About Rob Snyder

Episode Highlights

1. Why “pain points” are useless—and the single test that instantly reveals whether a customer will actually buy
2. How deep tech founders can find real demand before a product exists—and why this collapses 24-month sales cycles into weeks
3. The brutal danger of lukewarm interest—and how founders confuse polite enthusiasm with real pull
4. How to turn a lab breakthrough into a must-do project on a buyer’s to-do list (and why this is the real precursor to PMF)
5. The simple conversation structure that exposes true demand—and the words that tell you it’s all talk
6. Why founders must build a repeatable case study before they build a product—and how this becomes the foundation for PMF
7. The subtle difference between “that’s interesting” and “I need this now”—and how to engineer the moment of truth
8. How to describe your value in one sentence using the buyer’s own failed alternatives—no persuasion needed
9. Why most founders hire sales too early—and how to know the exact moment your process becomes repeatable
10. The mindset shift that makes selling feel natural, not gross—especially for technical founders who hate sales

Links and resources

• The Path to Product Market Fit– Rob Synder’s Newsletter
• The Physics of Startup– Rob Synder’s Podcast

Interview Transcript

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Welcome Rob. I’m so excited to have you here on Invisible Ink today.

Rob Snyder: Thank you so much. Excited to be here.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So we’ve got a lot to talk about.You know, I just can’t wait for a new book to come out. The Power of PULL. Do you have a date for it?

Rob Snyder: No, so sometime next summer, I think.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Ah, I thought you were going to give us a treat but I guess it’s a trick so we’ll just wait for it to come out.

So, there’s this whole, I think the part of getting to product market fit is one of the toughest things that any founder deals with. And I know that we focus a little bit more on deep tech and kind of STEM founders, so it’s even more challenging for them.

So let’s start at the beginning though. You’ve sat in the founder seat yourself. I love all your LinkedIn posts where you talk about how tough it was. What has happened in your own startup and how did you even get on this journey of trying to nail down how to get to product market fit.

Rob Snyder: Yeah, I had no intention to be doing what I’m doing now. I just wanted to build a startup and, you know have it, do that, you know, go straight to the moon and I thought I was smart. And then reality very quickly told me I didn’t know very much.

And so we raised money, went out with an idea. Design partners. You know, we thought we knew what we were doing and spent two years just hitting our heads against the wall, like repeatedly. It didn’t work.

And I didn’t understand why it didn’t work. So I had come from like McKinsey and Harvard Business School and so I thought like I had read all the books and knew the things that mattered and yeah. So it hurt even more because then  like that’s the normal story is very smart person just gets punched in the face for a few years and then whatever goes and gets a real job and gets back to it.

For me that almost happened. But then something weird happened where we went zero to $4 million ARR in two years and I didn’t understand why it worked when it worked. I, at that point I was like, okay, I have no idea why it didn’t work. I don’t understand why it did work. We have a worse website, we have a worse product. We have like nothing made sense.

And so I need to answer that question and figure it out. Because I feel like I don’t understand anything about the world if I don’t understand this question. And so yeah, that’s what I’m doing.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So that’s great. You said you raised and then you ran into your, you know, the wall. So how did you even raise money if you didn’t know what you’re doing?

Rob Snyder: Well, we thought we knew what we were doing. Come on. I was a McKinsey consultant. I know how to put a slide deck.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So do I. I was a McKinsey consultant too but it doesn’t work all that much. Oh, clearly you got it right. So you know you are like that. That story resonates so much because so many founders do it by the book.

You’ve read Lean Startup, you’ve read the 24 Steps to Entrepreneurship. I can name you a huge stack and most of them are sitting behind me on my shelf, customer interviews, validation, discovery, what’s the problem? Why doesn’t it work?

Understanding Customer Demand

Rob Snyder: So I’d say there’s kind of two problems. One problem is that all of the books give you things that could work. That’s the challenge. They could work, which implies that they could not work. And so when you stack together a bunch of tactics that all could work.

It’s like multiplying probabilities. It essentially goes straight to zero. And so I think that’s the core reason why a lot of this doesn’t actually work in practice. So we have to come at it from an angle of what would be weird if it didn’t work.

And when you come at it from that angle and ask, okay, how would I approach finding an idea that would be weird if it didn’t work. If my life depended on it, how would I approach that? Right? Like you ask a different set of questions, you come up with a different set of approaches and you come up with a different way of thinking about how zero to one works.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So what is the essence of the difference between how we are taught in the popular press to go after and find the “it” versus, I mean, they sound kind of similar on the surface if you’re not familiar with the approaches. So what’s different?

Walk me through what you did in your zero to 4 million, when you were hitting your head against the wall and what you would’ve done differently knowing what you know?

Rob Snyder: Yeah, so it was, it’s a nuanced difference and it’s hard to describe. So I’ve basically spent the last decade trying to describe it. The difference is that in reality, you focus on demand. Customer demand, which is customer is trying to accomplish something but blocked.

That is the foundation of a startup in the real world and you are looking for people who are in that situation who will rip the product out of your hands in the rest of the world. I the rest of the world and what we’re typically taught, you’re taught to do customer research and find pain points and problems, but that’s one of the steps out of 747, right? That’s not the critical thing.

And there’s also steps that are like, Hey, build your product. Do your vision board, like all this kind of nonsense. And so you don’t realize that the step of understanding demand is the foundation of the entire business. And so you just kind of, you check the box there and then you, I don’t know, launch on Product Hunt and pray. I don’t know.

I think they have some of the right elements, directionally right elements emphasized wrongly. And like there’s not a clear hierarchy of importance of things in the traditional way we’re talking about startups.

Deep Tech Founders and Demand

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Okay, so this is concept of demand and I want to just take like, unpack that for one second so I understand. Let’s say that you’re doing something in software or something more real world that feels easier to understand. But let’s say that I’m a deep tech founder and I have this new novel in innovation or invention.

It could have multiple use cases. I’m deeply steeped in the science of it. Then it starts to feel a little academic. What you’re telling me is yeah, it sounds great in theory, which is weird for a scientific founder to say but for the moment, let’s say it sounds great.

I have this innovation. How do I go around finding demand? It could do this, it could do that. It could decarbonize the world, whatever the case might be, right?

Rob Snyder: Yeah, I think what I’ve seen from a lot of deep tech founders, especially when the tech is very potentially horizontal, is that they basically come up with a list of people who might have demand.

It’s like, okay, maybe it is this kind of medical clinic doing this kind of thing. Maybe it’s this other kind. And they force rank them based on who they think is most likely to actually have demand aka they are actively using something or try or they can’t quite use something that would be a competitor to this. And you go talk to those people and see when they hear about your thing, do they try to rip it out of your hands?

The PULL Framework Explained

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Okay, so then let’s get right down. We’ve been dancing around the issue. Walk me through what is the heart of what you are advocating for in your approach and then I want to unpack that and see how that plays out in the real world of a founder, especially very early on in the game.

Rob Snyder: Yeah. Great. So, the core of my idea is that demand is all that matters and demand generates everything else about a business. And so demand is, as I mentioned earlier, customer trying to make progress.

They’re prioritizing something on their to-do list, but their current options available to them for doing that thing are not good enough such that when you show up, they will rip the product out of your hands. That’s the definition of demand in my book.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So let’s say, you’ve defined demand, which is somebody ready to buy a product, which is like the traditional definition. So I’m still talking about a deep tech founder.

My innovation or invention is still in the lab. They have nothing to report of my hand. What happens in that case, like how?

Rob Snyder: Yeah, so I work with founders who don’t have a product at all too.  I’ve done this pre-product as well where what you’re looking for when you are testing for demand.

You’re not looking for a desire for a product. You’re looking for space for a product. Space where a product might fit, right? And so what you’re looking for it when you’re going is you’re talking to potential customers, figuring out what are they prioritizing on their to-do list and in what way are their current options holding them back?

That’s the first step. Step two is then you say, okay, so if I had something that could do this without this, what do you think? Right? And if you hear anything other than I need that right now, how do we make that happen? Then that person doesn’t have demand.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So can you walk me through a couple of examples, maybe anonymized.

Rob Snyder: Yeah, sure. So, Harvard startup, we will go deep tech startup building. I can’t even remember what some sort of a very deep analytics thing in the medical space, right?

They were deep in the lab and had not really talked to customers, and so I forced them to do outreach to people they thought might be potential customers. So they started scheduling five calls per week with potential customers even before the product was ready and I had them write out their hypothesis. We believe that I’ll just, I’m just going to make this up, chief medical officers in this kind of pharmaceutical company is trying to do this kind of thing.

They’re trying to do this kind of work, but they are blocked because their existing data analytics products are too slow, not good enough, can’t handle X, Y, Z, right? And so they have a conversation around that and say, we’ve been talking to other chief medical officers and we’re hearing things like this. Is this similar to you?

Sometimes you hear, oh my gosh, yeah, we’ve been talking, were you just listening into our staff meeting a couple minutes ago? Sometimes you hear like, that’s French to me. I don’t understand what you’re talking about. But when you hear someone say, oh my gosh, that’s exactly what we’ve been talking about in our meetings.

Then you say, okay, interesting. So when I was talking to those other people, they were looking for something that could do this without that. Is that what you are looking for too? And the person says, yes, that’s exactly it. How does it work? That person is essentially pulling the product out of you.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Which doesn’t even exist, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the concept of the specific things it can do for them. So that comes with this idea that you mentioned earlier of progress, right? So we talked about pain points, and then I know you talked about “Bitchin’ ain’t switchin'”. Not to be profane on this podcast, but those were some of my favorite quotes!

Customer Conversations and Demand Validation

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So can you just walk me through like, help me understand. Let’s say I’m a deep tech founder and I’ve been like trained to look for pain points and problems.

I’ve done my customer discovery interviews, everybody’s talking about this big problem. How do I know that demand or not? Like what is a litmus test?

Rob Snyder: I am going to file a petition to remove the words problems and pain points from startup books. Just ban them because they are not help. They could work. They probably won’t, right? Because life is a bunch of pain points that we don’t do anything about.

Pain does not imply action. Pain just implies pain. And so founder who is used to pain points, they’re going to talk to people and those people are going to say, oh yeah, reporting is a huge pain point or whatever it is a huge pain point. And you’re going to say, okay, cool.

What have you done about it? Nothing really. Okay, cool. Then it’s not a priority. They’re not actually applying force against it. We care about the buyers applying, what they’re actively trying to do, applying force against and struggling in the process of trying to accomplish something.

And so that’s why I focus on what I call projects on their to-do list that they are actively prioritizing. That implies something that is a project that we are prioritizing implies action where pain points and problems do not, climate change is a problem, but like if I go in and say I’m solving climate change, they’re going to be like, great. Good for you. Get back to work.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I’ve seen too many of those on you know some text but okay. So now we’ve narrowed down two big things right. The first is what I heard you say was. You got to figure out who it is you’re targeting. Who is that person who’s desperately trying to solve something is number one.

So you have a bunch of let’s call it guesses because I’m trying to stick to simple English here because of my tendency to go into four syllable words. You have a guess as to who might have this to do on their list that’s really burning up. So there’s a who and then there’s a what?

There’s a task that they need to check off. How do you know it’s the right task? Like do bad things happen if they don’t check off? How does a founder figure out is this like a big enough or important enough project not a problem or pain for them to solve?

Iterating Through Customer Feedback

Rob Snyder: Yeah so my take here and it might just be that I’m not smart enough to find another way is that like the way to know if it’s a big enough thing for them is if they try to rip your product out of your hands. Your not-yet-existing product out of your hands.

That’s the only way to know. And you do that by having these conversations and saying if we did X without Y what do you think about that? And they should say “yeah, I need that tomorrow”. Is it ready yet? Anything other than that implies it is not big enough. It’s either the project isn’t urgent enough for them. It’s not actually something they’re prioritizing or their existing options are mostly good enough.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Got it. So you figured out who it was. You got the project and then I heard I know it’s a pull so I’m kind of cheating a little bit here because it’s the PULL framework.

So it’s the project and then it’s the urgency right which is the fact that they’re actually pulling it out of your hands. The question is how do you get to have the conversation with them where you describe the it in such a precise or thoughtful way that you’re basically maximizing your chances that they’re going to pull it out of your hands. What’s the trick there?

Rob Snyder: How do you get the conversation like get them to talk to you?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: These conversations are very valuable right. So I’ve been doing some of this myself and especially if you’re talking to deep tech I have maybe a very limited set of potential customers and these are usually pretty high up executives and it’s hard to get at-bats.

So, a very few at-bats that you want to make the most of. So you want to make each conversation pay. So how do you get to a point where you describe it you’ve done your work you kind of figure out okay it’s a project on this person’s to do list.

They’re in all kinds of pain and want to get it done fast. Then how do you get to a point where you describe it in a way that makes sense to them and helps them say give it to me now?

Rob Snyder: Yeah that’s a really good point. So we’ll put like how do you get these people to talk to you aside. We can talk about that later if that’s relevant. When you have one of these people in a conversation, what I tend to do is I tend to have a kind of either fictional or real case study in the background of a person just like you who was trying to do this but blocked for this reason.

This is what we offer. That fits the space that’s there. And the structure of the conversation that I typically do is first like I actually have a kind of three part structure. There’s the demand supply next steps.

Demand part: You start by asking, hey thanks so much for meeting with me today. You’re very busy. Why did you agree to talk to me today and what were you hoping to get out of it? What they might say is you reached out to me. Okay we don’t get much progress there that’s fine we’ll move on. Or they might say yeah I looked at your background I looked at your research. It seems super relevant because we’re focused on X Y and Z right now.

In which case you’re like “oh, bullseye, let’s talk more about that”. But like so the paths kind of branch from there. But what you do in that conversation is you ask that like why did you take this and then you ask some discovery questions to fill out the pull framework.

Okay so what exactly is the project on your to do list? Why is it urgent now? What options have you tried? What have you looked into and why aren’t those good enough? You ask those questions to get a sense of the shape of the thing they’re trying to do and in which ways they’re blocked before you pitch your idea your product. Because if you pitch your product or idea without knowing that, you are going to use words that don’t fit the shape of the thing they’re trying to do and the limitations.

So then you say okay cool. Based on what I just heard from you sounds like you’re trying to accomplish this but are blocked by this. If we offered something that was this without this would that fit what you’re trying to do. And then see what happens after that. So you have to have a conversation before pitching something.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Okay so I’m going to play devil’s advocate for a second. So this sounds a lot like a customer discovery interview to me. Because you know I could argue, I could push back and say hey what you’re telling me to do is to just discover their pain point.

Rob Snyder: Yes. So it is a form of a customer discovery interview in the same way that the first part of a sales call is called discovery. It is a customer discovery interview but you’re not looking for pain points because pain points don’t matter.

You’re looking for projects on their to do list and where they are blocked. Then you are offering something to them which you usually don’t do in a customer discovery interview. You’re not supposed to talk about your product at all. You’re just supposed to learn about them and their world right. So to make sure that you accomplish nothing in a customer discovery interview don’t even talk about what you’re trying to build to see what they do.

And so what we’re doing is we’re saying okay cool. This is the shape of progress you’re trying to make. This is where you’re blocked. Here’s what we’re offering which seems to fit that. Then the most important thing is we’re seeing if they pull. If they’re like “oh wow, I need to bring my team in to evaluate this.

Oh wow. how do we get started with this? How do we trial this?”. The entirety of the conversation up until that point there is some percentage of it that is a lie. And the only way to figure out what part of it they have lied about or just have said nice things because you asked is to have some sort of a call to action. Some sort of an inbuilt truth mechanism to the conversation.

A Stripe link for example is the best truth. It’s the only source of truth I trust because it says cool I am demonstrating that I’m going to pay. For a deep tech founder you’re not going to have that yet. Because I mean you can try to send a Stripe link see what happens probably won’t work well for you.

But what you’re looking for is for that person to say, oh wow this seems really relevant. How do I dig in deeper? How do I bring my team? What they’re doing there is they are pulling you in.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So that makes sense to me. And have you seen examples of this working out? And I’m thinking through some of the founders that I worked with where they’re looking for a pilot. Maybe it’s not going to be commercial scale for five years ten years.

You know, “first of a kind” technologies, things of that nature. And all you want is somebody to commit to a pilot and a pilot meaning a meaningful investment and commitment on their part. How did those sound and how can a founder tell the difference between someone being nice?

I get the point about Stripe. I’m trying to understand what’s a realistic real commitment in that moment of truth that tells you that you’ve got real demand here versus somebody just saying all the nice things because they don’t want to hurt your feelings. Hey this sounds interesting. Keep us posted etc. Can you just give us some real life examples you’ve heard?

Rob Snyder: Yeah, so okay. PhD friend out of MIT selling into chief patient officers in pharma. Deep tech, MIT Media Lab kind of person. Basically did not have a product ready and talking to chief patient officers like trying to figure out what are they actually prioritizing, what would they actually buy.

And he found something that was so urgent for them and unsolved that they said, yeah, couldn’t you actually find some way to do this for us now? And so he came back and said, I could make this report for you in a pilot, in a paid pilot. Would that be good enough? And they said yes, that’s exactly what we need. Pulled him through the procurement process.

So it’s all about: are they trying to accomplish something in their world? Because if so, they will pull you in. If they have some sort of selfish project on their to-do list that they must do, they will pull you in.

And what it looks like is — you make a really good point there — you’re going to hear things that are nice words that are not evidence of pull. Nice words are like, wow, you’re really smart.

They’re not going to say that, but they’re going to say, wow, this is really impressive technology. This is the future. I can totally see how this is going to revolutionize our industry. And then what do they do? They are explicitly not saying, “I need this for my job now”.

If they’re not saying those words or something in that realm and then acting on it. I need this now, are you doing pilots, can we explore a pilot with you then say that is evidence of pull. If you say, so we’re looking for pilots, and they say, oh yeah, we might be interested in that, maybe send me more information by email. That means a no. That is a nice way to say no.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Just like VCs, right? You go to fundraise and they’re like, well, this is great, keep us posted, come back in a few weeks and we’ll definitely take a look.

Okay, so you have described Nirvana, right? It’s the best of all possible worlds. You’ve got a customer literally crawling over the desk trying to pull the product out of your hand, even though it doesn’t even exist.

But we live in the real world, and it takes us a while to get there. So help me understand. There’s degrees. It feels like you want to keep getting close to that red hot demand, but it’s not a one-shot deal.

How do you maximize your chances? You don’t have forever. You need to do that fast. How do you get to that point? And second corollary to that is, have you ever seen a situation where somebody kind of had demand and you could convert it into red hot demand? Or is that just a mythical concept? How do you get there?

Rob Snyder: Yeah, so what it takes is it takes the same level of obsession deep tech founders put into their technology. It takes applying that to a volume of customer conversations.

This isn’t something you’re going to do and you’re going to come up with your first hypothesis of who this customer is. You’re going to do two calls and you’re going to have two customers right away necessarily. Like sometimes I’ve seen that happen. But usually what happens is you have to do five calls and most of the people think you are speaking a random language. Okay, cool. Something here is deeply wrong.

Then you do it again. Then you do it again. And you have to just repeat that as many times as possible and have as many conversations as possible in a short timeframe as possible to start figuring out. And you record these conversations and review them and see where they got totally confused.

See where it was irrelevant for them. And figure out what words did you say that caused that. Is it something that’s happening in their world versus something that I’m saying? What’s actually going on here?

And so yeah, it’s all about a volume of conversations that you have to have with potential customers. The good news is you have a lot of time on your hands to have these conversations. If you can spend two hours a day, that’s four 30 minute conversations a day.

You should be able to do that. If you can do four a day or if you can do one a day even then you’re doing five a week. In one week, you can either cross off a potential target segment because there’s no real demand there, or you can say, ah, there’s something there.

I maybe need to change something. Maybe I’m targeting someone who’s too junior. Maybe I’m targeting someone who’s too senior. Maybe I’m using the wrong words. It’s just figuring out from how people behave and when they get it or when they’re confused, what to do next.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So there’s a little bit of overlap again, I’ll cheat here because I know that you’ve kind of made fun of experiments and trials and hypotheses and stuff like that. And again, this sounds remarkably like that, right?

Because I am having a hypothesis about a certain customer type and about a certain shape of demand. Two questions on that. First is, how many of these conversations do I need to have for me to rule out a customer? And when do I know, like a circuit doesn’t get closed if 77 of them are closed, but the 78th is not closed and the circuit will also not close if none of the 78 are closed.

Rob Snyder: Yeah. The answer is, I don’t know. And I don’t think it is knowable. Like, this is the hard thing, which is you’re just never going to have enough information. And so I tend to do things in sets of five. Five customer conversations with a particular target and from that I’ll review them and try to figure out what I learned.

And I’m going to be asking basic questions. Was there any demand there? If not, okay, why do I think that was? And therefore, what should I do next? If there is no demand in five conversations at all, then I’m like, okay, I am very backwards on this. Because my whole goal in setting up these five conversations, my goal was to find people who I think would be crazy not to buy.

And so if I go zero for five, no signal at all, holy cow, I need to recalibrate. Usually you’ll have like two people who are kind of like, oh, that’s interesting, maybe tell me more which is an equivalent of no or close to no. And so then you go back to the drawing board. And so yeah, I don’t know. What I do is until I know, I just keep doing this.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So it does argue for some amount of, you know, it’s a numbers game and you have to kind of keep going. And you automatically hone your approach, maybe the words you use or the specific aspects of the demand that are more relevant to them than not.

What do you do if somebody says, I get the point about the no, right? But if they said, well, I like this about this but what I don’t like is this. Is that demand or is that non-demand?

Rob Snyder: It might be demand.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So what do you do then?

Rob Snyder: So if we offered this without this, what would you do then? See what they do.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: But at the end of the day, they have to commit to the next step. Otherwise, you don’t have a hit.

Rob Snyder: Yeah. Otherwise it’s words.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: No cash.

Rob Snyder: Yeah. Words. No action, no cash.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: No cash for me. That’s, that’s no cash.

So, have you seen more or less being needed than five at any point? And if so can you just talk about that critical mass of how many conversations?

Rob Snyder: Honestly, I chose five because I do a workout program where you do barbell lifts and sets of five, and I really like reps of sets of five. But I’ve also found that it’s not a bad number either, right?

Like if you’re doing 10, sometimes it takes a while to do 10 calls but you can do five calls basically. If you kind of go all out and try your hardest, you can do five calls this week. That’s why I like five. You can kind of fit it into a week unit, if not sooner. And then 10 calls, you’re then comparing and contrasting across a pretty wide range of calls usually and it’s actually harder to analyze at that scale.

Analyzing Conversations for Patterns

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I think I can buy that. So I just want to focus for a little minute on the mechanics of how you do these. I’ve recorded my five calls, maybe I can get a transcript from AI. So basically it sounds like you’re literally scanning for patterns: like were there inflection points or were there moments between the transcript and your memory of what happened where either there was a sharp drop off in interest and they started saying nice words, right, and they like started thinking about the next project.

What are the other specific things you’re looking for and how can you make the most of mining these conversations?

Rob Snyder: Yeah, so I just have three buckets of things that I’m looking for. Did they have demand? Then, like, underneath that, what were the specific quotes that I heard from them?

Did our supply fit in their minds, and then quotes underneath that? And then, did they pull for next steps? Those are the things I am looking for.

And so I actually create like a Miro board basically that has a link to the call, context about the person, and then demand quotes, supply quotes, next steps, and green or red essentially for each of those categories.

Green is, yeah, they had really intense demand. If red follows that, means I pitched the wrong thing or something was wrong here. I need to look at that. And then next steps are binary as well. Did they actually pull? Like did they reach out afterwards? Are they doing more pulling than I am pushing?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So based on that is how you’re going to tweak your next five, is what I’m picking up, right? So basically you are more concerned about getting the most upstream factor right, because if there’s no demand, there’s nothing else.

Rob Snyder: A hundred percent.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So when you’re looking at your analysis of these five conversations, you’re looking for the reds in the top row, so to speak.

Rob Snyder: So what I’ve found is I compare and contrast reds versus greens and figure out why. And I actually take the strongest signal from green and next steps.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Okay.

Rob Snyder: If they’re green and next steps, if they’re basically green all the way through, then I’m like, okay, there’s actually real demand here. And then I compare that versus the others.

Whether it’s green, green, red, then I’m like, oh, that might have just been talk. What’s the difference between these people versus red, red, red. And it’s like, okay, cool. How do I never talk to that kind of person again? Right? Or something like that.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Got it. So in other words, like Peter Drucker said, you are looking to feed the opportunities and starve the problems, right? You’re going to go where there’s the highest likelihood of demand and somebody taking action on that.

So I want to kind of zoom out a little bit. We’ve gone very intensively into you find the person, you find the project, you find that urgency and that specific shape of whatever it is they’re looking for, so you can move to the next step and get something happening. Okay.

Understanding Product Market Fit.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Now we started off this conversation talking about product market fit. Walk me through like where does this fit in with product market fit and how do you take this to the next step?

Rob Snyder: Yeah. I love that question. So the structure of this is you find one kind of, we’ll say, repeatable demand. So one project that’s on a lot of people’s to-do lists, or multiple people’s to-do list. I don’t know, if you’re selling a hundred million dollar contracts, you just need two or whatever.

But it’s a project that’s on somebody’s to-do list that is repeatable and your supply fits that. The combination of those two things, if we talk through the components of it, it sounds like a customer case study. Jim was trying to accomplish this, but he ran into this problem.

He ran into these bad options and then we showed up and he pulled the product out of our hands and was able to do this. That sounds like a case study. So what you’re coming to here is one case study based on repeatable demand, repeatable supply.

This is one repeatable case study. And so product market fit is essentially you’re finding your one repeatable case study where the customer pulls more than you push and you just repeat that and that’s what a business is. That’s what a startup is. But the path to product market fit is figuring out the components of the case study and delivering upon them so that you can get completed case studies that are repeatable over time.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Okay, that makes sense. So let’s apply that framework and talk about our favorite deep tech founder who’s struggling over here trying to sell his or her pilot to this big corporate buyer.

So it sounds to me like he or she has to establish that there’s enough of these people pulling this product out of their hand before or they just move and say, okay, I found this one person, they wanted the pilot and I’m going to go do the pilot. Is there like a trade off there?

The Importance of Continuous Customer Conversations.

Rob Snyder: Yeah, so what I actually recommend is that you never take your foot off the gas in terms of talking to potential customers. That five to ten conversations a week is a learning engine. It is an engine for you to smooth out your pitch.

It is an engine for you to figure out who really has demand and it makes sure that you don’t just overfit to one customer’s needs. So you always are doing that. And so as you are doing that, once you nail one, it’s way easier to nail two through five. And so I recommend doing more than one at a time.

Do two or three at a time for your first ones. And yeah, they’re going to be early pilots. They might take a long time, but you’re continuing conversations with other people and saying, we’re not doing other pilots right now. I would love to keep in touch so that you now know who we are.

And that person on the other line is hopefully like, oh, I wish I was doing a pilot with you right now. Right? And you’re kind of scheduling out. You could even schedule out their pilots into the future. You know, hey, if you pay us a hundred thousand dollars now, we’ll lock you in for May of 2027 or whatever it is.

But that’s how you guard against this. You should be trying to get a couple in so that you’re able to start to find the shape that repeats. And also, there’s a chance that you’re going to mess something up with one of them. So it’s good to have multiple. Why not? And you’re continuing conversations to know what the market really is for this.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So I’m going to throw another Bob Moesta. Is that how I say his name correctly?

Rob Snyder: Oh Bob Moesta. Yeah.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Right. Bob Moesta. So he says “time kills all deals”. So is there a trade off here to make? And I’m not trying to create artificial theoretical questions for you, but these are the problems that deep tech founders are dealing with.

These are long tail projects. They’re large and they still have to find the demand. And finding that pilot is so hard. So I’m just trying to understand what is the practical path here for them.

Handling Long Sales Cycles in Deep Tech.

Rob Snyder: Demand is even more important for deep tech founders with longer sales cycles because your customers have to grit their teeth longer to buy. So demand matters even more in this case.

And so a couple things on that. One is, yeah, this applies to you more. Two is that when demand is strong enough, buying cycles are short. Even in enterprise. Our PhD friend from MIT found when he was selling to enterprise pharma, his sales cycles—when you think of enterprise sales cycles for a new product, 12 to 24 months is what you hear—his is like three and a half weeks.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Weeks. Less than a month.

Rob Snyder: Yes. It’s because there’s a person with a project on their to do list. Is this sounding familiar? And that’s why.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Got it. So I mean, that part of the framework is pretty clear, right? The one thing that we didn’t go into is, you’re describing it in a way, we kind of, we glossed over this. You said you have this person who has this project. It’s very urgent.

For some reason, their bonus depends on it. They’re going to lose their job, whatever the case might be, right? The world is going to blow up whatever and you go describe them. And they’ve been looking at all these other options and then we gave them this. But we have been looking at all these other options. How do you find out how to describe your this in a way that beats all the other options? Is there anything that you’ve learned through this process?

Rob Snyder: Yeah it’s actually like a quite simple formula. So one is if you don’t know what options they have considered, you can just ask. They will tell you. And if you want, why didn’t you like them?

Like why aren’t they good enough for you? They can say, yeah, we tried using this technology but it didn’t work for our process because X, Y, Z, right? Once you know what they are trying to accomplish the project and you know the limitations of the alternatives. So project is X limitations of alternatives is Y. Then you say, okay, we help people accomplish X without Y.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: If it’s right in that gap, right?

Rob Snyder: It’s what the point of this is to make that part ridiculously simple. When you’re talking about problems and solutions, a problem can take many shapes and when you find a problem, your solution can take infinite shapes. When you’re using the pull framework, your solution fits in a very tidy box and it’s really simple.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Got it. So the other thing then is kind of moving on. So now we’ve got the case study, which is really a success story of one customer who looks like them and they’re like, yeah, I can see myself in this person. And you’ve described a perfect situation where there’s a burning problem that they have to solve tomorrow.

You described exactly what that had to do, and now you start repeating this over and over again. So now you’re kind of well on your way to product market fit. Right. From a practical standpoint, I want to ask you, at what point do you have to bring in like salespeople, right? Because you can’t keep doing this forever, and in most cases we are talking about founder led sales. In the first, I don’t know, couple years especially. So for deep tech, do you have any experience or any thoughts on how that plays out?

Rob Snyder: Yeah. guess at what revenue Bill Gates stopped being the only salesperson at Microsoft?

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: The only sales person.

Rob Snyder: The only, I think. I’m going to throw this stat out. I read Hard Drive recently. It said it in it. I’ll blame that book. If not, I think it was like eight or 10 million.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Eight or ten million. What is the average contract size? Like 5 million.

Rob Snyder: No, at the time it wasn’t. He was just slinging sales and doing a bunch of other things too. So, what I find is that deep tech founders and just founders in general are looking for literally any excuse to hand sales off to somebody else. I will find anything else I can do in the business other than sales. Any excuse, wow, maybe I need to do my financial model again because that’s more fun.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Investors want financial model!

Rob Snyder: Yeah, exactly. why not? And so eventually you can hire in sales once the sales process is manageable. Like doable by a non founder which means there’s no real magic to it.

You can kind of predict exactly what someone’s going to say. You can give them the same pitch and they buy it every time and you know they’re going to buy it. And it’s kind of like it’s gone from 180 IQ down to a solid 95 IQ sales process.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Of the person selling?

Rob Snyder: From the person selling. Yes. Still magical to the buyer, but the person selling. Like you as a founder, you could do it in your sleep, you know, every like, all the ins and outs and so at that point, or nearing that point, or if you’re just literally getting so much demand, so many people coming inbound that you have no time on your calendar at all, then you consider bringing in sales reps. But until then it is, you will bring in a sales rep and the person will fail.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Because why?

Rob Snyder: Sales process is wildly complex and it’s something that only you can kind of do for rules that only make sense in your brain.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So in other words, those rules that only make sense in your brain kind of translating are, only you know what levers to pull to bring out that Yes, or to shape the supplier or to identify the exact contours of that demand.

Rob Snyder: Exactly. Yeah. And it’s kind of you doing magic every time and like pulling some rabbit out of the hat.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: But no, I’m not going to take that like that. That is not repeatable. So what is it do that is magic?

Rob Snyder: No, no, but that’s the point is like what a founder will wind up doing it when it’s not repeatable is you’ll hear them say something that is totally unlike something you’ve ever heard before.

And on the spot you’re going to be like, all right, cool. I’m going to just figure out a solution here. I’m going to figure out something I can pitch and like hope, I think that will work. And like sometimes it does.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Okay, so it really comes from your extreme domain expertise combined with your hopefully extreme understanding of what problems they’re trying to solve and what projects they’re trying to get accomplished. Is that a fair?

Rob Snyder: Yes. Plus like massive IQ that can just kind of figure out a bunch of random things on the fly.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Well, I hope that doesn’t mean everybody needs to be an MIT grad to be successful as a founder. So, we talked about a lot of things and I want to kind of talk on some edge cases, which are real life issues that many founders can face. So sometimes you see tiny pockets of pull, you have your five conversations, and then you see what you think is pull. Is there some danger to that or like, are there patterns in terms of how do you decide that this is a start of something beautiful? Where is that critical mass?

Rob Snyder: Yeah I mean what I think the biggest risk is lukewarm pull to startups. If you find that you have really intense pull in a relatively small market you almost always find pull in an adjacent market that you almost always can expand out of that.

If you find lukewarm pull of people who are like oh yeah this is really interesting I’d love to, yeah maybe we schedule a demo with the team in three weeks and explore. You hear stuff like that that is lukewarm pull and you’re still going to read that as positive versus people saying no I need it right now. Lukewarm pull, you can stay stuck there forever.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Exactly. So what’s the remedy?

Rob Snyder: Yeah don’t start tweaking stuff in your pull hypothesis target. Maybe somebody who’s slightly different like figure out something different. Do not keep doing five calls with that same kind of person with that same kind of pitch.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Okay but you need to see that lukewarm pull more than once.

Rob Snyder: Yeah.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So let’s say I’m targeting I don’t know chief pharmacy officer to pick up your example and pitching a certain case study, a certain customer success story and I’m getting lukewarm pull in all. I don’t stop after the first one is my point right? Am I understanding you?

Rob Snyder: Yeah you’re doing a set of five.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So you start out with a set of five and you’re going to go through the five for a certain I hate to use the word persona but for a certain customer success story.

Rob Snyder: Yeah for certain hypothesis unless you have call one and it goes so poorly and they’re like listen, it’s clear you have never heard of anything in this industry, you’re going to be laughed out of it.

Then you have permission to go back to the drawing board and maybe go get an advisor who knows something about this space and go try to figure something out. But yeah no you want to do five.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: And then you step back and you say okay how did these go and that’s why getting that actual data versus your vague impressions of what you thought happened on the call is so important right?

And that’s why recording that call is really so important versus just discovery. So let’s say that I have been drinking the Kool Aid on the other stuff and I’ve been doing customer discovery and all of this other stuff and now I realize that I don’t want to push anymore I don’t want to sell anymore and I want to start discovering pull. For someone who’s like midstream what is the actionable like what do I start doing tomorrow to make this work for me?

Rob Snyder: Schedule five sales calls.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Geez I walked right into that one, didn’t I?

Rob Snyder: Yeah it’s why I have created this schedule five sales calls. Use this very simple structure for the call and just analyze after five sales calls process. It is the stupid simplest process out there because everything in a founder’s mind is going to want to avoid this. I want to avoid this. This feels uncomfortable. The point is the process has to be simple otherwise we’re going to find an excuse for not doing it.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So if I’m the deep tech founder. I’ve been going to pitch events and I’ve been doing this and I’ve been doing that and meeting investors and trying to network with industry experts and industry leaders you’re saying stop all that. My first step is what is that one case study where this one specific type of industry executive is trying to get this one project completed?

Rob Snyder: Yep.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: I have a hypothesis on what they might have been looking at either from attending all these networking events or my domain knowledge or whatever the case might be and I’m going to put it out there and literally try to sell this product that doesn’t exist.

Rob Snyder: Yes.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So my question to you then is where does price come into all of this?

Rob Snyder: Once you know what their project is, what’s the value of them accomplishing this thing that’s on their to-do list? What’s the value to the organization? What’s the value to them? What are the costs of the alternatives? Then you can triangulate a price from there.

So if it’s like hey if I implement your new fancy deep tech thingy, our revenue’s going to increase by 10 million dollars a year. The alternatives we considered each cost 2 million dollars a year. So and the alternatives that didn’t work for us cost 2 million a year. Okay cool I’ve now got a space that is somewhere around 2 million definitely not up to 10 million all the way but it’s somewhere in that bounds and so I can say, well yeah our solution was going to cost the ballpark of two and a half million.

Then you just let that hang out in the air and then you see what happens. One of two things happens. They’re just like okay cool great and they just continue on and then you just are drenched in sweat after four quiet seconds or they say “we would never pay 2.5 million for that” in which case you say “oh that’s interesting tell me more”.

“2.4 is the most we would ever pay”. I’m like okay whatever right and you just figure out their rationale. I had a friend who did this and the person said I’d never pay a hundred dollars per month for your software. Oh okay, he said for me to pay a hundred dollars a month, they’d have to do these two things as well which were like one day features to add into the product and they’re like all right cool we’ll be back to you tomorrow and that was their first customer.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Wow, so you’re now just stacked on another very uncomfortable thing for founders which is first of all you’re making me go and sell which is anathema it’s just like hard as hell and then on top of that if everything goes well now I have to have the price conversation. Do you have any when does that happen typically in the way that you work with?

Rob Snyder: Yeah so it’s going to depend enterprise like big contracts. They usually don’t talk you usually don’t talk about price until they’ve done their 47 different meetings or whatever it is.

It’s actually not always like that but I’ve seen price can come up in the second conversation in an enterprise deal maybe third in smaller deals that you usually talk about on the first call.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: So you do need to have a point of view which means you do need to again go back to that customer success story and is part of that also that you recommend understanding what the value of that is?

Rob Snyder: Yeah of course. Try to understand the value of it but also if you just say a number see how they react, that’s also totally valid. Like I for my company when we or we sold our first customers they were like how much was it how much is this and I wasn’t prepared for that.

So I just said 300 dollars and they said per month, per location, per what it’s like per location per year like all right and then that was that and that was how we got our first customer and then we could test after that but it’s like early on at least in my experience pricing has just been a way to say, are you serious about this, not necessarily like I’m going to optimize every penny out of our price for our first three customers.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Got it so we’ve talked a lot about this. I’m just going to ask one question before we wrap which is there’s an internal change that needs to happen. But there’s a discipline there’s an action part and then an internal transformation part.

The action part is simple, not easy –  simple is I had to get up in the morning and call these five people or set up these five conversations. You work with a lot of founders you still work with a lot of founders in terms of getting that sales mentality and that sales discipline. What has worked the best in terms of getting over that hump of undoing all of this indoctrination around whatever we learned in the past to get them to buy into this?

Rob Snyder: Yeah so usually founders have this idea in their heads that sales is gross and that it is difficult. That at the root it’s like maybe I had a bad experience with a used car salesman or something like that. But in my mind I think that sales means I am convincing you to buy something you don’t want.

So I need to learn all these tactics and I need to learn all these things and I got to cold call you. I got to you know and I’ve got to become a sales bro basically. And so if that’s the model in your mind of course you’re going to avoid it you are totally going to. However you change your mind and say you know what I’m not going to do any convincing. It would be insane for me to be able to convince a chief pharmacy officer to change what is on her to do list.

That’s ridiculous. If she’s going to buy something it’s going to be because she has something that’s going on her to do list that I can help solve unlike others. And so that reduces dramatically the sense of pressure on a sales call and just changes how you think about sales generally.

There is no convincing pushing persuading magic hacks in sales. The hack if there is one is by serving somebody helping them accomplish what matters to them. They wind up paying you and the better you focus on how to serve others the more successful your business becomes then call that a hack but that’s just how sales actually works.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Got it perfect.

So from all of my concluding question to you is from all of the work that you do with founders you have done with founders and learn from your own experience are there non obvious things you’ve observed trends changes anything that’s worth calling out that would help a founder do better in this process than going in cold and just trying to do it by the book? What has experience taught you on this?

Rob Snyder: It’s really not that complicated is honestly the thing. It is way dumber than you think it is. I think we are over intellectualizing this whole startup thing and making everything too complicated. So if you just keep in your mind it’s a project on their to do list with bad options can we help that’s it. That is essentially it.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Awesome, this has been a fantastic conversation one of the most fun ones I’ve had. Is there anything that you wish I’d asked but I didn’t?

Rob Snyder: No this is great.

Shubha K. Chakravarthy: Fantastic thank you very much Rob. I’m excited about your book and I really appreciate you taking the time.

Rob Snyder: Yeah absolutely thank you.