First off, here's your obligatory "teragigacope, pullups don't get you Tinder matches, Chad can slay as a bed bound quadriplegic amorphous blob with terminal cancer and gout, blah blah blah yap yap yap".
With that out of the way...
Not being able to do even one pullup is embarrassing and a real ego-crusher. Most western males in 2019 can't even do one. The minimum number of strict pullups to join the United States Marine Corps is three. The minimum to join the Navy SEALs is ten, with fifteen being considered competitive with other recruits. Military and law enforcement agencies worldwide use pullups as a standard for determining overall strength and conditioning, for good reason: you need to be both strong and lean to do a decent number of them.
The best way to do more pullups is to do more pullups, but how do you do pullups if you can't do pullups?
I'll tell you.
Your first priority should be losing body fat if your body fat isn't low already. The vast majority of men are strong enough to do at least one pullup completely untrained and lean. If you're overweight or skinnyfat, there's a good chance getting down to a fit healthy body fat percentage while maintaining the strength you have is all you need to do.
But let's assume you're already lean, since you should be practicing the movement even if you aren't.
In that case, the first thing you need to know is the three types of grip you can use: pronated, where your palms face down when your hands are out in front of you; supinated, where your palms face up in this position; and neutral, where your palms face each other in that position.
Each grip has its own level of difficulty. The order from easiest to hardest is: neutral, supinated (aka chinup), pronated (standard pullup).
With a neutral grip, you get more assistance from the teres major and biceps. A supinated grip gets you the most bicep activation. A pronated grip gets you the least bicep activation and puts the most stress on the brachialis muscle, a weak point for many people, making it the hardest of the three. Therefore, as someone who can't do even do one pullup with any of these grips, you should be starting with a neutral or supinated grip depending on whether you have access to a pullup bar with a neutral grip attachment.
If you go to a gym with an assisted pullup machine, that simplifies things immensely. Just start with a level of assistance that you'd rate somewhere between a 6/10 and an 8/10 in difficulty for a set of 5 reps (about 2 reps short of failure) and do 3 sets of 5 reps 3 times a week while decreasing the amount of assistance gradually over either a per-week or a per-session basis depending on how you can manage. Use either a supinated or a neutral grip since you should be getting off the machine as soon as possible; you can't expect 100% carryover to real pullups since those require more core stability.
If your gym doesn't have an assisted pullup machine, but does have a lat pulldown machine, you can use that in much the same way, but again, don't expect 100% carryover. You may need to lift more than your bodyweight before you can move on to a standard pullup bar.
If all you have is a pullup bar, or even a miscellaneous object you're using as an improvised pullup bar like a tree branch, that's where it gets tricky. You can use resistance bands, but those give more assistance on the bottom of the exercise than on the top, meaning the bottom of the movement might be a major sticking point for you if you've only been using band-assisted pullups. Negative pullups, where you perform only the eccentric (muscles extending as opposed to contracting; body descending from the bar) half of the movement, are easy to mess up as you'll likely simp out near the end, again setting yourself up to struggle with pulling yourself past the bottom portion of the movement.
For that reason, I suggest you do not only one of these two options, but also inverted rows, where you're pulling yourself up horizontally with part of your body weight resting on your feet. The difficulty of this movement can be increased by elevating your feet to decrease your leverage, though I wouldn't recommend doing this until you can do at least 20 inverted rows with good form before failure, preferably 30. You can do these under a table at home if you have to. Once you can do 20-30 inverted rows, you should be able to do at least one supinated or neutral grip pullup.
Here's an example pullup routine I'd recommend for someone who wants to do a pullup and can't use a lat pulldown or assisted pullup machine:
Monday
A. Negative chinups 3secx3x5
B. Inverted row 3x10
Wednesday
A. Negative chinups 4secx3x5
B. Inverted row 3x11
Friday
A. Negative chinups 5secx3x5
B. Inverted row 3x12
Just based on my experience as someone who struggled to get to one bodyweight chinup for a long time, negative chinups have better carryover to full chinups than band-assisted chinups, so that's what I would recommend. Even if you don't do the negative chinups perfectly, the inverted rows should make up for it.
You should be able to do one pronated grip pullup once you can do five supinated grip chinups.
tl;dr: Get ripped and do inverted rows.
With that out of the way...
Not being able to do even one pullup is embarrassing and a real ego-crusher. Most western males in 2019 can't even do one. The minimum number of strict pullups to join the United States Marine Corps is three. The minimum to join the Navy SEALs is ten, with fifteen being considered competitive with other recruits. Military and law enforcement agencies worldwide use pullups as a standard for determining overall strength and conditioning, for good reason: you need to be both strong and lean to do a decent number of them.
The best way to do more pullups is to do more pullups, but how do you do pullups if you can't do pullups?
I'll tell you.
Your first priority should be losing body fat if your body fat isn't low already. The vast majority of men are strong enough to do at least one pullup completely untrained and lean. If you're overweight or skinnyfat, there's a good chance getting down to a fit healthy body fat percentage while maintaining the strength you have is all you need to do.
But let's assume you're already lean, since you should be practicing the movement even if you aren't.
In that case, the first thing you need to know is the three types of grip you can use: pronated, where your palms face down when your hands are out in front of you; supinated, where your palms face up in this position; and neutral, where your palms face each other in that position.
Each grip has its own level of difficulty. The order from easiest to hardest is: neutral, supinated (aka chinup), pronated (standard pullup).
With a neutral grip, you get more assistance from the teres major and biceps. A supinated grip gets you the most bicep activation. A pronated grip gets you the least bicep activation and puts the most stress on the brachialis muscle, a weak point for many people, making it the hardest of the three. Therefore, as someone who can't do even do one pullup with any of these grips, you should be starting with a neutral or supinated grip depending on whether you have access to a pullup bar with a neutral grip attachment.
If you go to a gym with an assisted pullup machine, that simplifies things immensely. Just start with a level of assistance that you'd rate somewhere between a 6/10 and an 8/10 in difficulty for a set of 5 reps (about 2 reps short of failure) and do 3 sets of 5 reps 3 times a week while decreasing the amount of assistance gradually over either a per-week or a per-session basis depending on how you can manage. Use either a supinated or a neutral grip since you should be getting off the machine as soon as possible; you can't expect 100% carryover to real pullups since those require more core stability.
If your gym doesn't have an assisted pullup machine, but does have a lat pulldown machine, you can use that in much the same way, but again, don't expect 100% carryover. You may need to lift more than your bodyweight before you can move on to a standard pullup bar.
If all you have is a pullup bar, or even a miscellaneous object you're using as an improvised pullup bar like a tree branch, that's where it gets tricky. You can use resistance bands, but those give more assistance on the bottom of the exercise than on the top, meaning the bottom of the movement might be a major sticking point for you if you've only been using band-assisted pullups. Negative pullups, where you perform only the eccentric (muscles extending as opposed to contracting; body descending from the bar) half of the movement, are easy to mess up as you'll likely simp out near the end, again setting yourself up to struggle with pulling yourself past the bottom portion of the movement.
For that reason, I suggest you do not only one of these two options, but also inverted rows, where you're pulling yourself up horizontally with part of your body weight resting on your feet. The difficulty of this movement can be increased by elevating your feet to decrease your leverage, though I wouldn't recommend doing this until you can do at least 20 inverted rows with good form before failure, preferably 30. You can do these under a table at home if you have to. Once you can do 20-30 inverted rows, you should be able to do at least one supinated or neutral grip pullup.
Here's an example pullup routine I'd recommend for someone who wants to do a pullup and can't use a lat pulldown or assisted pullup machine:
Monday
A. Negative chinups 3secx3x5
B. Inverted row 3x10
Wednesday
A. Negative chinups 4secx3x5
B. Inverted row 3x11
Friday
A. Negative chinups 5secx3x5
B. Inverted row 3x12
Just based on my experience as someone who struggled to get to one bodyweight chinup for a long time, negative chinups have better carryover to full chinups than band-assisted chinups, so that's what I would recommend. Even if you don't do the negative chinups perfectly, the inverted rows should make up for it.
You should be able to do one pronated grip pullup once you can do five supinated grip chinups.
tl;dr: Get ripped and do inverted rows.
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