Start small and let demand set the direction

Most first products are too large. A founder with an idea sees all of it at once: the core feature, the settings, the integrations, the admin dashboard, the second audience that might want it later. Burnham, a co-founder of the New York venture firm Union Square Ventures, argues for building the smallest useful piece and letting demand decide what comes next. The line circulates under his name without a clear original source, but it matches how his firm has described the companies it backs, whose users shaped the product.

“Pull” is the working word. In a push model, the company decides what the market needs and spends its energy persuading people. In a pull model, the company puts something small in front of users and watches where they tug. Requests, workarounds and unexpected uses show which direction has demand behind it. Twitter, one of Union Square’s early investments, is the standard example. It launched as a bare service for posting short status messages. Users invented the @reply and the hashtag as conventions of their own, and the company later built both into the product.

Simplicity is what makes the pull visible. A product with twenty features gives users twenty ways to be mildly interested, and the signal from any one of them is weak. A product that does one thing gets a clearer response: people either use it or they do not, and when they want more, what they ask for points somewhere specific. Simple products are also cheaper to change, which matters because following the pull means rebuilding parts of the product often.

The approach fits consumer web services and developer tools, where users are numerous and can try things for free. It fits poorly where the buyer cannot try a partial product. A hospital will not pilot half a records system, and an airline will not test the simple version of a booking engine. In those markets the company has to understand the requirements before building, and the market pulls only after a substantial product exists.

A subtler failure sits inside the method. Markets pull in many directions at once, and a company that follows every tug ends up with a pile of requested features and no shape. The founder still has to choose which pull to follow, usually the one from the users the company most wants to keep. Letting the market lead is a way of finding demand. It does not settle which demand to serve.