Episode 1014: The Power of Pull — What Most Startup Founders Get Wrong

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Newt's World, Episode 1014

The Power of Pull — What Most Startup Founders Get Wrong

Host: Newt Gingrich
Guest: Rob Snyder, Serial Startup Founder & Harvard Innovation Labs Fellow
Date: July 26, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Newt Gingrich sits down with Rob Snyder, entrepreneur and author of "The Power of Pull: What You Need to Know About Customer Demand to Build a Successful Startup and Why Most Founders Get It Wrong." The conversation centers on the critical mistakes startup founders make around customer demand, the dangers of building products based on assumptions, and how success comes from deeply understanding what customers actually want. Snyder discusses practical lessons drawn from his own failures and successes, introduces the "pain cave," and outlines the pull method—a radically customer-centric approach to starting and scaling a company.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Rob Snyder’s Startup Journey: Learning by Failure

• Early Missteps (03:17)

  • Snyder describes leaving Harvard Business School and McKinsey "with a little bit of an ego," believing he could build a successful tech startup just by following conventional wisdom: raising venture capital, conducting market research, and creating a big vision.
  • Despite a “logical” product and diligent efforts, Snyder faced two years of failure and frustration—what he terms the “pain cave.”

  "I spent two years in the pain cave...just nobody would buy the product. That was so logical. It made so much sense. They should totally have wanted it. It would have provided them so much value. And it just kept not working." — Rob Snyder [03:17]

• The "Pain Cave" Explained (04:39)

  • The pain cave is a period of deep doubt when a founder cannot understand why a seemingly strong business isn’t working, no matter how many plans or iterations are tried.

  "Plan A hasn't worked. Plan B hasn't worked. Plan C hasn't worked. You keep changing things and it keeps not working...it's almost impossible to figure out why." — Rob Snyder [04:54]

The Breakthrough: Listen to the Customer

• The Turning Point (06:24)

  • The company's breakthrough came unexpectedly: a Dunkin’ franchise owner called, not interested in the original product, but willing to pay for help with a different problem. This led the team to throw out their original code and build a solution for a more urgent customer need—employee recruiting and retention.

  "A owner of Dunkin franchisees...gave me a call and said, 'Hey, I have no idea what you were trying to sell me, but I would pay you to do this other thing.'" — Rob Snyder [06:24]

• Actual Product-Market Fit (08:21)

  • The original product was a workforce scheduling tool; no one cared. The new focus—helping franchisees hire and retain staff—addressed customers' urgent priorities, especially during labor shortages.

  "We tried to sell a workforce management product...Turns out nobody cared. They said, 'help us recruit employees and retain the employees we already have.'" — Rob Snyder [08:21]

Small Changes, Big Impact

• Simplicity Wins (09:01–11:37)
  • The new solution was practical: software that reached out to former applicants and checked in with new hires at set intervals to prevent preventable turnover.

  "It was way more practical of a product...than what we had envisioned that we wanted them to want." — Rob Snyder [09:01]

  • Checking in via email or text at milestones drastically reduced early turnover for "dumb reasons" like losing a uniform.

  "They had 10, 15% of employees quitting in the first 30 days for totally preventable reasons...when we automatically started checking in with employees, they would stop quitting for preventable reasons." — Rob Snyder [10:33]

The Pull Method: Stop Selling, Start Listening

• From 'Pain Cave' to Customer Pull (12:30–13:02)

  • Real success came not from selling customers on a founder's vision, but from responding to what customers actually prioritized.

• Metaphor: Lecturing Apples (13:33)

  • Snyder compares the old approach to "lecturing apples about the ROI of falling to the ground," highlighting the futility of trying to convince customers of something they aren’t motivated to do.

  "I view myself in the pain cave as basically having been lecturing apples about the ROI of falling to the ground..." — Rob Snyder [13:52]

Understanding Real Demand

• The Matt Damon Haircut Story (14:52)

  • As a teen, Snyder brought photos of Matt Damon to the barber, thinking he wanted a haircut; really, he wanted to look like Matt Damon. A metaphor for founders mistaking what customers say or do for what they truly want.

  "I wanted to be Matt Damon. Coming out of Great Clips. What that tells you is that...demand isn't rational." — Rob Snyder [14:52]

• Pull vs. Push (18:39)

  • The pull method is about uncovering and serving customer priorities so effectively that customers "pull" your product from you, rather than you "pushing" it onto them.

  "If they do need help, then all you have to do is very simply describe how you might help them and see what they do. And that's what a sales call actually feels like." — Rob Snyder [18:39]

• Anecdote: The 'Hell Yes' Customer (19:58)

  • Successful startups, Snyder observes, experience the customer "pull" their product out—sometimes even doing the work to buy it themselves.

Customer Requests vs. True Demand

• Case Study: Basecamp (20:27–22:47)
  • Customers often request features they describe as solutions, but genuine demand is in the underlying problem, not the spec. Basecamp realized this and built simple fixes for “demand,” not just “supply.”

  "Customer saying, I want X, I want this feature, I want this part. That's not what demand actually is. Demand is a totally separate thing out there in the customer's world..." — Rob Snyder [21:57]

Pitching: Stories over Logic

• The Awful Pitch (23:27)

  • Snyder recounts a mortifying episode where a logical, fact-heavy pitch flopped; replacing it with a customer story led to far more engagement.

  "I spent weeks writing a pitch that was, I thought, so convincing...In the first two, three minutes, it was just clear. Everybody had tuned out...it was mortifying." — Rob Snyder [23:27]

  • The lesson: Start with the customer’s experience and priorities, not the founder's logic.

• Change from Their Perspective (25:36–27:10)

  • Both Gingrich and Snyder draw parallels between sales and politics: successful persuasion starts with what’s in the audience’s head, not the speaker’s.

  "Any effort to communicate change has to occur within the framework of the person who's about to be changed, not the person who's making the sales pitch." — Newt Gingrich [25:36]

Scaling: The Success Story Factory

• Building Repeatability (30:15–32:11)

  • Snyder urges startups to focus on creating “a success story factory,” repeating what worked spectacularly for one customer, then scaling that scenario instead of reinventing the wheel every time.

  "If you’re trying to repeat that one hell yes success story, well, then you can kind of envision a business as a factory that just produces almost near clones of your success story." — Rob Snyder [30:15]

• The Gordian Knot Analogy (32:11–34:05)

  • Snyder likens entrepreneurship to untangling the Gordian knot: a tangle of interconnected variables. The “pull” method and success story factory act as the sword that simplifies the problem, making startups more manageable.

Entrepreneurial Mindset

• A vs. D Students (34:05)
  • Snyder quotes Bob Moesta: "A students don't get started until they have the answer. D students get started because they don't have the answer."
  • Overthinkers (often from prestigious backgrounds) try to solve the business in their heads before acting; D students just get to work and iterate in real time.

Practical Takeaway for Founders

• Get Out of the Pain Cave (35:05)

  • The most important advice: stop trying to sell your idea—ask customers what they want, and build from there.

  "Find one customer, and instead of saying, here's what I want to sell, you flip that and ask, what do you want to buy? What can I help you with? It will change your entire trajectory as an entrepreneur." — Rob Snyder [35:05]

• Political Parallel (35:25)

  • Gingrich compares this to Lincoln’s philosophy: with popular sentiment, nothing can fail. Listening is paramount—in politics and business.

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Notable Quotes

• On failing old-school startup wisdom:

  "I was just constantly unlearning everything that I thought I knew." — Rob Snyder [03:17]

• On customer priorities:

  "None of us can convince people to buy things they're not prioritizing." — Rob Snyder [13:02]

• On pushing vs. pulling:

  "You should try to pull your product or service out of your hands versus you feeling like you are pushing it into theirs." — Rob Snyder [18:39]

• On product-market fit:

  "I want them to go and find one customer...and instead of saying, here's what I want to sell, you flip that and ask, what do you want to buy?" — Rob Snyder [35:05]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Startup failures and pain cave explained — [03:12–06:13]
• Breakthrough via customer pull — [06:24–07:55]
• Success in hiring/retention tools — [08:21–11:37]
• Lecturing apples metaphor — [13:33–14:34]
• Matt Damon haircut story — [14:52–16:11]
• Overview of the pull method — [18:29–19:41]
• Basecamp and the supply/demand distinction — [20:27–22:39]
• Pitching disaster and lessons — [23:27–25:36]
• Success story factory and the Gordian knot — [30:15–34:05]
• A vs. D students in entrepreneurship — [34:05–34:50]
• If you're in the pain cave: concrete advice — [35:05–35:22]

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Memorable Moments

• "Lecturing apples about the ROI of falling to the ground" — delightfully illustrates the futility of trying to rationalize customers into wanting something they don't value [13:33].
• Matt Damon haircut story — wry, self-aware analogy for founders’ misreading of customer wants [14:52].
• The disastrous conference pitch — a vivid lesson in the limits of rational persuasion and the power of storytelling [23:27].
• "Hell yes" customer and the success story factory — flips founder perspective from invention to repeatable servitude [30:15].

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Conclusion

This episode is a masterclass in product-market fit, customer discovery, and humility for founders. Rob Snyder debunks conventional startup advice, demonstrating the central importance of genuinely listening to, and responding to, real customer priorities—however mundane or simple—rather than building elaborate visions in a vacuum. The combination of Snyder's stories, metaphors, and Gingrich's historical/political parallels makes this an indispensable listen for early-stage entrepreneurs (or anyone struggling in the “pain cave”).

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Recommended Action for Listeners:
If you’re a founder, stop pushing your product—go talk to one customer, ask what they actually need, and start building your own success story factory from there.
Book: "The Power of Pull" by Rob Snyder
Host sign-off: "With popular sentiment, nothing can fail... listening is everything."

Transcript

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[Newt Gingrich]

Welcome to Newts World podcast on the iHeart podcast network. I am really pleased to welcome my guest, Rob Snyder. Rob is a serial startup founder and a fellow at Harvard Innovation Labs. He graduated from Harvard Business School and previously worked at McKinsey Company. He's also an entrepreneur in residence and venture partner for Early Stage Venture Capital Funds. Snyder lives with his wife and daughter in New Hampshire, and he's joining me to discuss his new book, the Power of Pool. What you need to know about customer demand to build a successful startup and why most founders get it wrong, in which he argues that nearly everything founders are taught about market research, business plans, and building customer demand is backwards. As you can imagine, this will be fascinating. Rob, welcome and thank you for joining me on Newts World.

[Rob Snyder]

Thank you for having me.

[Newt Gingrich]

I'm curious, first of all, how did you get into this?

[Rob Snyder]

Well, coming out of business school, you come out of McKinsey and Harvard Business School with a little bit of an ego, you might say, thinking, you know, I can kind of do anything. Why not become a tech billionaire? Like, that seems like the next step in my life. And so I did all the things I was supposed to do, raised money from venture capitalists, did a bunch of market research, interviewed a bunch of customers, created this big market vision and tried to push that onto the world, onto potential customers, and spent years, two years back to back, not succeeding. Just nobody would buy the product. That was so logical. It made so much sense. They should totally have wanted it. It would have provided them so much value. And it just kept not working. And it was awful. And I felt like I was just constantly unlearning everything that I thought I knew. And then the business randomly took off and we went zero to 4 million in revenue in two years. And it worked. Nothing like what I was taught or what I thought. And so it was my second mba, I guess, was in figuring out how startups actually work. And then I talked to a bunch of other founders who were in very similar situations. They tried to push their products onto the market and the markets didn't pull. And they all had a similar kind of unlearning as I did.

[Newt Gingrich]

I have to start with, you have this great line, which I think I've lived through. Talk about a pain cave. What is the pain cave? And why do you think almost every founder ends up there at some point?

[Rob Snyder]

The pain cave is the most awful place. I spent two years in the pain cave, and the pain cave is this place you go when everything makes sense in your head. The business makes total sense. It could provide a lot of value to people, and yet for some reason, it's not working. And plan A hasn't worked, Plan B hasn't worked. Plan C hasn't worked. You keep changing things and it keeps not working. And when it keeps not working, you just realize you have no idea why the business isn't working. Is it because you have the wrong product? Is it because you're bad at sales? Is it because your thesis is wrong? Or is your entire philosophy of business backwards? And it's just almost impossible to figure out why the thing that isn't working isn't working. And in the pain cave, I just felt like I was going crazy, like everything that I had learned was not applying in the real world. And I think every founder spends time there because we all start startups basically the same way, which is we come up with an idea in theory or a vision for how we believe the world should work, and we try to impose that vision on an uncaring world. That's just the wrong premise for starting a company.

[Newt Gingrich]

My first reaction is, so why don't you stop and listen to the customers and invent something else? Why do you persist in staying inside the pain cave?

[Rob Snyder]

Well, maybe if I had talked to you a couple years ago, you would have told me that. It's common sense. When you say it like that, it just doesn't seem right. Aren't we supposed to come up with a brilliant idea and convince customers that there's a different possible world for them, that we could provide them a ton of value? It's so compelling to think of the world in this way where, you know, we, the innovators need to go into our. I don't know, we need to go and think and whiteboard and come up with a better view of the world. And yet, when it actually worked for me, it was because a owner of Duncan franchisees who owned 40 Duncan's in Massachusetts, he gave me a call and said, hey, I have no idea what you were trying to sell me, but I would pay you to do this other thing. Will you do that for me? And that's how the business actually worked.

[Newt Gingrich]

The thing which drew you into the business was a dead end, but in the process, you made contacts that invented a new business.

[Rob Snyder]

Exactly.

[Newt Gingrich]

So then what happened to the original idea?

[Rob Snyder]

Oh, the original idea. We had spent years writing code. We threw it all away. We threw everything away. It never saw the light of day. We built an entirely new business, entirely new product, entirely new brand, everything based on this one customer giving us a call and saying, hey, I don't want what you were trying to sell me, but I will pay you to do this. This thing I actually need in my life.

[Newt Gingrich]

And then did it turn out that there were other potential customers that had the same need?

[Rob Snyder]

Yeah, it turned out that, yes, in fact, then we would go and talk to another owner of restaurants and say, hey, this Dunkin guy called us and said this. I don't know if you need something similar. And the owner would be like, oh, my gosh, that's exactly what I need too. We just kept repeating that we scaled to tens of thousands of restaurants in

[Newt Gingrich]

the US Just to show my ignorance here. What were you actually selling?

[Rob Snyder]

Early on, we tried to sell a workforce management product, which is just a fancy scheduling software for employees. We tried to sell that because we thought we could do scheduling better. Turns out nobody cared. When it actually worked, they said, hey, could you Help us recruit employees and retain the employees we already have. Because hiring is our number one priority right now. Retention is our number two priority. Could you help us do something with that? And so we built a hiring and retention software.

[Newt Gingrich]

When you say hiring, was it a way that people could approach filling out forms and being considered, or what's the deal?

[Rob Snyder]

Yeah, totally. What it wound up being was actually really interesting. They said, hey, we're having really hard time finding candidates for our jobs. Could you help us find candidates? We have a bunch of people who've applied to us in the past that we've probably never reached out to. These restaurants have databases of thousands of candidates they had never reached out to. Is it. Could you just contact them for us? And so we built the software that would contact past applicants, former employees, and it would say, hey, you applied here in the past. Would you be interested in coming back to work for us? And it would just do that automatically. And it would also check in with new employees when they were hired. You know, on day seven, day 30, how's your job going? Anything we can help you with? Because they found that a lot of their employees were quitting in the first 30, 60, 90 days for, oh, I lost my uniform or things like that. It was way more practical of a product in a business than what we had envisioned that we wanted them to want.

[Newt Gingrich]

Doesn't the ability to recruit and retain become almost universal?

[Rob Snyder]

Oh, yes, especially when, you know, it's Covid and there's a massive labor shortage.

[Newt Gingrich]

When you start talking about the scale of recruiting. Some industries, as you know better than me, where your retention rate is so bad, then you're spending so much money churning that you never get people trained because they leave.

[Rob Snyder]

Yeah, you lose half your workforce in the first 14 days after they're hired. It's unbelievable.

[Newt Gingrich]

So how do you affect that?

[Rob Snyder]

What we did is we would just check in with employees. This is a business that has long since been acquired, but we would check in with employees after they were hired automatically. The employers came to us saying was, hey, we have this thing that we have on the wall for managers where managers are supposed to check in with employees after they're hired on their seventh day, on their 14th day, 30, 60, 90. And the managers are just too busy to do that. So could you build something that automatically does that? We know we have problems. We know we're not the number one workplace in the world. We know people will switch jobs for more money, but we just don't want people quitting for reasons that are absolutely preventable like logistical things. I lost my uniform and I'm embarrassed about it, or I don't know where to find my schedule or like these very common things. So they had 10, 15% of employees were quitting in the first 30 days for totally preventable reasons that they had no visibility into. And so when we automatically started checking in with employees, they would stop quitting for preventable reasons.

[Newt Gingrich]

I'm hearing you suggest that something as simple as an email that asked me if I was satisfied with my first two weeks had a sufficiently big impact on my propensity to stay. I mean, that's almost like a no brainer.

[Rob Snyder]

This is what I've actually found is really interesting if we zoom out about entrepreneurship, is I came in with these massive visions about how I thought world should work. And basically every entrepreneur does this exact same thing. And then what actually works is a simple email or text message to check in with employees to make sure they're not quitting for dumb reasons. It's way smaller, it's way more humble, but it's also what fits what the buyer is actually prioritizing versus what we want them to prioritize.

[Newt Gingrich]

So you go from the pain cave to something as simple as having your potential customer tell you what they need, then designing an online system that actually solves a real problem for them, as opposed to you having to try to sell them on your solution for a problem they actually don't think they have.

[Rob Snyder]

Exactly. Or a problem they might agree to, but they're not prioritizing. This has caused me to really think about, okay, how do markets actually work? Because I always thought people buy things because they are convinced to buy them. Well, none of us can convince people to buy things they're not prioritizing. It's way simpler than that. Just what are they prioritizing? What are they trying to do? What do they need help with? And then we can design something simple that helps them get that thing done.

[Newt Gingrich]

And I really like the way that you use language that's vivid. So you go from the pain cave. Now you're telling us about lecturing apples about their pain points to get them to fall from the tree. That whole imagery is really quite something.

[Rob Snyder]

It felt that way. It feels really embarrassing when you realize the theory here is there's a cause of somebody buying something, right? And it's quite as simple as, oh, they buy something if they have pain points or if they have problems. It's they're trying to prioritize something and they need your help. In the book I talk about how assuming that apples fall from trees because we convince them to fall from trees, you just imagine. And I view myself in the pain cave as basically having been lecturing apples about the ROI of falling to the ground or the pain points and the problems and how the world would be so much better for them if they fell to the ground, which was totally irrelevant.

[Newt Gingrich]

So you go from there to telling a story about getting haircuts. Walk us through this. I really like the very human way that you relate these things, but tell us about haircuts.

[Rob Snyder]

When I was young, what I would do is I would bring in a picture of Matt Damon and say, this is what I want. And they would cut my hair to look exactly like Matt Damon's hair. And I would always leave unhappy because what I really wanted, what I was really trying to do was not get a haircut that looked like Matt Damon. I was trying to come out looking like Matt Damon. I wanted to be Matt Damon. Coming out of Great clips. What that tells you is that, like, demand what I want isn't rational. You can't just say, oh, you shouldn't want to look like Matt Damon. Well, I'm sorry, I'm 13. I really want to look like Matt Damon. That's what I'm trying to buy here. And you great clips need to understand what I'm really trying to do in my life is look like Matt Damon. And so it's a funny story, but it goes to show that what I really want, what people really want, isn't necessarily rational or it doesn't even have to make sense to ourselves. Like, I didn't understand why I was leaving Great clips unhappy. It took me like 10 years about that of why was I leaving Great clips on happy. And so we need a way to understand how do we understand what people really want? What will they actually pay for? What are they trying to do in their lives? That's just like a vivid example of it.

[Newt Gingrich]

When we come back, Rob will walk us through the pull method itself. What he calls getting a hell yes customer and the two spectacularly bad pitches that taught him how to actually sell.

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[Rob Snyder]

Why is he smiling?

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[Rob Snyder]

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[Newt Gingrich]

Walk us through what you call the pool method. You describe it as getting a hell yes customer. Tell us about the pull method.

[Rob Snyder]

So the pull method is basically a way of selling that is not pushing your product onto potential customers. It is. You know, if you think that your job is to convince those people to buy well, you're going to poke them and prod them. Don't you have these problems? Don't you have these pain points? Don't you want this shiny new car, this fancy product? The pull method says you know what, they have priorities in their lives. They're experts in their own lives. So figure out what it is they're trying to do and where they actually need help and if they actually need help. If they don't need help. It's not a sales conversation no matter what you think it is. If they do need help, then all you have to do is very simply describe how you might help them and see what they do. And that's what a sales call actually feels like. That's what a sales conversation feels like. And they should try to pull your product or service out of your hands versus you feeling like you are pushing it into theirs.

[Newt Gingrich]

You're really looking for the kind of emotion and the kind of demand where, in a sense, they're pulling forward your product rather than you trying to push it on them. Is that a fair way to put it?

[Rob Snyder]

That is 100%, and that's how it feels. I was talking to a founder who has built two unicorns, so $2 billion companies, and he said, you know, it's funny, every time my startups worked, it felt like the customers were pulling the product out of us and we had stopped pushing. They were doing the work to buy and use our product, which would make

[Newt Gingrich]

for a really powerful product.

[Rob Snyder]

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

[Newt Gingrich]

You talk about Basecamp, which is a project management software company, and how it evolved. What was that about?

[Rob Snyder]

So the interesting thing with Basecamp, that story actually is what led me to see that I was doing startups entirely wrong. My entire theory of startups was backwards. What they found was that their customers, their project management software, their customers would submit feature requests. They'd say, hey, I want you to make this kind of button in the software, or something like that. And they always assumed that, okay, if a customer wants it, that's demand. That's demand for this particular button, this particular feature. But what they realized was that that actually is them saying, here's the supply I which is different from demand. Demand is like what was going on in their world. So if someone requests a permissions button, right? Where it's like, hey, I need to be able to do certain things in an application, and other people can't do those things in an application, well, that's them saying, here's the product I want, here's the feature I want, here's the supply I want. The demand is something totally different from that. It's basically them saying, hey, I don't want contractors to be able to delete a project for everybody on the project, which it doesn't lead to them building the permissions feature that the customer requested. That would have taken them six months to build or more. Instead, it led them to just build a simple little warning button that said, hey, you're about to delete this project for like, 40 people. Are you sure you want to do that? Which took them a couple of days to build. And so what they learned from that, a customer saying, I want X, I want this feature, I want this part. That's not what demand actually is. Demand is a totally separate thing out there in the customer's world that is not about the product at all. When you understand demand, what they're trying to do in their lives, then you can figure out what supply to build for them.

[Newt Gingrich]

That also implies, I think, that the customer themselves may not fully appreciate the demand, oh, 100%.

[Rob Snyder]

When a customer says, I want a permissions feature, if you say, why do you want a permissions feature? They say, well, because I want it, Right? Like I just told you, I want it. Now you go make it for me. What you have to do is you have to help them explain their life up until that moment. There's a long history of customers saying, like, no, this is what I specifically want. And then if you understand a little bit differently, oh, what was happening before then, what caused you to ask that? Then both you and them could understand the demand.

[Newt Gingrich]

You tell a story about a pitch that went so badly you still sweat thinking about it. Tell me about that first public pitch at a fast food industry conference.

[Rob Snyder]

We had this really big opportunity within a fast food brand. We had spent a lot of money to sponsor one of their conferences where a bunch of the owners of the brand's restaurants were coming together. And so I had this huge opportunity. I spent weeks writing a pitch that was, I thought, so convincing. It was basically like a logical argument for why they should buy our product. And so I get on stage, I deliver it, and basically in the first, I don't know, two, three minutes, it was just clear. Everybody had tuned out, Everybody had zoned out. It wasn't even just that they were paying. They weren't even paying attention. They started loud conversations and it was mortifying. And as I walked off stage, the person who was giving the pitch right after me was like, yeah, that was really bad. Next time, just tell a very simple story about what one of them did with your help. I'm actually sweating now thinking about it, but it was so awful. And then I did start my presentations just became simple stories after that, and they worked way better.

[Newt Gingrich]

Do you think part of that was just the attitude you brought up on stage?

[Rob Snyder]

I think my entire theory of the case was backwards, which is, I thought my job was to go up there and convince them. Logically, I'm up here convincing you. I'm going to put together a very detailed presentation, almost like a lawyer would, on why you should buy my product. And that just didn't land. It didn't land for the same reason I was in the pain cave years before, because I was trying to impose my will upon them. And instead, the presentation that works is something like, hey, I've been talking with a lot of franchise owners, in fact, Jim, over Here was really struggling with recruitment and retention and he had tried all these different things and found they weren't working. So he plugged in our tool and here's what Jim's life looks like now. And that is way simpler than the, I don't know, probably 30 slide with 6 point font at the end of it is.

[Newt Gingrich]

Therefore, you must buy any effort to communicate. Change has to occur within the framework of the person who's about to be changed, not the person who's making the sales pitch.

[Rob Snyder]

I like that. Yeah, that is 100%. It has to be from their point of view.

[Newt Gingrich]

Well, I always tell people I've made a fair number of speeches in my career. All of my speeches have to start with the audience. It's not what's in my head, it's what's in their head. And if I can find a rhythm where I'm helping them unlock what they already know. There's actually a book written in the 60s called the Responsive Chord by a radio advertiser whose theory was, for example, you have in the back of your head what a horse running sounds like. So he would make a pitch where the sound would trigger that memory

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[Newt Gingrich]

you would build a cascade of sounds that got you used to doing things. So this notion of if I can understand how to be inside your head. So you're selling yourself. I'm not selling you. I don't know if that makes any sense in terms of how you've developed this.

[Rob Snyder]

That is a hundred percent. The big realization is going from, I am over here looking upon you, telling you what you should want, what you would benefit from, to me just figuring out what you're trying to do in your life, where you need help in your life. And it's that simple. And it sounds like that's something that you did as well in your speeches too, which is fascinating that that's kind of where you started all of your speeches.

[Newt Gingrich]

Coming up, Rob will tell us how the fastest growing startups turn a single success story into what he calls a success story factory. And what he's learned about staying sane while you're building one.

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[Child]

Dad, Disney activities are on Lingokids.

[Parent]

What?

[Child]

Moana and Elsa and Marvel's Spider Man.

[Parent]

All of them on Lingokids?

[Child]

Yes, dad, on Lingokids.

[Parent]

That's pretty cool.

[Child]

I know.

[Podcast Host]

You just lost them for the rest of the afternoon.

[Parent]

Worth it.

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[Newt Gingrich]

Charles Ibak how the fastest growing startups take one success story and then they become a success story factory. Which I think is a fascinating concept. I mean, how did you develop that?

[Rob Snyder]

That came over time. So what happened was I first built my startup and I didn't quite understand why it was working when it was working when we took off. And then a bunch of my friends who were also struggling with their startups brought me into theirs. And so I've now helped 50 products at least, go from their zero to their first million in revenue. And so all of this has been in trying to figure out how this stage actually works. And so the thing that I've kind of learned is that startups, we need very simple models for understanding our startups. The most simple model is the case study or the success story of a customer. That one customer who said hell yes before they bought, said hell yes after they bought. And they bought really fast and they got a ton of value out of it. Well, if you're an entrepreneur, you don't want to have to reinvent that every single customer. It's way easier to just repeat that one hell yes success story. And then if you're trying to repeat that one hell yes success story, well, then you can kind of envision a business as a factory that Just produces almost near clones of your success story. And what that does for entrepreneurs is it allows them to zoom out from their business and look at it just like a factory and apply 100 plus years of manufacturing thinking to the factory, where they can say, oh, where in our factory is the constraint to our business? Is it that we're not talking to enough potential customers? Is it the pipeline step? Is it that we're not converting them? Do we have the wrong kinds of people coming into the factory? This is kind of a diagnostic model that has been massively helpful to a bunch of entrepreneurs when business feels really complex without a model like this. But it gets quite simple when you apply a model like this as a lens to see your own business.

[Newt Gingrich]

One of the things you try to do to help folks like me understand it better, you use Alexander the Great and the Gordian Knot, which I've always thought was fascinating and has a lot of applications to modern government. But from your perspective, how does Alexander and the Gordian not fit into the concepts you're trying to move?

[Rob Snyder]

When you're an entrepreneur, it seems like there are basically a trillion things that matter. It's unclear how they're all connected. So you have the market, you have the specific customers, you have the Personas, you have the product, you have pricing, you have promotion, you have distribution, you have advertising, you have employees, you have your vision, you have investors, or maybe you don't have investors, you have finances. So there are all of these different things that you have to kind of keep in your own head. And when they're working, it's hard to keep them in your own head. When they're not working, it's really hard to understand which one of those million things is it and which is upstream, what is downstream, what causes what's in effect. And so that's how it feels like this Gordian knot. I help out at Harvard Innovation Labs, and the main thing that I deal with are a bunch of very smart, very smart people, way smarter than me coming in, saying, like, my brain hurts from trying to understand how this whole thing works. How does zero to one work? How do we build something people want? It feels like there are a million interconnected things. And so the success story factory and the idea of pulling what these are trying to do, these are trying to basically take the sword to the Gordian knot that is these million kind of seemingly connected things and put it into one very simple model that, yes, us dummies at Harvard can deal with, but anybody can actually implement in their Business.

[Newt Gingrich]

You also have this great line. You quote Bob most as saying, a students don't get started until they have the answer. D students get started because they don't have the answer. So does that mean a D student is more likely to be an entrepreneur?

[Rob Snyder]

Yes, very much so. More likely to be a successful entrepreneur, in fact. Because what happens is the Harvard types are overthinkers. We want to solve it in advance in our heads. And business is really hard to solve in advance in your head. When you think you have it solved in your head, then you go talk to a potential customer and they don't buy. And then you have to go back and solve it in your head again. And it's just really, really hard. And so D student doesn't even think that way. They just go and start selling something to see what people want to buy.

[Newt Gingrich]

If we have a founder listening and they're right in their own pain cave, what's the most important single thing you'd want them to take from the power of pool?

[Rob Snyder]

I want them to go and find one customer, one potential customer, one customer. And instead of saying, here's what I want to sell, you flip that and ask, what do you want to buy? What can I help you with?

[Newt Gingrich]

That is great.

[Rob Snyder]

It will change your entire trajectory as an entrepreneur.

[Newt Gingrich]

That's great. The best example of that in American politics is Lincoln, who had an acute sense. As he said one time, with popular sentiment, nothing can fail. Without popular sentiment, nothing can succeed. And he listened. He was the most acute listener to citizens that we've ever had in the White House. It's just a very similar to the way you put it. You know, Rob, this has been absolutely fascinating. I want to thank you for joining me. Your new book, the Power of Pool, what you need to know about customer demand to build a successful startup and why most founders get it wrong is available wherever books are sold. This has been a very invigorating conversation and I really appreciate your taking the time to educate us.

[Rob Snyder]

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. This was phenomenal.

[Newt Gingrich]

Thank you to my guest, Rob Snyder. Newtworld is produced by Gingrich360 and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Garnesy Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. Special thanks to the team at Gingrich360. If you've been enjoying Newts world, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Join me on [e-mail] net I'm Newt Gingrich. This is New Twirler.

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The first ever X Games League championship is going down live, and New Orleans has the call. Three days of elite action sports. A season's worth of competition coming down to one final weekend. Watch July 24 through 26 on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2. Or stream on the ESPN app, X Games, YouTube, Kick Roku sports channel and Amazon. The championship starts July 24. Don't miss the moment it becomes history.

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[Child]

Mom, can I have Lingokids? Dad, Lingokids, please.

[Parent]

When did we become the Lingokids house?

[Podcast Host]

No idea. Last week it was Dinosaurs.

[Child]

This weekend's Lingokids.

[Parent]

Why Lingokids?

[Child]

Because it's the best thing ever. We can play games with astronauts, wild animals and superheroes.

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[Podcast Host]

So no dinosaurs and dinosaurs.

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[Parent]

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