A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:28:10 · Damien Lewke
And then, okay, I have some data on business value. Okay, how do you think about pricing and budgeting, right? Is this replacing? Is this augmenting? How valuable is that to you? The idea was end state for the ninety and niniety to get a market scape in terms of who your ICP was, which verticals you might plan. But also understand what does their environment look like? What does their team look like? What are their priorities in general? How much money do they have? How do they value your solution? And ninety data points, as that discussion evolves, really builds that comprehensive data set. Which allowed me to raise money and be like, this is what we're doing. This is how they value it. This is how it's going to work and at the same time, bring in a team to help build that out.
00:28:52 · Pablo Srugo
[00:28:52] S2: I'm really worried because listen, you've been listening for like, what, ten, twenty, thirty minutes now? Clearly you like it and the thing is, the next episode is way better and you're gonna miss it. You're gonna miss it because you're not following the show. So take your phone out and hit that follow button. This is why it takes, sometimes founders will do this and be like, yeah, I spoke with ten or twenty and it's like, first of all, you need to start broad. Because otherwise you're going to lead them to the thing that you want to lead them to. So you have to start broad to even validate that piece, takes probably twenty, thirty calls to get those patterns and then you use the next fifty or sixty or a hundred calls, whatever it is, to figure out all the other details, right? All the infrastructure, everything else they're using, and then come out with the ICP. And, you know, if it's this type of customer and with this type of role, with this type of setup. Then now we're really feeling the pull for the kind of product that I'm thinking about and that's what you have to come out of with Discovery. Which leads me to my next question on learnings. What is, do you remember an example or two of something that as a result of doing these calls, you learned that you otherwise wouldn't have or it might have taken you a long time, selling the wrong thing, to get at?
00:30:00 · Damien Lewke
[00:30:00] S0: Oh my God. Yeah, absolutely. I mentioned this earlier, the architecture, I was so wrong. I thought we were going to plug into this one system called the SIM and we were going to pull all this data from it. So off base, we ended up needing to plug into an entirely different tech stack. The other thing is I wanted to build this new system that would run in their environment and I learned that that would add zero value. But if I had operated, and this is a personal suggestion but as a founder, yes, you have conviction. You want to be obsessed with the problem. You have conviction in your idea, but you do need to check your assumptions. Because if I hadn't, if I had not done this customer discovery, if I had not learned how they run operations and how and where we would fit. We would have built the wrong solution. We absolutely would have and we would have had to hard pivot, burn money, make some tough choices versus case the market, get a flavor for what that actually is. So, yeah, no, I had core assumptions that were very wrong. I'm very glad that I did the discovery because it got me to the right place.
00:31:00 · Pablo Srugo
[00:31:00] S2: The other thing you mentioned is, you know, you asked just about everybody at the end if they could introduce you to somebody else in the network. Which, you know, you mentioned obviously just gets you more calls, it gets you more connected. It also, by the way, plays into this psychological bias, which is you're actually more likely to do a favor for someone that you've previously done a favor for, which is a really weird thing. You think favors kind of are reciprocal like if I do you a favour you, you owe me one sort of thing. Which there’s an element of that but actually if you ask me for something small like at the end of a positive call, hey do you know anybody else that would what to talk to? Just as a small favour? It's like, hey, you know, I actually do, here you go, here's an into. I’ve actually just escalated that relationship to one where I’ve already done something for you then you asked me for a second call or you ask me for, you know, hey, let's discuss maybe a design partnership or something like that. It's just, I'm actually just more likely to respond favorably to that. So that, I don't know if you experienced that at all. I'm curious what maybe the outcome was of all these calls.
00:31:52 · Damien Lewke, Pablo Srugo
[00:31:52] S0: A thousand percent is the answer, Pablo, right? People are more likely to help as you build a relationship and really what I ended up doing, especially if it was a really good one. We did some deeper dives with the ninety and ninety or about fifteen companies that I had two, three, four sessions with. Where we do an hour and we got into some more of the tactics. And that's how we found our first design partners. One suggestion for founders. It served me well to get out of this chair and get out there. I did bike, Uber, train, fly to meet these people and it was really, really helpful. Because, especially in today's distributed world, those in person connections, look, you need to be genuine, right? But, if you genuinely go out there and make the time and effort, people will respond to that positively. [00:32:44] S2: Was this for the first meetings or you did it only for the second meetings? How did you make this happen?
00:32:44 · Pablo Srugo, Damien Lewke
[00:32:44] S2: Was this for the first meetings or you did it only for the second meetings? How did you make this happen? [00:32:48] S0: It varies. So one of the key things that I benefited from was there was a core industry conference about two months into the ninety and ninety called Black Hat that happened for us, and I just, on my own dime. Flew out to Black Hat, got myself a hotel room, paid for my Ubers and I just walked the floor. I walked up to strangers and I was like, hey, I'm Damien. Can I get you a coffee? But it was putting myself in those positions to be successful. So it was for plenty of first meetings and yes, definitely for second meetings. We had a bunch of folks, I'm based in Boston, Massachusetts. We had a bunch of folks in Boston and it was like, hey, this was great. Hey, do you want to go for a run? You want to grab a coffee? And then I'd get out there and meet them where they were in their respective city. [00:33:28] S2: After these ninety days, first of all, is it just you? Do you raise money? Do you have customers? What's the outcome? [00:33:34] S0: Yeah, so I ended up raising money during the ninety and ninety. [00:33:34] S2: How much did you raise?