The most expensive sentence in business is "they will love it once they see it." I have said it. I have heard it in board rooms, agency pitches and product reviews. It is almost always wrong.
The sentence assumes demand can be created by showing people the right thing. Sometimes it can. Most of the time, the customer was not looking, and no amount of showing changes that.
Push feels like progress
Pushing a product feels productive. You build, you launch, you run campaigns, you call prospects. The calendar fills up, activity metrics climb, and the team feels busy in a good way.
But activity is not demand. CB Insights found that 35% of failed startups cited no market need as a reason they failed. That is not a marketing problem. It is a product that nobody was trying to buy.
I have watched this from both sides.
As an agency, we at difrnt. get hired to push. Some of the hardest briefs we receive are for products where the marketing is fine and the demand simply is not there. More budget makes the gap visible faster, nothing more.
What pull actually looks like
Pull is different. A customer already has a problem they are actively trying to solve. They have tried something, it did not work well enough, and they are looking for a better option right now.
You can feel the difference in a sales call. With push, you spend the meeting explaining why the problem matters. With pull, the customer explains the problem to you, in more detail than you expected, and asks when they can start.
Pull also shows up in behaviour, not opinions.
People hack together workarounds with spreadsheets and scripts. They pay for imperfect solutions. They ask for the product before it is finished.
Compliments and survey scores are cheap. Workarounds are expensive, which is why they are honest.
The best signal I know is a customer who would be annoyed if you took the product away. Not delighted by a demo. Annoyed at the thought of losing something they already depend on.
The questions that reveal it
The useful questions are about the past, not the future. "Would you use this?" invites politeness. "What did you do the last time this problem came up?" gets facts.
I would ask what they tried, what it cost them, why it fell short, and what triggered the search in the first place. If the answers are vague, the problem is not urgent. If they can name the date, the tool and the amount of money lost, you have found pull.
The trigger question matters most. Demand rarely appears out of nowhere. Something changes, a new regulation, a new competitor, a lost client, a promotion. Knowing the trigger tells you when to show up and what to say, which is most of what marketing does well.
Why AI makes this harder
Building used to be the expensive part, which acted as a natural filter. If an idea needed six months of engineering, someone usually asked whether customers wanted it first.
That filter is gone. With Claude Code or Cursor, a small team can ship a working product in a weekend. The cost of building something nobody pulls for has collapsed, so the number of such products is exploding.
The result is a market full of polished solutions searching for problems. Every one of them needs pushing, so every one of them competes for the same attention, which drives up acquisition costs for everybody. I argued earlier that distribution is the only moat left. Pull is what makes distribution cheap.
There is a second effect inside companies. Cheap building means internal teams can launch new initiatives faster than anyone can evaluate them. Without a discipline for stopping work, the portfolio fills with pushed projects. I wrote about why your company needs a way to kill ideas, and the pull test is one of the simplest ways to do it.
The test I use now
Before I commit serious time or budget to a new product or service, I look for three things.
Can I name ten specific customers who are already trying to solve this, with evidence of what they tried? Is there a recent trigger that makes the problem more urgent now than a year ago? And would those customers pay for an imperfect first version, today, rather than waiting for the finished one?
If the answer to any of these is no, the work is not ready to scale. It might be ready for more conversations. It is not ready for a launch campaign.
This is a systems thinking point as much as a product one. Pull determines how hard every other part of the business has to work. Sales cycles, acquisition costs, churn, even hiring all get easier when customers arrive already looking.
You cannot push a market into existence. You can only find the people already leaning toward you, and get out of their way.