Push vs. Pull Marketing for Startups

Why do good products fail to get early traction?

Good products fail when founders build in isolation and wait for customers to show up. Early traction comes from push work: manual outreach, founder-led demos, and the unglamorous effort that lands the first hundred users. The product is rarely the problem. Distribution is.

Liftout was a recruiting platform built on a genuinely good insight: the best hires come in groups, not solo. Companies poach entire teams all the time in M&A. We thought we could turn that into a product.

The platform worked. The idea was sharp. And nothing happened. We skipped the only part that matters in a startup's first year. The push.

Founders who get traction share one trait. They do the manual, unscalable work that creates the first hundred users. I've built businesses that took off and one that didn't, and the difference was never the code. That lesson cost me a startup, so let me save you the tuition.

Why do most startups fail?

Most startups fail because no market wants what they built. CB Insights, after analyzing hundreds of startup postmortems, named "no market need" as the number one killer. Poor marketing ranks close behind. Both point to the same root cause: the founders never got the product in front of the right buyers.

Market need hides a subtler truth, though. Plenty of failed startups did have potential. They never proved it because the founders sat behind their laptops waiting for inbound traffic that never came. Building and launching are different jobs. Most founders only do the first one.

What is pull marketing, and when does it actually work?

Pull marketing is a strategy where customers find you. You publish content, rank in search, and answer questions people already ask, so buyers arrive with intent. Pull scales, and it can run for years on autopilot. But it only works when demand already exists to pull against.

Pull is what most founders fantasize about. Great content, a top Google ranking, customers converting while you sleep. I run product and growth for ComparePower, which pulls over 100,000 organic visits a month, so I've seen the system work firsthand. It also took years and a market already thick with demand.

Two conditions have to be true before pull earns its keep:

• Existing demand. People already search for a solution. They're using spreadsheets, legacy tools, or duct-taped workflows. Your product just needs to be the better version.
• Inbound intent. Real search volume exists. People type their problem into Google, Reddit, or an AI assistant, you show up, and they click.

New categories break both conditions. If your product solves a problem people don't know they have, pull marketing is useless in year one. Nobody searches for something they don't know exists.

Liftout had that exact problem. Nobody was Googling "how to hire a fully-formed team." No category, no search volume, no playbook. Just an idea with zero built-in demand. Pull was never going to work. We needed push, and we refused to do it.

What is push marketing?

Push marketing is a strategy where you go to the customer directly. Instead of waiting to be found, you put your product in front of one person at a time through cold outreach, founder-led demos, and manual onboarding. Push doesn't scale. Early on, that's exactly the point.

Push looks like this in practice:

• Cold outreach with a personalized message
• Founder-led demos where you sell and onboard at once
• Showing up in communities where your buyers already hang out
• Manual onboarding that feels more like consulting than software
• Following up five times when nobody answers the first four

None of it looks good on a pitch deck. And it's exactly what separates startups that survive from startups that stall.

How did Brex get its first 169 customers?

Brex won its first 169 customers with champagne, not ads. The fintech startup, then around 30 people with near-zero revenue, mailed 300 bottles of Veuve Clicquot to recently funded Bay Area startups, each with a handwritten note from the CEO. Then it asked for a demo.

The list came from Pitchbook: roughly 300 companies that had raised seed through Series B in the prior six months. The note read, "Congrats on your recent fundraise. We know how hard it is to build a startup and we're rooting for you." Then the CEO followed up by email asking if they'd want a demo.

75% said yes to the demo. 75% of those converted. That's 169 paying customers from a $19,000 campaign: about $50 a bottle, $2K for handwritten notes, $2K for TaskRabbit deliveries. Customer acquisition cost landed under $115 for a B2B fintech product.

Coordinating 300 champagne deliveries across the Bay Area is logistically absurd, and that's why it worked. It felt human. It stood out. It wasn't one more cold email rotting in a founder's inbox.

How did Airbnb get its first listings?

Airbnb's Brian Chesky got early listings by doing every job himself. He climbed the stairs of New York brownstones, photographed the apartments, wrote the descriptions, and posted them. He was the sales rep, the content team, and customer support in one person.

In his words: "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." That's what doing the work looks like. Not strategy decks. Just a founder doing the job that needs doing, even when it feels beneath the title.

How did LinkedIn get its first users?

LinkedIn got its first 12,000 users through the founders' own address books. On launch day the founding team invited their professional contacts and asked each person to invite theirs. Most early signups were first- or second-degree connections. No ads, no viral loop. Just a team working its network by hand.

Why should founders do their own sales?

Founders should do their own sales because nobody sells a product better than the person who built it. You know the pain, you handle objections live, and you adjust the pitch with every conversation. Each call doubles as customer research. Early-stage startups in 2025 and 2026 are leaning into this harder than ever.

Many YC-backed companies now delay their first sales hire until they cross $1M in annual recurring revenue. The logic holds. Decision-makers value direct access, and they'd rather hear from the founder than a BDR reading a script. That's the advantage a small team has. Use it.

Once you've personally closed enough deals to see the pattern, document the playbook, hire a closer, and build the machine. But you have to be the machine first.

What did I get wrong with Liftout?

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

So we didn't. We stayed in our day jobs. We polished the site and assumed users would come.

Paul Graham said it years ago: "Startups don't take off on their own. Founders make them take off." Everyone quotes that line. Almost nobody lives it.

We built the car and nobody wanted to be the engine. A car without an engine is furniture.

What should you ask yourself before building a startup?

One question predicts whether your startup survives its first year: will you do the work that doesn't scale? Founders who answer yes and mean it get traction. Founders who want only the fun part end up with a polished product and an empty customer list.

Sit with these three:

• Am I willing to do the work that doesn't scale to bring this to life?
• Am I willing to become the person this business needs me to be in year one?
• If the manual version of this job doesn't excite me at all, do I actually want to run this business?

If the answer is no, stop. Save yourself the months. A good idea without a founder willing to push it into existence is a side project with a landing page.

How do you get your first 100 customers without search demand?

Getting your first 100 customers without search demand means pushing, not waiting. You name a few hundred ideal buyers, reach out personally, lead with value, follow up past the point of comfort, and onboard each one by hand. Then you earn the right to build pull.

1. Name a few hundred ideal customers

Real companies, real people, real email addresses. Not personas. Use LinkedIn, Pitchbook, Crunchbase, or industry directories. You need a list, not a target-market slide.

2. Build a personal outreach sequence

Skip the mass blast. Write messages that reference something specific: a recent milestone, a post they wrote, a problem you know they have. Make it obvious a human wrote it.

3. Offer value before asking for anything

Give first. Share a useful insight, run a free audit, or send a short video showing how your product solves their exact problem. The first touch should give, not take.

4. Follow up relentlessly

Most deals close after the fifth follow-up. Most founders quit after the first. The gap between those two numbers is where startups die.

5. Onboard people yourself

Skip the docs link. Get on a call, walk them through it, watch where they get stuck, and fix it live. Every onboarding call teaches you something your analytics dashboard never will.

6. Earn the right to pull

Once you have 50 to 100 customers and know exactly who buys and why, invest in content, SEO, and inbound. Now you have the data to build a pull engine that converts. Pull without push data is guessing.

Why is building the easy part?

Building is the easy part because it's the fun part, and fun tricks you into feeling productive. Designing systems and shipping features feels like progress. The real work starts after you ship: the calls, the demos, the rejections, and the awkward LinkedIn messages that make one person care about what you made.

Most good products die not because they were wrong, but because the founders refused to do the part that felt beneath them. I've watched it happen more than once. Don't be that founder. Be the engine.

If you're staring at a good product and no traction, that's the problem I help founders untangle. Tell me what you're building and we'll map out your push.