A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:00:00 · Ali Khokhar, Pablo Srugo
[00:00:00] S0: Validation is dollars exchanging hands. I can go talk to 50 of my friends and be like, what do think about this idea? And I was like, they don't wanna offend you. They're like, oh, that's a great idea. [00:00:07] S1: A 100%. [00:00:09] S0: And so I was like, no. No. No. No. None of that is real validation. You know, we had 47 no straight before our first yes as an example. Like, it was a lot of like no no no no no. And then by the end of the journey, it was like, hey, yeah, I'll wire you the money without meeting you. It's like, I have heard through the grapevine that you have a term sheet or multiple term sheets. I've heard sort of what you're doing, where do I wire the money? If you can't sell the first 2,000,000 yourself, like, first of all, how are you gonna attract the world's best AEs to come work for you? The world's best sales team is not gonna respect a founder who can't do it themselves. If you're build on an AE and say, year one quota or target is a million, a million and a half, if you yourself haven't done that in six months, you don't have a right to say this is possible, you have the ability to do this. Basically, doubled the company's revenue overnight with one new customer. And we're like, oh, great. Yes. We have such a good fit here. Let's go and focus only on that, and then we did the hard decision of actually churning everybody else. Fully refunded them, found them a new home, like made them whole, but we stopped working with [00:01:06] S1: What percent of your revenue was that at the time?
00:01:06 · Pablo Srugo, Ali Khokhar
[00:01:06] S1: What percent of your revenue was that at the time? [00:01:08] S0: A 100% of our old revenue we churned. Everybody. We started from scratch on the revenue side of things and rebuilt from the ground up, but we crossed our previous high within two months. And then, like, five x that and then 10 x that. That's product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. I called it the product market fit question. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product market fit. Product I market mean, the name of the show is product market fit. [00:01:34] S1: Do you think the product market fit show has product market fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to pick up your phone. You have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders, and it lets us get better guests. Thank you. Ali, what's up, man? Welcome to the show. [00:01:50] S0: Thank you. Good to be here. [00:01:52] S1: So you've built I mean, everybody's talking about AI agents. You've built a platform of AI agents for the health care sector. You've raised over 15,000,000, almost 20,000,000 so far. Just raised the series a. So we're gonna get into all that, what happened, how it happened, all the pivots, all the all the shit you have to go through to to build something like this. But to start off, because this is the product market fit show, when did you feel like you'd found true product market fit and why? You know, where were you? When was it? What happened?
00:01:52 · Pablo Srugo, Ali Khokhar
[00:01:52] S1: So you've built I mean, everybody's talking about AI agents. You've built a platform of AI agents for the health care sector. You've raised over 15,000,000, almost 20,000,000 so far. Just raised the series a. So we're gonna get into all that, what happened, how it happened, all the pivots, all the all the shit you have to go through to to build something like this. But to start off, because this is the product market fit show, when did you feel like you'd found true product market fit and why? You know, where were you? When was it? What happened? [00:02:19] S0: One of the biggest deals we ever signed, which was our very first deal, which was like a multi 6 figure contract, got signed in sixteen days during Christmas and New Year's. Right? When the world is asleep, when the world sort of shuts down, generally speaking. They came inbound and that felt to me like we had sort of struck lightning. Because it like very clearly indicated that a fairly larger company relative to us at the time cared so deeply and has such a big hair on fire problem that their execs were wanting to work through Christmas, through New Year's, in a very short period of time, and sort of go through this process with us, and take a bet on a fairly early stage company. That was the first moment I would say, and then the following three to four months, that feeling of we were closing larger and larger enterprise deals. [00:03:07] S1: What what kind of ACV are we talking about more or less? [00:03:09] S0: We're talking a 150 to 300. [00:03:12] S1: Okay. Meaningful.
00:03:12 · Pablo Srugo, Ali Khokhar
[00:03:12] S1: Okay. Meaningful. [00:03:13] S0: Yeah. Meaningful. Exactly. As in like, you know, we're looking at CEOs are only signing off on this, like, this is not bottoms up, there's no PLG, it's pure play. You know, what at the time for us especially was considered quote unquote enterprise. We've now moved even more upmarket. But at that moment, that first 240 k deal was the largest deal we had ever signed in the history of our company. We had done it in like sub twenty days through Christmas and New Year's. Every few weeks then we were signing deals like that. And that feeling of like the market is pulling the product out of you versus you are pushing it into the market, that feeling is very distinct. And I started feeling that over and over and over, and that gave us the signal that we were on the right track and that we had sort of struck a nerve in terms of the product and platform and infrastructure we had built with this really good match in terms of the pain points that a lot of our customers were feeling.
00:04:01 · Pablo Srugo
[00:04:01] S1: Everybody will tell you that there's no number that indicates product market fit, like when you hit a million or 2,000,000 or whatever. But when you're signing 100 k plus deals consistently, and especially fast paced, you're just getting through cycles and it's a high priority, it's almost impossible to not feel like you have true PMF. Because it's real money. Nobody's spending that money unless they feel they really need that product, which leads me to that question. Tell me a bit more about that product at that point, because I know it changed before, we'll get to that. But at that point, what was the product that you were selling that was resonating so clearly?
00:04:33 · Ali Khokhar, Pablo Srugo
[00:04:33] S0: Yep. So we were very focused on, and still are. We think of ourselves and have had sort of framed ourselves as an infrastructure and platform layer to build healthcare specific agents, especially those agents that were able to perform tasks and works generally that is has high risk of failure. Right? In healthcare, there's a lot of back office administrative functions, there's a lot of rev cycle type of building that's happening. We started our journey being focused on patient facing agents. Patient facing agents in what I call subclinical use cases. Think like med adherence and side effect management. Think like post discharge, post surgery recovery, etcetera, etcetera, messing up and, like, cost of failure is extremely high. And we had built and have built sort of this entire infrastructure deep layer to be able to build and train and quantify the performance of those agents performing that type of work in the world. [00:05:24] S1: And these were voice agents, like, that you would call or text or email? How did people interact with them?