How Rob Snyder Builds Worthwhile Products & Rethinks Customer Demand Beyond Pain Points

Nobody wakes up wanting a CRM. No one lies awake dreaming of expense-reporting software, and rarely does someone feel a flicker of joy at the thought of a new project management tool.

Yet B2B software is a trillion-dollar industry built almost entirely on things nobody “wants.”

That contradiction sits at the center of Rob Snyder’s new book, The Power of Pull. Snyder, a founder, entrepreneur, and fellow at Harvard Innovation Labs has spent his career watching product teams chase a definition of “demand” that doesn’t hold up.

If demand were really just desire for a product, he argues, half of B2B software wouldn’t exist.

The Good sat down with Snyder ahead of the book’s release to talk about what demand actually is, why the popular Jobs to Be Done framework never quite clicked for him, and what he thinks most teams, from first-time founders to product leaders scaling past product-market fit, get wrong when they go looking for it.

The problem with “pain points”

Ask most product people to define demand, and you’ll get some version of the same answer: demand is a pain point, a problem, a frustration waiting to be solved. Snyder thinks that definition is close, but not close enough to be useful.

“Life is a series of pain points that we don’t do anything about.”

People are annoyed by all kinds of things: slow software, clunky processes, mediocre tools, and yet they never lift a finger to fix most of them.

If pain alone drove purchasing, every mildly annoying process at every company would already have a solved-for-it vendor. It doesn’t, because pain and action aren’t the same thing.

The gap between “this is annoying” and “I am now going to pay to fix this” is where Snyder thinks most teams lose the thread. And it’s why he built an alternative model for thinking about demand, one that starts not with the problem, but with what a buyer is already trying to get done.

Why he skipped Jobs to Be Done

If that framing sounds familiar, it should. It shares DNA with Jobs to Be Done (JTBD), the framework popularized by Clayton Christensen that reframes purchases as “hiring” a product to do a job. Snyder respects it, but says it never worked for him in practice.

“I just found Jobs to Be Done to be way too high IQ for me,” he said, “so I had to create something that worked in my brain and made more sense in what’s happening in buyers’ brains.”

His replacement is deliberately unglamorous: the to-do list.

Snyder’s model starts from a simple premise: everyone is walking around with a mental to-do list, and at any given moment, they can only really act on one item at the top of it.

Demand, in his framework, is what happens when solving a specific problem becomes the thing that’s currently prioritized on that list. Not a background irritation. The active, top-of-mind task.

“Demand is basically [a potential customer] prioritizing something on their to-do list. And sometimes that leads them to buy something; sometimes that doesn’t.”

Once something lands on that list, the buyer starts looking at their options for getting it done, and those options, in Snyder’s model, are your real competitive set. Not the other vendors in your category. Whatever the buyer was already trying, including doing nothing, a spreadsheet, or a “headachey DIY solution” duct-taped together in-house.

That last detail matters more than it sounds. A buyer who has already tried to duct-tape together their own fix is showing you something a pain point never can: proof that the demand is real enough to act on, not just real enough to complain about.

Look for the trigger, not just the problem

If demand is really about what’s active on someone’s to-do list right now, what makes something jump to the top?

Snyder calls these moments triggers, and he’s found they’re rarely tidy. “It’s almost always something weird,” he said. A new VP starts and restructures a team’s priorities overnight. A company launches a second product and discovers the shape of demand looks nothing like the first one did. A funding round forces a scramble to scale something that used to be handled manually.

“In what situation is it weird if this project isn’t on their to-do list?” is the question he says is worth asking of any prospective buyer.

Reframing this way turns demand-finding from an abstract search for “pain” into a concrete hunt for the specific event that made a task urgent.

The hell yes customer

Finding demand and finding a trigger both point you toward the same destination: what Snyder calls a “hell yes” customer. Once you know what to look for and where to look for it, the remaining question is how to confirm it once you’re actually sitting across from someone.

“A hell yes customer is somebody who buys as if your product is irresistible and uses or retains your product as if it is addictive.”

Not delighted. Not satisfied. Irresistible.

That distinction isn’t just semantic. Snyder argues it’s the whole point, because a hell yes customer changes how much work you have to do.

“If they buy as if it is irresistible, we exert less effort in the sales process to get the deal done, because they’re doing all the work to buy,” he said. “And if they use our product and retain it as if it is irresistible, they are also doing all the lifting.”

Chase anyone short of a hell yes, in his experience, and the opposite kicks in: you end up building more product just to convince them, pitching bigger and bigger promises to close a reluctant buyer, and shipping a worse product overall to people who never wanted it that badly to begin with.

So how do you actually identify a customer in a live conversation? Snyder points to a few tells.

Most people, when shown a product, will offer some version of encouragement. “Oh wow, this is nice, I can see how this would be helpful.” But Snyder says to ignore that entirely.

What he’s listening for instead is a shift in who’s asking the questions. Real demand sounds less like praise and more like someone pulling information out of you: “Wait a second, I’m trying to deploy something just like that, and I’ve been hitting my head against the wall for weeks. What do you offer? How does it work?”

Watch for that shift a few times, Snyder says, and it becomes recognizable, almost a visible click, the moment a prospect stops evaluating your pitch and starts mentally testing your product against whatever’s already sitting at the top of their to-do list.

Add one more tell: whether they’ve already tried and failed to solve the problem themselves. It’s the trigger’s follow-up question, answered in real time.

Why this matters beyond early-stage founders

Snyder’s advice is aimed squarely at early-stage founders trying to land their first handful of customers. But the underlying diagnosis, that teams routinely mistake polite interest for real demand, doesn’t expire once a company hits product-market fit.

It shows up just as often in scaling SaaS organizations deciding what to build next. A feature request logged in a support ticket, a “that would be nice” in a user interview, a highly upvoted item in a feedback board. None of these tell you whether something has actually landed on a user’s to-do list, or whether it’s just a mildly interesting idea they’ll never act on. The teams that confuse the two end up building and testing a lot of features nobody was ever going to adopt.

Take a common scenario for a product experience leader at a mid-size SaaS company: churn is creeping up, and three different customer conversations surface the same feature request.

It’s tempting to read that as demand and greenlight the build. But under Snyder’s model, the real question isn’t how many people mentioned it; it’s whether it’s actively sitting at the top of anyone’s to-do list, urgent enough that they’ve already tried (and failed) to solve it themselves.

A feature that shows up in casual conversation is a very different signal than one a customer has already built a janky workaround for.

This is a big part of why continuous, structured research and experimentation matter so much for growing SaaS companies. The goal isn’t just to collect more feedback; it’s to build a system that can tell the difference between a “hell yes” and a polite maybe before resources get spent chasing the wrong one.

Getting started

Snyder’s core argument is a useful gut-check for any team, whether you’re chasing your first customer or your ten-thousandth: demand isn’t what people say would be nice to have. It’s what’s already active enough in their head that they’re willing to act on it, and everything else is just supply-side noise.

The Power of Pull is out now, and you can find more of Snyder’s work on his site and LinkedIn.

If your team is trying to build similar discipline into how you validate ideas, separating real signal from polite feedback before you commit a roadmap to it, research and experimentation work from The Good could help. Get in touch to see how a structured research and testing program can help your team build only for the demand that’s really there.