Look for pull

Consciously or unconsciously, success is defined by market pull. It is the force that shapes your career trajectory. 

It’s the difference between a mediocre career and making millions (or billions). 

Most people don’t really understand what it means.

The clearest examples are from people that have been in the startup grind for a long time.

You work tirelessly on an idea. Grinding 12 hours a day for years. Squeezing out just enough revenue to survive. You finally decide to throw in the towel, and spend a few months on a throwaway project.

That project grows to millions (or billions) in revenue.

The canonical example is Slack. It started off as a video game, and ended up selling for $27B.

OpenAI was a research lab for a decade before they launched a free consumer preview of their latest LLM. That became the fastest growing product in history, ChatGPT.  

Every successful founder you know has been through this, many times over. Here are my own personal experiences with market pull, at a much smaller scale. 

$1m+ ARR with 2 full-time employees

After launching dozens of different products to varying degrees of marginal success, I was ready to give up the startup dream and get a job.

Instead, I decided to take one last shot and launched a resume building website. Customers really liked it. A few months after launching we put up a paywall. It made $5k in month one. 

The first year we made over $1m a year with 2 full-time employees. 

Why did it work, when all my other stuff failed?

Retroactively, I can come up with dozens of reasons.

It was a simple product that solved a universal problem. The timing was good, people were ready to build their resume on the internet. We crushed it on Google search. It was a good domain name. 

Things succeed and fail for the same reasons. 

People want it or they don't. People wanted this product. It was a good time for this product.

I'm still can't pinpoint the exact reasons it grew so fast. I still don't think it's a great idea. But it was a hell of a business, with real market pull. 

Beware of headfakes. When it feels like pull, but isn't. 

I sold that business in 2020, and started a new one that felt like it had real market pull.

It was a tool that helped remote teams collaborate better. Hundreds of great companies signed up organically, like BarkBox, Uber, Surveymonkey, and Verizon.

But it just wasn’t growing - despite constantly improving the product. No real virality. Impossible to monetize. A few mid-market deals on enterprise timelines. We worked tirelessly but everything felt hard.

100s of fundraising calls and one commitment.

1000s of customer signups but just dozens of paying customers.

Finally, I made the decision to shut down that business. We found a buyer, and moved on.

This is the most dangerous zone to be in. As a founder, you’re an eternal optimist. The next big growth curve is always around the next corner.

Just build that feature. Close that next customer. 

It turns out, that entire market that we were in wasn’t really a category.

Billions of dollars of funding for the "virtual office" category was burned.

Slack and Teams won. 

Lighting strikes again, in a bigger bottle 

After selling, I started another new thing. 

It felt like even more of a grind.

But this time, I approached it differently. My goal wasn’t to build any business - it was to build a venture-backed business that grew fast.

To systematically look for pull. 

In order for that to happen, the strategy needed to change. You can’t brute force a billion dollar business in the same way you can a million dollar one.

You need to work hard to find the product and market that can scale fast.

We grinded for over a year. Same story - hard to fundraise, no real customer traction, and a tough market. But we kept building and learning. Looking for that glimmer of market pull. That moment when a customer's eyes lit up. 

Then GPT 3.5 happened. We took one of our products and made it 10x faster with AI.

Instead of a DIY website builder, we launched a product that  “Built a website in 30 seconds with AI.”

We showed it to people at coffee shops, and they lost their minds. I knew it would be a hit.

We launched it, and got 100 users the first day. 1000s the first week. Within months, we hit millions of users and millions in revenue.

Why did it work?

Luck = preparation x opportunity.

We had done the work to understand our customers, our market, and their needs. To understand that they wanted the solution, not something that gave them more work to do.

We built a novel product with new technology.

We were early enough.   

Then the market kicked in.

ChatGPT launched, and anything AI started growing insanely fast. Being first to market with a novel product that people love in a fast-growing category is a good recipe.

This doesn’t mean our work is done. Far from it. We are working harder than ever, the market has evolved, and there are many more opportunities we need to unlock to grow from our current scale to our ambition level. 

Why you need to constantly look for pull  

Market pull isn’t constant. It doesn’t make things easy. It makes things possible. Those two instances of finding market pull will create more value and  more revenue than 100x everything else I built combined. The second business that worked is already much larger than the first one. Both of them are successes on the scale of businesses but rounding errors on the scale of venture (for now...) 

Some advice for founders deep in the grind of looking for pull: 

Work hard for things to feel easy - don’t work hard for things to continue to be hard.

You can spend years of your career on stuff that just will not work. That is both emotionally and economically painful. Take as many swings as you have the energy for to find something that really works. 

I typically dislike sports metaphors, but here’s a simple one to explain the journey towards non-linear business success. 

Imagine pushing to exhaustion on a stationary bike vs a fine-tuned race machine. No matter how hard you push on a stationary bike, you’ll never get anywhere. You’ll just be tired. Bored. Depressed. Alone.

And no one will care.  

You need to be in an environment where eventually your effort is compounded.

Get on the road and start exploring.

Start building your personal map to success. There will be a variety of terrain. Some flat. Some cobblestones. Some grades that seem impossible. Some downhills that seem easy.

You will get more fit as you keep riding. Your navigation skills will improve. You will start to see around some corners. You’ll learn how to tune your bike.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t hard - it’s always hard. But it’s the right kind of hard.

One day you’ll know the route. One day you’ll put the hammer down on the pedals and think to yourself “damn, I’m really good at this.” The next day you’ll hit a patch of gravel and wipe out.

Just get up, and keep riding.

One day you’ll find that magical market pull. 

You’ll know when you do.