Push vs. Pull Marketing for Startups

How Avoiding the Work That Matters Killed Our Startup

Liftout made sense on paper. Companies don't just need candidates — they need teams. People don't just want jobs — they want to stick with people they work well with. And the best hires? They come in groups, not ones.

That's how it works in the real world. Corporate M&A has done it forever — it's called a liftout: when a company poaches an entire high-performing team and brings them over intact. We thought: why not make that a platform?

So we built it. The product worked. The idea was smart. But it didn't move. And here's why: We weren't willing to do the hard part.

We Built a Platform. What We Needed Was a Pipeline.

Neither of us wanted to become recruiters. Not even for six months. Not even to prove the concept. We didn't want to cold-call teams. We didn't want to chase HR reps. We didn't want to manually pair teams with companies.

So we didn't. We stayed in our day jobs. We polished the site. We assumed users would come. They didn't. Because they never do. Not without a push. Not without someone driving it, one user at a time.

What Brian Chesky Did That We Didn't

In the early days of Airbnb, co-founder Brian Chesky and his team exemplified the principle of doing things that don't scale. They personally visited hosts. They took professional photos of their listings. They gathered feedback face to face.

This wasn't glamorous. But it built trust. It created momentum. It made Airbnb work.

"I remember walking up to the top of a brownstone in New York, and I'd take photos, write the descriptions, and post them myself. I was the photographer, copywriter, and customer support all in one." — Brian Chesky

Similarly, with Liftout, we believed in the strength of our idea — a platform for team-based recruitment. We built the product, confident it would attract users on its own. But unlike Chesky, we didn't immerse ourselves in the gritty part. We didn't get in the trenches. We didn't do the unscalable work. And that's why the platform stalled.

That experience taught me something most founders only learn after they fail: Building the product is the easy part. The hard part is doing the work that no one wants to do — until it works.

The Difference Between Push and Pull

A lot of new founders look at successful two-sided marketplaces and think, "They scaled without the grind — why can't we?" But here's what they miss: The ones that scale quickly have two things in common:

1. The demand already exists

People are already solving the problem — with spreadsheets, hacked-together workflows, or legacy software. The product doesn't have to create a market. It just has to offer a faster, cheaper, or more elegant solution.

2. There is already inbound intent

People are searching for help. All the startup has to do is show up — rank on search engines, get shared in the right circles, and convert. That's pull marketing. You don't have to chase people. You let them find you.

If the product is good and your SEO is decent, you grow. I've built those kinds of systems. They work — especially when there's already search volume and awareness.

But Liftout wasn't that kind of product. Nobody is Googling "how to hire a fully-formed team." There is no existing category. No search volume. No playbook. Just an idea — with zero built-in demand.

That's where push marketing comes in

When nobody knows they need your product yet, you have two choices: Spend money educating the market (which is slow and expensive), or manually create demand, one user at a time.

Push marketing requires:

• Sales
• Cold outreach
• Demos
• Evangelism
• And brute-force founder effort — the kind that doesn't scale

We didn't do that. And we didn't have the budget to buy our way out of it. So the idea sat there — smart, unused, and invisible.

If You're Not Willing to Do What Doesn't Scale, You're Not Ready to Build

Paul Graham said it best: "Startups don't take off on their own. Founders make them take off." Everyone likes quoting that. Almost no one lives it.

Every startup has an ugly, manual, brute-force phase. Call it onboarding. Call it evangelism. Call it user acquisition. But really, it's just you, doing the thing no one wants to do — over and over, until you don't have to anymore.

With Liftout, that thing was recruitment. And we weren't willing to go there. So the product sat there — elegant, unused, unproven. Not because we were wrong… But because we were passive. And passive builders don't win.

A Good Idea Isn't Enough. You Have to Push the Thing Into Existence.

The biggest lie in tech is: "If you build it, they will come." No. If you build it, you've earned the right to start pushing. You still have to:

• Sell it
• Prove it
• Support it
• Force it into motion until it has momentum of its own

That part sucks. That part's necessary. That's where 90% of good products die — not because they were wrong, but because the founders refused to do the part that felt beneath them.

If You're Not the Engine, the Product Doesn't Move

There's a version of Liftout that works. It's just not the version we launched. Because the team behind it (us) wanted to build a new hiring model… But didn't want to be the new hiring model — at least not in the early, gritty, manual phase.

We built the car. But no one wanted to be the engine.

The Takeaway

If you made it this far you might be thinking: "Okay, you can still do it. You can become recruiters." But here's the truth: I don't want to be a recruiter. Neither does my cofounder. And that's the real lesson.

You have to figure that out from the beginning. Ask yourself — honestly:

• Do I want to do the work that doesn't scale to bring this idea to life?
• Do I want to be the kind of person this business needs to survive?

If not — stop now.

If you're a builder like me, you probably fall in love with building something. Having a good idea. Designing it. Shipping it. Having the resources and support to bring it to life. That is not a business.

No one is going to hand you a business in a box. Just because you built it, doesn't mean it's a business. Turning it into a business means doing the work that sucks. The grind. The day-to-day. Until you have enough momentum that it can finally start scaling on its own.