Startup Handbook: Market Pull
Which startups succeed the most?
This lesson explains how to identify which startups are most likely to succeed. It explains what the most successful startups have in common.
After reviewing thousands of startups at my fund, Julian.capital, and at Carveout, I stumbled into an insight that spurred this handbook: most $1B+ tech startups fall into one of seven product categories. It appears that startups within these categories have a greater chance of succeeding.
Before I share them, let me explain why they work: they increase the chance of your startup having market pull. Market pull is when consumers reflexively want a product upon learning of it, and they’re willing to do whatever is required to get it. Market pull is the force behind "product-market fit."
In other words, when you have market pull, the market pulls the idea out of your hands at the same pace you tell people about it; you don’t slog to sell it.
Market pull is so powerful that even weak founders can ride it to $4B+ in value. Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator (who graduated Airbnb, Reddit, Coinbase, Instacart, Doordash, and Dropbox), remarked:
“If you wonder how someone who seems crazy or incompetent could be the CEO of a successful startup, the answer is that some startups are so viral that they'll grow (for a while at least) almost regardless of who's in charge.”
—Paul Graham
Market pull emerges when three things are true about your target audience:
- Comprehension: Consumers intuitively value a product without needing an extensive explanation of it. (This eliminates the need for extensive sales.)
- Value: Consumers perceive enough value to justify the labor, price, and risk of switching to the product.
- Enthusiasm: Consumers want the product right away. (The enthusiasm of immediacy helps them overcome the friction of switching.)
Let's look at the special product categories I found within the market pull data.
Market pull categories
Read this handbook's intro for context on where my data comes from.
The closer you align with a market pull category below, I'd argue the greater your chance of experiencing market pull today or in the future.
You don't have to restrict yourself to these, but you should understand how each works so you can borrow their tactics.
1. Democratize investment opportunities
Consider what these startups have in common:
- Masterworks made high-end art investing accessible for those who couldn't afford expensive art (by fractionalizing ownership).
- Republic made startup investing viable for people who weren’t accredited investors (which means having a high salary or net worth).
- Equi made hedge fund investing accessible for consumers who aren’t ultra-wealthy by lowering their net worth requirement.
When you democratize asset classes like these startups have, investors who already believed in the asset class’ performance, but were unable to access it, rush in to invest their capital. That’s market pull. You’re giving people what they already wanted and benefiting from a high-demand, low-supply dynamic.
2. Create new income opportunities
- Airbnb made home renting a viable income stream for millions of homeowners.
- Uber and Lyft made becoming a taxi driver a viable income stream for tens of millions of drivers.
- DoorDash and Postmates made becoming a food courier viable.
By empowering people to make meaningful amounts of money with little upfront work or necessary qualifications, the billions of people on this planet looking for more income consider using the product. This leads to market pull.
3. Remove extensive labor for a low cost
Softr, Webflow, and Zapier are tools that save web designers weeks or months of development work. They remove the need for coding and instead empower anyone to make websites visually—without sacrificing control and customization. For anyone used to making websites from scratch, the speed upgrade feels like magic.
Further, these companies reduce that development labor for a low cost: they cost 1/500th the price of a professional design agency or employee. So you move faster and save money—and there’s no catch.
In short, by removing a lot of work plus saving a lot of money, an equally-featured product becomes a no-brainer for anyone stuck with the alternative. This creates market pull.
4. Lower cost and increase convenience
- Dropbox made file storage much cheaper and easier to access.
- Spotify made on-demand music listening way cheaper and easier to access.
- Hulu made cable TV cheaper and easier to access (via on-demand).
In all three cases, these startups aren’t lowering the product quality—only the cost. And because consumers were already buying those product categories, switching to an equal quality alternative that’s far cheaper is a no-brainer.
For in-demand products, a significant reduction in price without a significant reduction in quality can trigger market pull. The pull is even greater if the new products are more convenient and not just cheaper, because convenience helps consumers emotionally justify the labor required to switch products.
Medium-sized price reductions are most appealing to individual consumers. Businesses, however, may be less price sensitive plus more risk averse and therefore need larger price reductions to switch to a new product.
5. Adapt a proven business model to a new region
Many big startups become replicated in other countries. For example, Yummy is the Postmates of Venezuela, Airlift is the Doordash of Pakistan, Dukaan is the Shopify of India, and so on.
By adapting $1B+ businesses to new regions, the startup has a higher-than-normal chance of succeeding because its market pull was already validated in another market.
However, the new region must meet some requirements:
- You can’t be too early to the new region, meaning it must have the supporting technology and infrastructure in place.
- There can’t be existential cultural barriers to adoption, such as how business is done in that region being incompatible with the business model
- The business has to benefit from being localized. (Otherwise, international incumbents will expand to this region themselves.)
6. Create a marketplace for disaggregated supply and demand
If purchases in a market are manual and inefficient, you'll likely experience market pull by creating a software-run marketplace to match buyers and sellers for greater pricing transparency and more consistent supply/demand.
In pre-existing markets, buyers and sellers already interact with each other, so for a software marketplace to become a no-brainer choice, it simply needs to stabilize demand/supply and increase pricing visibility through search. And if the marketplace doesn't increase costs or friction, buyers and sellers switch over time.
Examples include Airbnb, eBay, OpenSea, and Thumbtack. New upstarts include:
- Zendoor is a marketplace to connect mid-sized rental property owners with property managers.
- Billdr is a marketplace to connect general contractors with homeowners looking to renovate.
7. Build SaaS that encourages users to invite other users
Some SaaS companies grow lightning fast because their users organically invite more users. Think Slack, Asana, Zoom, WhatsApp, and PayPal.
This invitation flywheel works when users invite others to (1) send them something they’re owed (e.g. cash via Venmo or legal documents via DocuSign) or to (2) invite friends to private conversations (e.g. Zoom, Telegram, Slack).
This is called product-led acquisition and it's covered in Lesson 3, which explores how to acquire customers for your startup. (I list product-led acquisition as a pull category because it helps businesses generate market pull for themselves.)
Should you restrict yourself to these categories?
No, but remember this criterion for market pull:
Consumers must intuitively value the product without needing an extensive explanation of it.
That's why each of the market pull categories above requires you to offer something that people badly want with immediately clear ROI.
I've overseen paid marketing for hundreds of companies, and I will tell you this with certainty: it’s hugely advantageous to pursue an idea that immediately strikes people as a no-brainer when they hear about it. In a highly competitive market, it's how you scale ads and sales without friction.
In contrast, the opposite of market pull is market push. This is where a startup has to slog to convince consumers they should want the product in the first place. Or, if consumers already want the product category but not the company’s specific product, they slog to convince consumers that the product’s benefits are worth the time, cost, and risk of switching.
This is swimming upstream, and it’s a sign that the market doesn’t want you because your idea is low ROI or that you’re early to your market. The latter doesn't mean you shouldn't start the startup, however. If you have good reason to be confident that market pull will arise in the future, you can get a headstart on the idea today.
That's worth repeating: You don't need market pull today if you're confident it'll arrive in the near future. (I talk more about market timing in the next lesson.)
If maximizing your chances of success isn’t your goal—say instead you have a social mission or an itch to scratch—then perhaps lacking market pull isn’t a concern. The purpose of this lesson is to help you stack the deck in your favor. Startups are hard, and almost all of them fail.
While browsing stories of startup failures, I came across countless quotes of founders' failure to appreciate market pull:
"This will be the number one lesson I will never forget and the absolute key to understanding Dinnr’s failure—we were not solving anyone’s problem."**
—**Michal Bohanes, founder of Dinnr
"EventVue was 'a vitamin instead of a painkiller.' Conference organizers typically liked our product but none of them said they needed it. It didn’t make their lives easier, make them more money or cut any of their expenses—it was just nice to have."
—Josh Fraser, cofounder of EventVue
"Personalization was not an immediate need as of that day in the app world. We failed to realize how big a problem like that was, and somehow assumed the market would see the value in the product."
—Rohit Nallapeta, founder of Eloquis
Note: There are certainly more market pull categories I haven’t yet identified.
How do you assess market pull?
If you think you have market pull, here's one way to partially validate it:
- Find at least 100 potential customers that are representative of the total audience.
- Ask each to rank your startup idea out of 10 on how likely they are to put down a cash deposit for it.
- Count the percentage of respondents who respond 9 or 10. In my experience, these are the only two numbers that matter. Don’t be misled by 7s and 8s—these numbers often aren't high enough for people to ultimately purchase.
- Take the percentage of respondents who say 9 and 10 and multiply that by the size of your sample audience. Now you’re getting an idea of what percentage of the market you appeal to and therefore how big your idea is.
- See if you can get those 9s and 10s to actually pay a deposit. If so, you're onto something.
- Rinse and repeat for every idea you have.
This is an oversimplified process and it may not work for startups that have to be experienced to be appreciated, but it’s a powerful exercise for many founders.