Pull: Why Better Isn't Enough (Unless They Can Feel It)

You can have a product that's objectively better than the alternative.

Faster. Cheaper. Cleaner UI. More powerful.

And still people shrug, stick with what they have, and never come back after the first try.

Why?

Because "better" isn’t enough. You need Pull, the force that makes a new way feel not just plausible, but personally worth it.

What is Pull?

Through the JTBD lens, Pull is one of four forces that determine whether someone switches solutions. Push and Pull drive people toward change. Habit and Anxiety hold them back. Pull is the attraction to a better future.

Not your features. Not your roadmap. Not the list of things you can do. Pull is the user picturing themselves on the other side of the switch and thinking:

"That would make my life easier." "That would make me look competent." "That would make this whole situation less stressful."

Pull is felt. It's emotional before it's rational. And it's comparative — pull only exists in contrast to what they're doing now.

Pull isn't "I like it." Pull is "I need that."

A lot of teams confuse pull with positive sentiment. Pull isn't "this seems nice." Pull is desire with teeth. It has a target: a specific kind of relief, confidence, speed, control, status, calm.

The iPhone is the classic example, and it's worth revisiting because it shows how pull works at full strength. Apple wasn’t merely selling a better phone. It collapsed a bunch of messy, annoying realities — carrying a phone plus an iPod plus a camera, the "mobile internet" that felt like punishment, tiny keyboards — into one clean promise you could feel in your hand. People adopted it because the future it implied was obvious.

Without a strong Pull like that, you end up with polite interest and no behavior change.

Pull has two jobs

Pull has to do two things at the same time: make the new future vivid and specific, and make it feel reachable and realistic.

A vivid future means the user can clearly see what changes when they switch. Not "improved workflow." What changes in their day? What stops happening? What do they finally stop dreading?

A reachable future ****means the user believes they can actually get there. A future can be vivid and still not create pull if the learning curve looks steep, migration looks painful, or the whole thing feels like a "project."

Notion nailed both sides. The vivid and specific part was easy to demonstrate — one workspace replacing the scattered mess of Google Docs, Trello boards, wikis, and spreadsheets that most teams were running. You could see your whole project in one place. But Notion also made it reachable and realistic by starting people out with templates. You didn't have to build your system from scratch. You picked a template, modified it, and you were working. The gap between "I see why this is better" and "I'm actually using it" was short enough that pull didn't collapse into overwhelm.

People don't only ask "is it better?" They ask, silently: "Can I actually get there without regretting it?"

Pull is strongest when it hits more than one job layer

Many teams try to create pull on the functional level only: save time, automate tasks, ship faster. That's fine, but it's rarely the hook.

Pull gets much stronger when it also hits emotional and social jobs.

Peloton is a great example. The functional job is straightforward — get a workout at home without commuting to a gym. But the pull that actually drove adoption hit all three layers. Emotionally, riders described feeling like they had a coach who knew them, not a screen playing a generic video. Socially, the leaderboard and community created a visible identity — you were "someone who rides," and your friends could see your streaks and milestones. The bike was a piece of exercise equipment. The pull was about feeling motivated and being seen as someone who shows up.

A product that makes someone feel capable and look competent can beat a product that's technically more powerful. People don't just buy tools. They buy how the tool makes them feel and lets them operate in the world.

Pull in action: what a different workday actually feels like

Figma's pull over Sketch, the design tool that dominated before it, wasn't about features. Sketch could do almost everything Figma could do.

The pull was about what your workday felt like.

With Sketch, collaboration meant exporting files, uploading them to a shared drive or InVision, waiting for comments, syncing versions, re-exporting. A design review involved a chain of handoffs before anyone could even look at the work.

With Figma, you sent a link. Your teammate opened it. They were in the file. They could comment, inspect, or edit — live, in the browser, no installs. A design review became a conversation instead of a logistics exercise.

That's pull. Not "we have better features." More like "here's what your Tuesday looks like when this friction disappears." The day felt different, and that difference was obvious the first time you tried it.

The Pull mistake

Describing features as if the user is browsing a menu. "AI summaries. Integrations. Dashboards. Templates" isn’t Pull.

Airtable's early messaging shows how this works. They could have said "spreadsheet with database features." Instead they showed specific use cases — a film production company tracking every shot, a startup managing their launch timeline, an event planner coordinating vendors — each one a story about a day getting easier. The pull wasn't "we're a flexible tool." It was "here's what it looks like when your specific chaos gets organized."

If you can't describe what someone's day looks like when the problem stops running their life, you're not creating pull. You're hoping the user does the translation for you.

Most won't.

Pull in low-desperation markets: you have to create the gap

When push is low, pull has to do more work.

Quibi is a majofr cautionary tale. It was a mobile streaming service built for "quick bites" of premium video — ten-minute episodes you could watch between meetings or on your commute. It raised $1.75 billion, hired Steven Spielberg to create content, built a beautiful app, and launched in April 2020.

It was dead within six months.

Quibi had production value. It had polish. But it didn't create pull strong enough to overcome the alternatives. People already had YouTube. They already had Netflix. They already had TikTok and Instagram and endless free entertainment in their pocket. "Premium short-form video" wasn't a future they were reaching for because the present was already good enough.

Contrast that with Duolingo. Language learning apps weren't urgent either — nobody wakes up in pain because they can't speak French. Push was basically zero. But Duolingo created pull by making the experience feel like a game you didn't want to lose. Streaks, leagues, a mascot that guilted you when you skipped a day. The pull wasn't "learn a language." It was "keep your streak alive" — a target so immediate and emotionally sticky that millions of people open the app daily even when the underlying job isn't urgent at all.

In low-desperation contexts, you need a sharper contrast than “better”. A clearer "why this, why now" — or in Duolingo's case, a "why not right now" that makes not opening the app feel worse than opening it.

A Pull diagnostic you can actually use

If you want to test whether your product has pull, ask a potential user this: "Imagine you've been using this for a month and it's working really well. What's different about your life?"

If they can't answer, pull is weak. If they answer with vague abstractions — "I'm more productive" — pull is still weak.

If they answer with specific moments — "I don't dread Monday mornings anymore because I know what's going on" or "I stopped getting those panicked Slack messages from my team asking where things are" — now you have something.

That's a future they can feel.