Scaling Europe
00:06:08 · Dimitris Samouris, Sebastian Johnson
And so that began this journey of like, what can we do if we stitch together speech to text and and language models? What what workflows in that space can we go after? And I think seeing the content produced by the first Whisper model was when I... It really hit me like, okay. The way that you run a diligence is gonna completely change over the next couple of years. [00:06:32] S0: And what was the first, you know, three, six months like? You know, did you get to a point where you'd built a solid product that was useful? Or how long did that take until you [00:06:41] S1: kind of [00:06:41] S0: had the sort of the wind behind your sails?
00:06:44 · Dimitris Samouris
[00:06:44] S1: I wanted to start building right away. My co founder was much more product minded than... He'd spent five years at Airbnb and then a couple of fintech companies afterwards. It was completely right to pump the brakes. He was like, I know you think you know the problem. Let's do a bunch of user research before we do anything. So the first like month and a bit was hitting up my network and asking people how they run expert calls and very very quickly realized it's quite consistent across the industry. We did something like 80 user research calls in the space that first month. Obviously dogfooding the tech and I was gonna say, making sure that like we were happy with the quality that it produced. Those conversations and a piece of advice for other entrepreneurs that are going down this journey, they became our design partners. Like, the people that were most excited when we were talking to them about this were the people that signed up immediately. And, you know, there's this cliche our accelerator kept telling us like when you when you hit product market fit, will feel it. Yeah. There's no like objective metric here that you're going for. Like you will just know when when people want to use your product. And and that's what happened like at some point we were like, I have a case starting on Monday. Can we go? Like, can I use this now? And that's when we started building. We lined up three boutique consulting firms, the ones that would give us the time of day early on, you know, the big enterprises they they... It's very very hard to serve them if you don't have a track record.
00:08:16 · Sebastian Johnson, Dimitris Samouris
[00:08:16] S0: Yeah. [00:08:17] S1: And we spent... This is like February to May, so three months or so building out like v one of the product where it had a couple of different phases. First phase is like, can we throw some old content on there and see how it works? Second phase, can we run this in parallel of an existing engagement? Because, you know, these people get paid a lot of money on live deals. Like, there is no room for error on this stuff. It has to work. You can't ask a consulting firm to switch over their workflows to, like, untested software. And at the end of the three months, those three customers signed up. They were happy with the quality of the of the product. And that's when we started going to market like May May twenty twenty three. [00:09:04] S0: That's amazing. What you say about product market fit remind me of what another founder said that it's... Before product market fit, you sort of feels like you're pushing a boulder up a hill. Yeah. And then once you've got product market fill... Fit, all of a sudden you're kind of chasing that boulder down the hill [00:09:18] S1: Yes. [00:09:18] S0: And you're just sort of running with it. Yeah. Was that... I mean, it sounds like you clearly wanted to be a founder. Right? Before you knew exactly what you're building, the thing that you wanted to do was to build something cool or great or useful. Yeah. What was that moment like where you're like, hold on. We've actually... We've got something now. We've just kind of struck gold. People are telling us they want this.
00:09:18 · Sebastian Johnson, Dimitris Samouris
[00:09:18] S0: And you're just sort of running with it. Yeah. Was that... I mean, it sounds like you clearly wanted to be a founder. Right? Before you knew exactly what you're building, the thing that you wanted to do was to build something cool or great or useful. Yeah. What was that moment like where you're like, hold on. We've actually... We've got something now. We've just kind of struck gold. People are telling us they want this. [00:09:39] S1: Extremely fulfilling. There's a moment where someone looks at what you've built or after uses it and then says, thank you. There's a gratitude that comes from solving like a genuine pain point. [00:09:54] S0: Yeah. [00:09:54] S1: There is no better feeling in the world than a customer or user saying, thank you for what you've built. Did it... Did a lot of diligence in the ten years before that. Didn't get a lot of thank yous from from clients. Yeah. Odd one here and there, but it's a very transactional environment and you're only as good as your last engagement. And when you're a more junior member of the team, right, you don't have that personal relationship with your sponsor across the the table. But, I think that that was like a really pivotal moment for us when people... Like, their eyes would light up and they'd smile. I don't have to do this donkey work anymore. Like, it's amazing. Yeah. [00:10:31] S0: Well, like, now what? Three three and a half years later since that kind of first, you know, commercialization or going to market? Yeah. Where are things at today? How's the business doing?
00:10:31 · Sebastian Johnson, Dimitris Samouris
[00:10:31] S0: Well, like, now what? Three three and a half years later since that kind of first, you know, commercialization or going to market? Yeah. Where are things at today? How's the business doing? [00:10:41] S1: Things are going very well. This particular year has been extremely hectic for us. So we we started the year at 25 people. We're now at 75. [00:10:51] S0: Wow. [00:10:52] S1: 30,000,000 in run rate. We're serving over 60 customers, mostly on the larger side of the industry. We are expanding outside of our initial product line as well. So there's a lot happening and going on at the same time. And one thing particularly proud of and I think is quite unique about Junior is the fact that we've done that entirely bootstrapped. [00:11:16] S0: That's amazing. And was that an intentional choice? Or were you... It sounds like you were able to commercialize quite early. Yeah. Was were you just able to reinvest that money? Did you look at funding?
00:11:16 · Sebastian Johnson, Dimitris Samouris
[00:11:16] S0: That's amazing. And was that an intentional choice? Or were you... It sounds like you were able to commercialize quite early. Yeah. Was were you just able to reinvest that money? Did you look at funding? [00:11:26] S1: Yes. Of course. Yeah. We looked at funding. I I don't want to pretend like this was some plan from the beginning. Like, as part of the accelerator that we got into, like, they're very clear about what they expect from you. Like, build a product, get some customers, go raise a round. Yeah. And we tried that in May 23. We spoke to about 60 funds at the time. No one would give us the time of day, and we can we can talk more about feedback from investors for this market if you're if you're interested. So necessity is the mother of invention. It made us extremely focused on what what we needed to do to get paid. Build a product that someone is willing to pay you for now, right now. We ran the bank down to out of the the 400 k that we had been granted by South Park initially at some point, we were down to a tenth of that. That really focuses the mind. That's amazing.