Why Great Ideas Fail: Escaping the Pain Cave

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:

In the late 1980s, a retired housewares executive named Sam Farber rented a house in the south of France. For a month, he was there with his wife, Betsy, who was an architect. And the plan for the month was simple. To cook, to eat, and to enjoy the countryside. But there was just one problem. Betsy had arthritis in her hands. And the kitchen in that rental house was stocked with the same tools that every kitchen had back then. Thin metal handles, hard edges.

Todd Henry [00:00:29]:

The kind of vegetable peeler that hurts even if your hands work perfectly. For Betsy, peeling an apple was genuinely painful. But she didn't stop cooking, and she didn't write a complaint letter to the peeler manufacturer. She did what makers do. She found some clay, and she shaped it around the handle of the peeler. She built something that her hands could actually hold. And Sam watched her do it. Now, Sam had spent his entire career in housewares.

Todd Henry [00:00:56]:

He had founded a cookware company called Copco. He built it, he sold it, and he retired. And by all accounts, retirement was driving him crazy. But standing in that kitchen, he wasn't looking at a business opportunity. He was looking at a person he loved who was stuck, who was trying to do something that mattered to her with tools that were simply failing her. So he asked a question that sounds obvious now, but it was radical then. Why do ordinary kitchen tools hurt your hands? And if you made tools that were comfortable for someone with arthritis, wouldn't they be better for everybody? Sam and Betsy took that question to an industrial design firm in New York called Smart Design. One of the earliest prototypes was literally a metal peeler jammed into a rubber bicycle handlebar grip.

Todd Henry [00:01:44]:

In 1990, the company they founded, Oxo, launched a line called Good Grips, that fat backed, thinned rubber handle that you've used a thousand times. Now, four years later, that vegetable peeler entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Fortune magazine would later rank it among the greatest designs of modern times. You can still buy one today for about $10. Now, here's something to consider about this story. The demand for that peeler existed before the peeler did. It was sitting in a farmhouse kitchen in France in the hands of one specific person trying to do one specific thing. Just cook a meal without pain.

Todd Henry [00:02:24]:

If you had surveyed a thousand home cooks in 1989 and asked them what they wanted, not one of them would have said that they want a santoprene handle with fins on the side. No one would have said that. They would have said they want a sharper blade. The insight wasn't invented. It was noticed. In my book the Accidental Creative, I made the case that for those of us who create for a living, we aren't actually paid for our time or even our output. We're paid for our insights. We're paid for the value that we create during that time.

Todd Henry [00:03:01]:

And today's guest has spent his career studying exactly where insights like Sam and Betsy's come from and why so many of us spend years looking for them in precisely the wrong place. If you've ever built something you were sure people wanted, something that solved a real problem, something people even said they wanted and then watched it land with a thud, you've been in a place that my guest today calls the pain Cave. It is one of the most confusing and demoralizing places that a creative pro can live, and most of us have spent time there. Rob Snyder knows the pain Cave from the inside. He's a serial B2B founder, Harvard Business School graduate, and a fellow at Harvard Innovation Labs, where he works with founders trying to get their ideas to take off. His new book is called the Power of Pull, and its central argument is going to rearrange some furniture in your head. Demand has almost nothing to do with your product. Demand is what a person is already trying to do with their life.

Todd Henry [00:03:59]:

Your job is not to convince anyone of anything. Your job is to find the people who are stuck and to get them unstuck. So in our conversation, we talk about why the customers you ask can't even tell you what they need and what we can do about it. This is the Daily Creative. Since 2005, we've served up weekly tips to help you be brave, focused, and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the show.

Rob Snyder [00:04:31]:

The Pain Cave is unfortunately relevant to way too many of us.

Todd Henry [00:04:35]:

That's Rob Snyder, author of the Power of Pull.

Rob Snyder [00:04:38]:

And it is this experience where you've built something or you're building something that people say they want that has objective value, that solves problems and people aren't buying and it's not clear why. And so I've spent way too much of my career in the pain cave and as a founder, as a builder of things. And it's just, it's the most confusing space because you don't know what to change and why it's not working.

Todd Henry [00:05:10]:

Having been there as well myself, both for my own projects and also working with clients, it is a very painful place to be because you I'll give you a personal experience of this in my first two books. I wrote two books, the Accidental Creative and Die Empty. I just released them. They did well. Everything was great. My third book I wrote, I released, I did all the same things, and it just did not sell. And in retrospect, looking back on it, I realize now it's because I had done something different for the first two that I didn't do for the third one, which is I had really very specifically thought of who was the individual person I was trying to write this for versus just writing for an audience or writing a felt need that I perceived. And you described this in the book.

Todd Henry [00:05:53]:

Right. You talk about the hell yes customer, which I think is a similar concept. Can you describe what that is and how that can become an antidote to the pain cave? In a way, yeah.

Rob Snyder [00:06:04]:

Oh, such a good question. So the. What I found is I was writing a lot too, and I would have my blog posts that would do really well would be ones that were very specifically for a single person. And the book I wrote for a single person, Ross, who does not know that he's in the book or that I wrote this for him.

Todd Henry [00:06:27]:

He does now.

Rob Snyder [00:06:28]:

He now knows. And so it's interesting because when you're in the pain cave, you often have something that makes a ton of sense in theory, but it doesn't make sense for a specific person right now in practice, who is stuck and needs help getting unstuck, which is like a series of things that we could dig into if relevant. But until you find a single person, one person who is stuck and needs help getting unstuck, where you, when you help them get unstuck, they said, oh, my gosh, this is the greatest thing ever. You really have nothing. You have something that just works on paper. And it would be weird if it worked in practice.

Todd Henry [00:07:11]:

You make the argument that demand really has nothing to do with the product. Right. Why do you say that? And how should that change the way that we think about as we go about our work? How should that change the way we think about approaching our work, especially as we're creating products or trying to find product market fit for what we're doing?

Rob Snyder [00:07:28]:

Yeah, so that's a really good question. And the thing that I think we all have experience in the creative space, we're trying to create things that haven't existed before. We're trying to create new things. And so if you think that demand is wanting a thing, that demand for an iPhone is a thing that people want an iPhone. But how do you explain 2006 to 2008 when the iPhone wasn't a thing? The iPhone then was a thing. And a bunch of people wanted it. But then I keep shipping a bunch of products that are new, different, and interesting, and nobody wants them. You can't make sense of that.

Rob Snyder [00:08:11]:

If you just say, on day one, there was no demand, day two, there was infinite demand. It just doesn't work like that. And so you have to separate out the demand and the supply realms. The supply realm is the product, the category, the service, the whatever. The thing is, the artifact, the thing that you are building on the demand side, it is what is this person trying to do in their own life that has nothing to do with the product for them? They were trying to connect with their family. They're trying to look at the Internet. They were trying to do all these kinds of things in their lives. And the supply that showed up, the iPhone or whatever it is you're building, has to fit these things that they're already trying to do on the demand side.

Rob Snyder [00:08:56]:

But they're just stuck. They just can't quite do them or they can't do them the way they

Todd Henry [00:09:00]:

want to do them.

Rob Snyder [00:09:01]:

And so if you look at it that way, then the act of creation is a lot less about. I go into a dark room and brainstorm until I start sweating and hope that out of that pressure cooker comes something magical. It's just finding people who were stuck before I started thinking about this and figure out an elegant way to get done unstuck.

Todd Henry [00:09:26]:

It's tricky because sometimes if you ask people what they want, what they actually want would prefer that you make for like. I think very few people would have asked for the iPhone in 2006. Right? They probably. They would have asked for maybe a faster BlackBerry. Right. Or so like that, because that's. That was their grid of reference. How do we get to an understanding of what people actually want versus what maybe they'll tell us that they want?

Rob Snyder [00:09:51]:

Yeah, I love that. That's where the demand and supply separation also helps. Because if we separate demand and supply, remember, supply is all the thing, the artifact. If they say, I want a faster BlackBerry, that is them saying, this is the supply I want. Which is a different thing than saying, here's the demand I have. When customers talk on the supply side, don't trust them.

Todd Henry [00:10:19]:

That's.

Rob Snyder [00:10:19]:

It's a. It is. That's our job to live on the supply side. Now, they might tell us why they don't like the existing supply options, but we have to get them back over to the demand side to figure out what they're actually trying to do in their life. So if they say, yeah, I want a faster BlackBerry. Okay, cool, that's somewhat interesting. But in what ways is a slow BlackBerry preventing you from do? What are things that it's preventing you from doing which will. Then I take that and say, okay, it takes too long for me to visit websites, or it's hard to see the websites when I'm doing on that side, you get all the things that they are actually trying to do, and then you take that and go onto the supply side and conjure something that fits that better than just getting their supply side requirements.

Todd Henry [00:11:11]:

So this kind of brings us a little bit to the pull framework that you introduce in the book. Would you give us just a brief overview? Obviously, there's no way that we can cover the full depth of what you write about the book, but could you give us an overview of what the elements of the pull framework are?

Rob Snyder [00:11:24]:

Totally. So the pull framework exists for those of us who want to build things that take off and specifically want to get people unstuck. Pull framework defines the case in which somebody would be weird not to buy a thing when most people, most of the time, would be weird to buy. So four things have to be true for somebody to have pull and therefore pull a product out of your hands. P is for project. They have a project on their to do list. That thing on the demand side they're trying to do in their life you is unavoidable. It is not something that they can't do.

Rob Snyder [00:12:04]:

There are a million projects that they would love to do, but there has to be some situation that they're in where they're prioritizing this project right now over all of the other projects they could theoretically prioritize. But just because somebody has an unavoidable project doesn't mean they're going to buy something. So we need the Ls, which are the list of options and the limitations of those options. When you have a project you're trying to do that's right now unavoidable, where your existing options, whether that's another software tool, whether that's hiring somebody with a variety of different options, but none of those options can get you to do the project the way you want to do it, you're stuck. When you're stuck, you'll buy something that gets you unstuck in that particular way. And that's what the pull framework specifies.

Todd Henry [00:13:02]:

Okay, did you catch that? I want to hit pause for a second because Rob moved through that really quickly and I don't want any of us to miss it. This framework is the spine of his whole argument, and it's worth writing down. Pull P, U, L, L. Four things that have to be true before anyone pulls your work out of your hands. P is for project. The person has something they're trying to do with their life, Not a feature they want, a thing they're trying to accomplish that exists. Whether your product exists or not you is unavoidable. They have a hundred projects they'd love to get done someday.

Todd Henry [00:13:37]:

This one is different. Something about their situation has pushed it to the top of their list right now. And then the two Ls the list of options they've already considered and the limitations of those options. They've looked at the other tool, the other firm doing it themselves, and none of it gets them where they want to go the way that they want to get there. So project unavoidable. List limitations. When all four are true, that person is stuck. And a stuck person doesn't need to be convinced of anything.

Todd Henry [00:14:10]:

They just need someone to show up with the thing that gets them all unstuck. So keep that in your mind as we go forward, because everything Rob says from here builds on it. Okay, back to the conversation.

Rob Snyder [00:14:23]:

I've probably watched 3 to 5,000 sales calls, like recorded sales conversations with potential customers. And what will happen is the seller or the founder will ask something like, why are you on this call today? And what they'll get is a monologue. And I call it a hairball. It's just that it's. There's so many words in there that touch anything that could be possibly relevant. So customers do not speak using the poll framework at all? I wish they would. That'd be great for all of us. But they speak in their own language.

Rob Snyder [00:14:59]:

And so what happens is, within the monologue, they actually often describe their poll. And we, because we don't have the poll framework in our heads, misinterpret what they're saying. And so I felt it's way more often the case that somebody has pull and tries to explain it but can't convey it very well, and we can't interpret it as the case, then they actually don't have pull.

Todd Henry [00:15:25]:

So what you're saying is it's really less about listening, better to what they're saying, and it's more about hearing maybe what they're not saying and understanding the patterns behind what they're saying, because they may not be good at describing their own needs or their own demand.

Rob Snyder [00:15:41]:

Yeah, they often use a lot of words, most of which are unclear if they are relevant to them or to you, but they're trying to convey their context and so you have to help them. I even in a lot of sales teams now are using the pull framework as a way to help customers explain what they need. And some people even pull up their screens and show them what are you trying to do, why this versus all the other. And they like walk through the framework on the. I don't recommend that, but it doesn't, it seems to work sometimes to give

Todd Henry [00:16:13]:

the folks listening because I know we have a lot of people listening who are maybe pitching client projects or trying to figure out how to win business for their organization. Let's. Could we think of an example of, for example, let's say an agency is trying to pitch a particular piece of business. They know that the client has a need. They maybe they've even put out an RFP saying here's what. But maybe that RFP doesn't reflect what they really need. How could someone apply this framework in that context where they want to go out and potentially identify the need and create a package that would solve that problem?

Rob Snyder [00:16:49]:

So I've seen a lot of agencies sales pitches and watch quite a few and they follow a typical pattern in my experience, which is the exact opposite of the pull approach, which is there's usually a slide deck on kind of our theory, our capabilities, the problems we solve. Which is the theory behind that is I need to walk you through what we do so you understand exactly what we do. And then you can give me a thumbs up or down on why you

Todd Henry [00:17:19]:

want it or not.

Rob Snyder [00:17:20]:

And in my experience, what I've seen is that actually prevents you from figuring out what this client actually needs. And so the structure of a sales call that I would recommend in this case is first you just have them fill out the pull framework. What are you actually trying to do? What have you looked into? Why isn't, why aren't your existing options good enough? That alone is a monumentally helpful question. Because what you'll find in a lot of cases, yeah, we considered the big firm, but blank. But they were too expensive or but it just felt like there was going to be a junior person on the call. It was just going to be farmed out to junior or we worked with the big firm before and if you know that, then you can tailor your pitch to not be 16 slides of a bunch of our relevant capabilities. Given what they're trying to do, you can say, oh, wow. So it seems like you're looking for a boutique firm where you work with a specialist in this exact thing where over a period of you're able to get these deliverables.

Rob Snyder [00:18:24]:

That's exactly what we do. I'm happy to walk you through that, but.

Todd Henry [00:18:27]:

Right.

Rob Snyder [00:18:28]:

And the pitch goes from being 80% of the call to maybe 15, 20% of the call. And they feel way more heard than pitch.

Todd Henry [00:18:37]:

I want to give you an example of a place where I'm seeing this. I've seen this play out recently, actually. Probably like you, I do a lot of traveling. I speak at a lot of events. So I'm in a lot of cities. And I was just recently on a trip to Punta Mita in Mexico. And because of the location, I was limited in my airline selection. So over the years, over the decades, I have had the opportunity to see all of the airlines over the course of a long period of time and see how they have adapted over time to what they perceive to be customer needs or how they have ignored customer needs over time.

Todd Henry [00:19:11]:

And so I've had my priority list of airlines. I was flying an airline who had dropped very low in my priority list of airlines. And I'll say who it is because it actually has a positive ending. And it was United because I'd had some really bad experiences with United early on in my travel days. And the stress of traveling for me is the biggest part of the stress of doing speaking events or workshops, the travel part. It's not the being on stage in front of 4,000 people or what. That's fine. That doesn't.

Todd Henry [00:19:41]:

Not stressful at all, really. It's the getting there, getting home. Am I going to get to the next thing? Right. And we're traveling. I'm delayed. We're sitting on the tarmac for 30 minutes because our gate's not open. I'm getting ready to leave the airplane, like, sprint to get through customs, to clear customs, to get whatever to get to my connecting flight, whatever it is. And I get a text from United and it says, hey, take a breath.

Todd Henry [00:20:07]:

We know your situation. We're holding your connecting flight. Don't worry about it. It's going to be fine. And I can't tell you, first of all, what that did in the moment to me as a traveler. But second of all, I did some research after I realized that United has spent an extensive amount of time trying to figure out what are those pain points, what are the things that really stress people out. And it's not getting me from point A to point B. It's not whether I will get there, it's the stress of connecting flights.

Todd Henry [00:20:36]:

It's the stress of delays, the stress of the uncertainty. And so they're trying, they've invested in this infrastructure to know where people are and to be able to send them customized text messages to say, it's going to be okay, you're going to be fine. And that was huge for someone like me. So what I'm seeing and what United is doing in that circumstance is they are figuring out what do I really need that I'm not maybe expressing well. And they're saying, we're going to go in and satisfy that need to quell that uncertainty that you feel about, am I going to make my connecting flight by just saying, hey, take a breath, just come directly to the gate, but you're fine. So what they have done by doing that is they've gone from, like, down here on my list. I don't know, like, they're pretty high on my list now. And that, to me, it's maybe a little bit of an illustration of what you're describing here, which is providing for me something that I wouldn't have been able to articulate to them necessarily, but they understood what the deeper need was that I didn't even maybe know how to talk about.

Rob Snyder [00:21:40]:

I love that. And I think the thing that I think ties that together is how they move, how this caused them to move up on your list. But basically, there's a lot of different improvements they could have made. They could have made the seats a little comfier, they could have done a lot. But what they found were the things that they believed would cause that to move up on your list, they found the things that, that were blocking you about choosing them before or that were blocking you from choosing other airlines, from prioritizing other airlines. And that's what causes it to move up on your list.

Todd Henry [00:22:14]:

Yeah. Well, what's interesting to me is that again, if you ask people, how can we make flying a better experience for you? They would say, wider seats, more legroom, better entertainment, get the WI fi right. They would say things like that. But they wouldn't say, hey, in that moment when I'm sitting on the tarmac thinking, I'm going to miss my connecting flight, I really would love a text from you saying, it's okay, we're holding your connecting flight, you're going to be fine. And that little thing. And that was a technology infrastructure decision that they made, right? To be able to send the. That wasn't a personal text. That was a obviously en masse.

Todd Henry [00:22:46]:

That was happening to a lot of people. And it was really, it's really impressive. That's where they're choosing to spend their investment. And to your point about pull, that's pulling me back into their ecosystem, like, it's making me want to. Then they're now in consideration for future flights, whereas before they weren't. I love that.

Rob Snyder [00:23:04]:

I'll say the. One of the interesting things I've seen that's related to that is you often just can't ask people and find these things out. And so one of. One of my friends from business school, he basically tried to do all the interviews and to figure out what people wanted. Couldn't figure out anything. He did like, hundreds of them. And he's all right, I'm just gonna go and shadow people in their jobs and just watch them. And they wouldn't have told them this, but they were shouting at their computers.

Rob Snyder [00:23:30]:

When they were trying to do these little, like, independent physical therapy practice owners, they were just shouting at their computers. They were, like, banging on. They were. They were annoyed, but it wasn't something that would have come up in any interview. But if you're watching over their shoulder, you seem really unhappy in this moment. What's going on? Or if you watched. I was actually on a very short connecting flight. If you had watched me on that flight shaking when.

Rob Snyder [00:23:54]:

As we were getting further and further delayed, you would have been like, oh, it looks like you're unpleasant. You're unhappy in this moment. Tell me more about what's going on there. Those are things that you can observe, but they might not relate or they might not tell you directly upon question.

Todd Henry [00:24:10]:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that is. That's a good reminder for all of us that it's important that we not just ask, but that we actually observe and we pay attention to what people are doing or how they're behaving, because that really tells us more than whatever they say, because they might not even know themselves. I want to ask you about something that you call out in the book, which is that the import, the importance of service is something that you call out at its core. You say the purpose of business is to serve customers how and when they want to be served. Could you talk just a little bit about the humility of that sort of service mindset and why you think that's important?

Rob Snyder [00:24:45]:

This is not something that. This is something I realized by getting to this place of understanding demand and supply. And it's not about me going and convincing the world they should want what I'm doing, that they should appreciate my product. That's not how innovation works. What you realize is, oh, when I this demand thing, it's just out there in the world, people are trying to do meaningful things in their own lives and they're stuck. And isn't it wonderful that if I show up with something that gets them unstuck, that basically serves them, then they will pay me and I will be able to build a business off of that that enables me to do what I want with my life. And it's just a fascinating coincidence that actually doesn't turn out to be much of a coincidence, that just by virtue of finding demand and find thinking in terms of demanding thinking in terms of not trying to convince them to do something they don't want to do, just helping them do things that they're stuck trying to do, that kind of makes it all work for me anyway. It's just if we can help them get unstuck, if we can serve them diligently in the meaningful things they're trying to do, then we earn the right to build a business and build a great life.

Todd Henry [00:26:05]:

Rob Snyder's new book, the Power of Pull, is available now wherever books are sold. Let's go back to that kitchen in the south of France for just a moment because there's a detail in the OXO story that I deliberately saved for now. Betsy Farber was not just the inspiration for Good Grips. That's the shorthand version. And honestly, it kind of sells her part in the story short, she was a trained architect. She shaped that first clay handle herself, she helped design the tools, she helped name the company, and she was part of the work from that kitchen all the way to your kitchen drawer. The person who was stuck became the co creator of the solution. And that's exactly what our interview with Rob today was all about.

Todd Henry [00:26:46]:

The people you serve aren't an audience to be won over. They're collaborators in the work. They hold the demand side, the deep knowledge of what they're trying to do and why every existing option fails them. You hold the supply side, the craft of building something that fits. So the magic isn't in either one alone. It's in getting close enough to a real specific person that the two sides. So here's the challenge I want to leave you with this week. Find your one person.

Todd Henry [00:27:15]:

Not your audience, not your market, not your ideal customer profile, One actual human being who is stuck trying to do something that matters to them, something that your work could actually serve. And here's the hard part. Don't ask them what they want. If you ask, they'll give you the faster BlackBerry answer, the sharper blade answer. Instead, watch them pay attention to where they wince, where they sigh, where they improvise a clay handle, because nothing actually works for them. That moment of friction is the most valuable creative brief you will ever receive. Somewhere out there is a person peeling an apple with a tool that hurts. Go find them.

Todd Henry [00:27:58]:

Hey, thanks so much for listening, as always. If you'd like the full interview with all of our guests, you can get it@dailycreativeplus.com it's absolutely free. Just go there, enter your name and email address. We'll send you a private feed to listen to all of our interviews in full. My name is Todd Henry. If you want more info about my speaking events and my books, you can find those@todhenry.com until next time. May you be brave, focused and brilliant. We'll see you then.