Enthusiasm Isn't Pull: Rob Snyder's Test for Whether Anyone Will Actually Buy

"I could see us using this in Q4."

If you've ever run customer interviews for a new product or a new market, you've heard some version of that sentence, and it probably felt like good news. Rob Snyder would tell you it's close to worthless. In his recent conversation on Lenny's Podcast, Snyder, who has helped dozens of B2B startups find their first real traction, draws a hard line between enthusiasm and what he calls pull, and most validation work, he argues, measures the wrong one.

I think he's right, and the framework he uses to describe the difference is one of the more useful tools I've come across for anyone deciding whether a market is real before building for it.

What PULL means

Snyder lays it out on his newsletter, The Physics of Startups. A buyer will pull a product out of your hands when four things are true at once:

A Project. Something on their to-do list they're actively trying to get done. Not a product category. Nobody has a project to "buy a CRM." They have a project to organize their sales data.

Unavoidable. A reason it has to happen now rather than someday. Most people have dozens of worthwhile projects they're not working on.

A List of options. The ways they've considered getting it done: doing it themselves, hiring someone, using what they already have, buying something.

Limitations. The reasons those options won't work. This is the part that makes them stuck.

His summary is the line I keep coming back to: "an unavoidable project meets unworkable options." A person in that situation would be weird not to buy something that unblocks them. Almost everyone else would be weird to buy it, however much they like it.

That's why he says, in his quickstart guide, that "pain points, problems, value, and wanting your product are NOT RELEVANT." It sounds extreme until you think about how many products solve real problems and still don't sell.

Why enthusiasm feels like evidence

Enthusiasm is easy to collect and pleasant to receive. Someone agrees the problem is real, says your idea is interesting, and maybe even says they'd use it. Each of those is true, and none of them tells you whether they'll drop their current priorities to buy.

In the episode, Snyder's test is to look for pull-shaped actions instead: the buyer asking how to get started, leaning in, trying to buy before there's anything to buy. A vague, someday kind of yes, like the Q4 line, is the opposite. It's someone being kind about a product that doesn't fit anything they're stuck on right now.

The cost of mistaking one for the other is high. In CB Insights' analysis of 101 startup post-mortems, "no market need" was the most common reason founders gave for failing, cited in 42% of cases. Plenty of those founders had interviews full of people who liked the idea.

What pull looked like for me

The clearest pull I've ever seen came before I'd built anything. In 2016 I was at Adaptavist, leading a training pilot for a large client: 20,000 Jira and Confluence users to start, scaling to 140,000. The only training Atlassian offered at the time was seated classroom instruction, and the quote for it came to $6.5 million, for software whose licenses cost $3 million.

Run that through Snyder's four parts and it fits almost exactly. The project was getting tens of thousands of people able to use Jira without flooding the help desk with basic questions. It was unavoidable, because the rollout was planned to reach 140,000 people. The list of options was effectively one, classroom training. And the limitations were brutal: at a dozen people per session, the pilot alone would have taken one trainer more than six years, at more than twice the cost of the software.

Nobody had to tell me they'd love an in-app training product. A buyer who could afford to pay had looked at the only option, done the math, and refused. That proposal became Learn for Jira, and I've written about why that refused quote was the best validation I ever got. In PULL terms, it was a project that couldn't wait meeting an option that couldn't work.

Pull belongs to a person, not a market

The other point Snyder makes in the episode that's worth taking seriously is that pull belongs to a specific person, not to a company or a segment. You don't sell to "mid-market private equity." You sell to a partner at one firm who has a particular project that's stuck right now.

That matters for how you validate a market. A segment can look enormous and contain very few people with pull at any given moment. A finding like "finance teams struggle with reporting" is about a segment. A finding like "the controller at this company has to close the books in five days instead of ten by the end of the quarter, has tried two tools and an outside firm, and none of them handle multi-entity consolidation" is about pull. One of those tells you to build. The other tells you there's a conversation worth having.

It also means you don't need many of them to start. Snyder's quickstart guide puts it plainly: "You don't actually need very much: Just one person in a PULL state, one thing they pull out of your hands." One clear case, understood well enough to find the next person in the same situation, is worth more than a hundred lukewarm interviews.

Using PULL when you're not a startup

Snyder works mostly with startups going from zero to their first million in revenue, and he advises against some common practices, like design partners. But in the episode he also talks about applying the framework inside larger companies, and I'd argue it matters most for a company that already has product-market fit and is looking at a new market. A new market puts you most of the way back to zero. Your existing customers' enthusiasm doesn't transfer, and the people in the new market have their own projects, their own options, and their own reasons those options do or don't work.

So before you size a new market or commit a team to it, find out whether anyone in it has pull. I'd want a handful of real conversations aimed at four questions. What are you trying to get done right now? Why now? What have you tried? Why didn't it work? Snyder makes the same point about discovery in another of his posts: asking about pain points produces information that seems useful and isn't. Ask instead about what they must accomplish and what they're trying to change, and look at what they've actually done recently. If you can't find people with clear answers to all four, the market may still be real, but it isn't ready to pull anything out of your hands yet.

The questions themselves matter, too. If they're generic enough that your best customer and your worst prospect would answer them the same way, they won't tell you who has pull and who's being polite.

A cheap yes leads to an expensive no, and "I could see us using this" is about as cheap as a yes gets. What you're listening for is the buyer who, before you've finished explaining, asks how soon they can start.