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Welcome to Please Don’t Push, the place to learn everything about the Pull Framework.
What is the Pull Framework?
The goal of a framework is to map the structure of a system so we can better understand what is going on; therefore, that helps us achieve our goals in that system.
The Pull framework maps the “Market” as a system, more specifically as a Complex Adaptive System or CAS.
That change of perspective will radically change your understanding of how companies grow. And that is what will help you answer the critical questions your startup is facing:
What should you add or change to the product to increase adoption and retention?
Who is really your customer, and who is not?
Why are ads not working as expected?
What are the metrics that we should use to guide our decisions to keep growing?
What is pleasedontpush.com?
This website is the main hub for the Pull framework, so any content I ever publish on any other website about the framework will also be here, and if you subscribe to the free plan, you will be notified each time something new goes live.
Also this is the place where all the advanced content will be published exclusively; this is content to learn how to implement and use the framework. This deep content can be accessed with any of the paid plans.
If this is so groundbreaking,
why didn’t I hear about it before?
Quick story: In 2015, I launched my fifth Startup (the first one was in 2002), so I was expecting to be any better after so much experience, but I was as lost as the first time.
So, I started suspecting that the theory we use to build companies could have some flaws. A rocket scientist with 15 years of experience understands what is going on, and even if the rocket she launches fails, she understands “why” and can refine it until it works.
But in the startup world, no matter how much experience you have implementing the existing techniques, results are never predictable. You try everything in the book, you even become really good at implementing these techniques, and still, once it goes live, you just end up “hoping that this time works.” In other words, I felt that in these 15 years, I became an expert, but an expert in the wrong things.
So, I stopped reading “business books” and started reading about other fields to see if there were some dots that I could connect, dots that were missing in the Startup world. Eventually, I learned about Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS), a new field that is slowly reaching the mainstream (some concepts are used in governments and big organizations) but that has not been applied to startups yet.
Then I spent 9 years connecting these dots. What started just with CAS ended up needing some deeper knowledge of Crowd Behaviour, Human Perception, Power law statistics…
So I spent close to 20.000 hours developing it. First, I applied the new concepts to my own companies, and then I taught it to other companies all around the world, both in deep, long, engagements as a consultant or in accelerator programs with VCs like 500 startups or Techstars, and I kept doing it until three things were clear:
The framework is helping me understand what is going on and how to solve it better than anything else I have used before.
The framework matured over time and now it provided me with solid (not BS) answers to the critical questions all these founders had (and great founders are really skeptical, so the questions were brutal)
The way the framework is implemented also matured to a point where I can be confident that, if I put it in writing, I will not want to change it tomorrow (there was a time when that was normal…)
In other words, the framework was ready to go public. I can finally leave my “tinkering cave” and focus on spreading it and helping more companies benefit from it. This is why you didn’t hear about it before; it was in stealth mode.
What type of companies should implement it?
The companies getting more benefits from implementing the framework are:
B2C Startups where “repeated use of the product” is key (subscription or freemium)
B2B SaaS for small or mid-size clients (no enterprise)
So, one-off DTC products, e-commerce with low buying repetition, insurance products, or enterprise sales (where retention is guaranteed through tough yearly contracts) don’t fit well in the model. If that is your case, sorry, I can’t help.
This is because one of the central pieces of the framework, the mindset funnel, is built with “repeated product usage” in mind, and everything else emerges from there.
In terms of company stage, any company Pre-series B will benefit from it as this is when companies still have some freedom to make changes and more critical questions without clear answers.
Who in the company should implement it?
The framework covers Customer segmentation, product development, marketing, metrics, and growth strategy.
Altough you have to start somewhere, and usually the best place to start is with the metrics.
Once companies calculate the first reports using the Mindset Funnel and see for the first time what is hidden there, the amount of energy (a mix of excitement and panic) is off the roof, so rolling out the framework into other areas is much easier.
You can start learning about the Mindset funnel here: MFunnel #1 - The Mindset Funnel
And when you want to start with the implementation, you have different subscription plans to help you do so.