Episode 1014: The Power of Pull — What Most Startup Founders Get Wrong
Newt's World
Gingrich 360
4.6 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 July 2026
⏱️ 31 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
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Summary
Most startup founders are doing it backwards — and Harvard Innovation Labs fellow Rob Snyder spent two miserable years learning that the hard way. After failing to sell a product that made perfect logical sense, a single phone call from a Dunkin' franchisee changed everything: the customer didn't want what Snyder was selling but offered to pay for something else entirely. That pivot took his company from zero to $4 million in revenue. Snyder joins Newt Gingrich to discuss his new book, The Power of Pull, and the counterintuitive framework he's used to help 50 startups reach their first million in revenue. They explore the "pain cave" every founder enters, why pushing your product onto customers almost never works, what a "hell yes customer" looks like, and how the fastest-growing startups turn one great success story into a repeatable factory.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.3 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:07.8 | Welcome to News World Podcast on the IHart Podcast Network. |
| 0:12.2 | I am really pleased to welcome my guest, Rob Snyder. |
| 0:16.3 | Rob is a serial startup founder and a fellow at Harvard Innovation Labs. He graduated from Harvard Business |
| 0:25.4 | School and previously worked at McKinsey & Company. He's also an entrepreneur in residence |
| 0:31.4 | and venture partner for early stage venture capital funds. Snyder lives with his wife and daughter in New Hampshire, |
| 0:40.3 | and he's joining me to discuss his new book, |
| 0:44.6 | The Power of Pool, |
| 0:46.4 | which you need to know about customer demand |
| 0:48.7 | to build a successful startup |
| 0:50.7 | and why most founders get it wrong, |
| 0:56.5 | in which he argues that nearly everything founders are taught about market research, business plans, and building customer demand is backwards. |
| 1:04.2 | As you can imagine, this will be fascinating. Rob, welcome, and thank you for joining me on Newt's World. |
| 1:10.9 | Thank you for having me. |
| 1:12.9 | I'm curious, first of all, how did you get into this? |
| 1:15.9 | Well, coming out of business school, you come out of McKinsey and Harvard Business School |
| 1:21.7 | with a little bit of an ego, you might say, thinking, you know, I can kind of do anything. |
| 1:26.4 | Why not become a tech billionaire? |
| 1:27.9 | Like, that seems like the next step in my life. And so I did all the things I was supposed to do, |
| 1:34.6 | raised money from venture capitalists, did a bunch of market research, interviewed a bunch of |
| 1:39.0 | customers, created this big market vision, and tried to push that onto the world, onto potential customers, |
... |
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