Product-Market Fit Starts With a Buyer Blocked by Inadequate Options

Rob Snyder distinguishes a product that seems valuable from one a buyer needs now. A founder can identify a real pain point, build a differentiated product, and collect enthusiastic feedback without giving customers a reason to change their priorities. As Snyder puts it, a prospect may say, “I’m not gonna drop my priorities to buy it.”

Pull exists when someone is already trying to get something done, is blocked by the options available, and sees the product as a way through.

Snyder’s framework names four conditions: a Project the person is trying to complete; an Unavoidable reason to do it now; a List of options they have considered; and Limitations that make those options inadequate. The last two matter because urgency alone does not make a customer buy. A team may have a mandated project but choose to do it internally. A person may dislike their current process but be content to leave it alone. The buyer has to be both under pressure to act and unable to make acceptable progress with the alternatives.

Snyder describes this as “blocked demand”: a person is trying to move away from the status quo, but the available options are not good enough. An unavoidable project meets unworkable options. Someone in that position would be “weird NOT to buy”; for others, given their priorities and options, it would be strange to buy.

That is why pull is something a person has, not something a company or market has. An enterprise vendor is not selling to “SpaceX” in the abstract. It is selling to a particular person there—the head of legal, for example—who has a project on her list and cannot complete it with the available options. Even within the same company, one person may be blocked and another may have no reason to change.

In conversations with that person, Snyder expects to hear something like: “Wait a second, you can do what? Okay, how do we get started?” Praise is weaker evidence. A prospect can call a product impressive, futuristic, or likely to save money without having any intention of acting. If the response is “send more information” or “we’ll think about it,” that enthusiasm is not proof of demand.

For Rob Snyder the framework is useful before a founder has settled on a product idea. Rather than choosing among speculative product concepts, a founder can write down a hypothesis about a specific person: what that person is trying to do, why it needs to happen now, what options they have tried, and why those options fail. The hypothesis can then be tested by asking whether that person tries to buy—even before there is a finished product.

Snyder advises finding the problem through firsthand experience rather than relying on brainstorming or a small number of remote interviews. A friend who wanted to serve small businesses began by shadowing people in different industries. Solar-panel installers proved a poor fit: he disliked the work and they did not warm to him. He eventually spent days with independent physical therapists, observing their work closely and even considering buying a physical-therapy franchise so he could inspect its finances. Snyder cannot recall the specific task the friend identified, or the precise limitation in the therapists’ existing options. He recalls that the friend wrote a pull hypothesis, showed it to one therapist, and asked whether it was accurate and whether they would buy help. The therapist recognized the problem and said they would. The friend then spoke with five others, who also “pulled.” Snyder presents the repeated response as evidence that the insight was not limited to one person; he does not specify that each of the five agreed to buy.

The example illustrates two reasons to get close to the work. First, an insight may only become visible through observation; it might not emerge from a whiteboard session or even from an interview. Second, building a company requires thousands of decisions about how to serve customers. Without firsthand knowledge of their work, the founder has less basis for making those decisions.

Among the roughly 50 companies he has advised, Snyder estimates that about 10 percent of ideas came from founders’ own experience and 90 percent from going out to gain firsthand experience. Solving your own problem can work, he says, when it is genuinely a problem you would pay someone to solve. It is weaker when the founder merely believes the problem should have a solution. His example is Emily Choi-Greene at Clearly AI, who worked in security engineering at AWS and encountered a problem she herself would have paid to have solved. That is different from building something because it seems generally useful.

The same principle can apply outside B2B software. Snyder says people in consumer businesses have used the framework too, and Lenny Rachitsky points to Spanx as an example of a founder selling one-on-one and watching people’s reactions. The point is not that every founder must follow the same process. It is that an idea grounded in direct contact with the customer’s problem is more informative than one derived only from theory.

A simple way to test the hypothesis is with two slides. The first states, in the customer’s terms, what they are trying to do, why now, what they have considered, and why those options are insufficient. The founder asks whether the description is roughly right. The second gives a plain conceptual account of how the product could help. The first slide should prompt recognition—“Oh my God, yeah, that’s exactly the thing.” The second should prompt questions about how it works and how to move forward.

The test is behavior, not just verbal agreement. A potential customer saying “I’d pay for that” is more meaningful if they immediately ask how to start, or offer to pay before the product exists. A person who places the possibility in a future quarter is not showing the same urgency.

Rob Snyder expects many early hypotheses to be wrong. He has seen only one or two companies find pull from the beginning. A lukewarm response is not a reason to build harder or polish the pitch; it is information that the person may not be blocked in the way the founder assumed.

When a prospect is not responding to the proposed idea, Snyder recommends asking an open question: “Is there anything on your to-do list that you would pay me to do right now?” He calls this the Hail Mary. One startup approached government buyers with an applicant-tracking system. A prospect thought it was somewhat interesting, but, when asked what they would actually pay to have solved, named a problem with job descriptions. That became the startup’s first contract and the basis for a different direction.

The question also changes the founder’s posture toward selling. Snyder says he used to find sales uncomfortable as an introvert and overthinker, because he imagined he had to convince someone to buy. Reframing the call as an attempt to discover whether the person is stuck—and whether he can help—makes it easier to hear “no” and to keep exploring when the original idea does not fit.

Some founders need to intensify that search. Snyder calls this “goblin mode”: a break-glass response when ordinary outreach is not producing insight. It can mean going to a conference and scheduling a large number of meetings, getting on a plane to meet potential customers, or, in the case of Teero, having a friend’s parents go door to door to dental offices to talk with people about dental staffing. The point is not that frantic activity is always wise. It is a way to get in front of customers when the founder is stuck and needs new evidence quickly.

He also advises against delaying those conversations until a product is built. The belief that a prospect needs to see a finished product before they can understand it can keep a founder insulated from the market. AI tools may make it faster to build a rough version, but that is not a reason to postpone contact. Nor does he usually recommend design partners. In his experience, a design partner may agree with the vision and offer extensive feedback without ever buying; the relationship can reward someone for helping the startup rather than for getting an urgent job done. Customers with real pull, he argues, want the job completed.

If a prospect requires a pilot as part of the way their organization buys, a founder can respond to that requirement. The objection is to proactively offering pilots, proofs of concept, or design partnerships in place of a direct attempt to sell. Making a customer a collaborator in building the product can weaken the urgency that originally made them interested.

To find potential customers who are not already in a founder’s network, Rob Snyder recommends short, unusual messages on LinkedIn or by email. The purpose is not to explain the value proposition or ask whether the recipient has a particular pain point. It is simply to give them a reason to talk. The pull, if it exists, is on their to-do list; the outreach message is only a way to start the conversation.

One startup wrote, “Snoop Dogg invested in us and I thought you’d find it interesting too. Would you be open to chat?” Another example was a founder saying they had left a PhD and were working on something for content marketers. The detail needs to be interesting to the recipient: a claim that might attract a technology executive may mean little to someone who runs a plumbing business. The message can be only a sentence or two and does not need extensive personalization. Snyder has not seen AI-generated personalization work well at this stage; it can tell people things they already know about themselves and read as machine-written.

The goal is to have two to three conversations per day with potential customers. Snyder’s rough LinkedIn target for building toward that is to add 100 to 150 potential customers a week, or about 20 a day. Of those contacted, he looks for 30–40 percent to accept the connection request, and 30–50 percent of those to reply. These are diagnostic benchmarks, not guarantees of demand. If acceptance is low, the sender’s profile may look like an imminent sales pitch or otherwise fail to establish credibility. If people accept but do not reply, the message may not be interesting enough.

Rob Snyder organizes an early sales call into six steps: intro, discovery, transition, concept, how, and next step. These are stages, not timed blocks. A prospect might reveal the need immediately, or discovery might take much longer. Snyder’s on-screen script describes the sequence: the introduction earns the right to ask discovery questions; discovery fills out the customer’s PULL; the transition confirms that pull and shifts to the product; concept and “how” explain its fit; and the final step checks the fit and agrees on what happens next. The sequence is a starting point, and he says founders can adjust it as they learn from running calls.

The introduction earns permission to ask questions. Snyder often opens with, “Why did you take the call with me today?” The answer may reveal the project and its urgency without further prompting. If the prospect only says they took the call because the founder reached out, he proposes an agenda based on that answer and asks if it sounds right. He then asks permission to explore the prospect’s context. Without that transition, discovery can feel like an interrogation and yield little useful information.

During discovery, the founder tries to establish all four parts of PULL. Questions should surface whether there is something the person is trying to do now, whether it can wait, and whether existing tools, methods, or staff are good enough. Snyder identifies the alternatives question as one of the hardest to ask: perhaps the prospect can already do the job internally, and the current option is acceptable. But that answer can save a founder from spending years trying to sell a product the market does not need.

Once the buyer’s situation is clear, the transition confirms the project and shifts the discussion to supply: what the product might do. The recommendation is to describe the concept in a small, simple way that fits the customer’s stated need, rather than deliver a broad product vision. If the prospect is trying to make a website but finds conventional point-and-click tools too cumbersome, for example, the pitch can be a concise restatement of that problem and a proposed fit. The customer’s next question—“How exactly does that work?”—is more useful than a polite reaction to a sweeping presentation.

The final steps explain how the product fits and establish a next action, such as onboarding or a follow-up call. Snyder generally schedules 30 minutes, in part because shorter blocks may be overlooked on a calendar. A very early company may have no demo to show; later, a short demonstration may fit into the first call.

A successful call need not always end in a purchase. It should leave the founder with either a clearer account of the person’s pull or a clear understanding of why the product is not relevant. Snyder suggests reviewing what was learned after about five calls. If every prospect is leaning back and the conversations teach the founder nothing, something is likely wrong with the hypothesis or the way the team is reaching people. In one example, five calls into banking produced little interest, but a referral to defense led to a prospect who responded with immediate urgency. The team revised its hypothesis.

Snyder describes the mindset as “selling to learn.” The founder is not trying to push a product through the call; they are checking whether the prospect acts as if buying is the natural next move. If not, the conversation can still inform another hypothesis. If the founder feels they are trying to convince someone, that feeling is a reason to examine what is off.

The question is not whether switching is generally difficult. It is whether the founder can find people who are already trying to change. That also shapes how to think about “10 times better.” Snyder does not see a fixed improvement ratio as the key. In the Jump example, generic AI note-takers were not adequate for financial advisers because they did not integrate with their CRMs and advisers were unsure whether they met relevant compliance requirements. If one product enables the job and the alternatives do not, the difference is decisive for that buyer.

Rachitsky describes Linear as winning customers from Jira through a better-crafted experience that engineers like using. The framework would ask which users are impeded by Jira’s experience and whether Linear removes that obstacle. Snyder had tried to apply the lesson of “better UX wins” in HR software, but the experience was not relevant to the buyer, so it did not create pull. Even a much better household printer, he says, will not sell to someone who has no reason to replace the one they have.

When a prospect wants the product but it does not yet exist, Rob Snyder recommends returning with a concept and a plan. A founder who heard a pharma executive describe slow, poor market research restated the need, then returned a few days later with a rough mock-up. After getting feedback, he asked whether there was anything else the executive needed to know to decide whether to proceed. The answer was price.

The PULL framework can help set an initial price range. Snyder suggests considering the value of completing the project and the cost of the alternatives. If the customer currently spends $50,000 a year on consultants, that cost can anchor a proposal at a similar level, while the value of getting the work done faster offers another reference point. Early on, the main question is often whether the customer is willing to transact, not whether the founder has found the perfect price.

For a larger deal, a founder may need to coordinate multiple steps after a champion agrees that the product is a fit. The recommendation is to work backward from when the buyer needs to see results. If the target is to be live by the first quarter, the buyer and seller can map the steps required to deploy by then. That date becomes a forcing function for the sales process.

A sale does not require a finished software platform. Snyder has seen companies sell a service-shaped version of the product, with people doing some of the work while software operates behind the scenes. That can let the company deliver the outcome and learn what needs to be automated. It carries a real risk: the company can get stuck as a services business. He does not dismiss that risk, but argues that early delivery can expose the work more directly than handing over a login and hoping the product succeeds.

For Rob Snyder getting a customer to buy is not the end of the search. Each customer is “guaranteed to churn until X”; the delivery task is to discover X and design onboarding so that every customer reaches it. X is not necessarily product usage or a high satisfaction score. It is the point at which the customer has received enough value that leaving would be surprising.

Snyder cites a Slack usage threshold discussed by Mark Roberge as an example of a leading indicator: users who sent a certain volume of messages in an early period were more likely to remain. In Snyder’s own restaurant-retention software startup, the decisive moment was when a restaurant received a notification that an employee was about to quit and managed to prevent it, often within the first two weeks. Customers who experienced that result became highly enthusiastic and told others about the product. The company designed onboarding around getting customers to that moment.

He advises founders to deliver the product firsthand to early customers rather than simply sending a login. The work helps reveal what customers actually need to experience before the product feels indispensable. The founder should keep asking whether the customer has reached that point, and what would make them stay.

High churn is painful but can expose the difference between customers who had pull and those who did not. One horizontal AI-workflows product saw most customers leave, while a small subset kept using a particular workflow. Those users were freight forwarders. The company shifted from a low-priced horizontal product toward a premium product for freight forwarders. Churn, in this account, can reveal a narrower group with a recurring need that the original broad hypothesis missed.

Once a company finds customers who buy and stay, Rob Snyder proposes a different mental model for growth: a startup is a factory for repeating one successful case study. The case study describes a customer who was trying to do something, whose existing options were inadequate, and who got an outcome from the company’s product or service.

The founder’s task is not to accumulate unrelated success stories. It is to make one story repeatable: find similar customers, help them achieve the same kind of outcome, and make the route from prospect to customer to retained customer reliable. Snyder calls the people who respond eagerly before buying and behave as if the product is indispensable afterward “hell yes” customers. The company should look for more customers like them.

The case-study factory has three main stages: pipeline, sales, and delivery. The company can use the theory of constraints to identify whichever stage currently limits growth. If not enough prospects are entering the pipeline, that is the problem to solve; once it is no longer the bottleneck, the constraint may shift to closing or retention. A repeatable case study also helps sales. A prospect can compare their situation with the example and decide whether the result is relevant. It can qualify customers who resemble the case and disqualify those who would require a different, less repeatable effort.

Rob Snyder says established companies can use the framework when they launch a second product or test a new feature. A company can take an idea to existing customers and see whether they will buy before the feature is built. He has heard of product ideas that succeeded because customers asked for a capability during sales calls, while ideas developed through internal whiteboarding did not work.

Ideally, the founders lead this work; if they cannot, Snyder advises people responsible for zero-to-one efforts to sell the idea and learn through the selling process. The mechanism is the same: articulate a hypothesis about who is blocked, test it with real customers, and look for an attempt to buy rather than approval of the concept.