A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:10:10 · Ali Khokhar
[00:10:10] S0: Exactly. So I started seeing the writing on the wall, like within the month that Chagibity came out, you can imagine like, at the early on there were companies like Jasper that were doing copywriting. If you remember, that was like the very first sort of like application layer of hot AI startup that raised a bunch of capital. And you could then start saying, okay, well that's like copywriting as a category. Right? And I was like looking at Upwork's like sort of labor marketplace, I'm like, okay, copywriting, a lot of work is like software engineering, coding work, a lot of work is design work, A lot of work is, you know, there's a lot of consulting happening, and so on and so forth. And so I just started saying, like, each of these categories is gonna get picked off one by one or the next five year window, let's say. And so it was very, very clear and obvious, at least to me at the time, cause it's what, November 22, right, Chatbeti comes out? February 23, I quit my job and I was like, I'm gonna go build a company in this space. It was very obvious at that point. And so then I spent the remainder of '23 basically formulating, talking to a lot of organizations, understanding how they're thinking about at the enterprise level, how the technology changes, how they complete work, how they do work on a daily basis. And so zigged and zagged in the early days and found my way to this concept of, okay, we're gonna go and create these agents, this platform to allow anyone, solopreneurs included, right? I. E. Like those who are doing on Upwork for example, or other marketplaces like Upwork, like Fiverr, who are like going and trading their time for money that are services heavy. That's where the initial thesis was. Can we take somebody who's delivering a services heavy type of product or value, can we allow them to train an agent that they have a lot of control over, where the cost of failure is high, they care a about their brand, their reputation, and can we allow them to deliver that same value, but at a much lower price point and increase accessibility on the demand side? So that was sort of the obvious problem that I set out to start, and then raised money in January 24 of that, and then started horizontally. Right?
00:12:01 · Ali Khokhar
And then over the course of the year, we started feeling a lot of pull and thinking through, okay, as the market evolves, as the world evolves, as the technology gets better, where is there forever going to be this sort of concept of service is heavy, huge constraint on the supply side, infinite demand that is very expensive. Right? You can start now seeing why healthcare became the obvious place for us to go land in and, like, really narrow in and focus on. I also had a lot of personal experience in this space. I have four sisters. They're all in healthcare. One's an MP, one's a pharmacist, one's an RN. My partner's an RN. I saw I lived with her during the pandemic and, like, witnessed her life. A third of her floor, like, all the RNs and MPs were quitting every six months, right, during the pandemic. And so I had also experienced firsthand through my family, through my significant other, the life of somebody who is a clinical person delivering care. And so that's when like sort of two and two sort of hit me in the face of like, okay, we've built this really strong technology that allows us to capture expertise and train these systems and these agents in a very nuanced way to then go deliver high quality services at the time. Let's go and focus in on health care only, and that's when we then felt the what I was describing of like December 24, January 25 of, oh, we've hit the spark. Like, a good fit in terms of the market that we were in, that started we started focusing on, where then the rest is sort of history.
00:13:17 · Pablo Srugo
[00:13:17] S1: Perfect. And we're gonna go through I mean, we're gonna talk use communities to get your first million in ARR past that. So we're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk actually about how you raised that first round. See the 100 pitches in ten days. Before But we get to that, I wanna zoom in on that. You skimmed over this part, I get why you would do that. The you know, from February 23 until you find this first idea, right, in January 24. We call that research mode. This is like before you're actually in startup mode, you're building anything, you're doing even the MVP stuff, you're literally just researching. I've done it. It is painful. It's painful for a founder to be there because, like, you wanna start a business. That's why you quit. You wanna build something. You wanna sell something, and you're, like, doing research and trying to and people ask you, hey. What are you up to? And you're like, I don't really know. Yeah. You know, like, I'm just tell me more about those nine months. Maybe what did you do? Does any conversations come to mind? Anything you remember from that? Because it's critical to do that right. Yes. You'll pivot. But where you start matters. Right? You started broad, then you honed it in. If you'd started somewhere else, it's hard to imagine that you would end up with the amigo you have today.
00:14:18 · Ali Khokhar, Pablo Srugo
[00:14:18] S0: Yeah. Those are the the insane days of just me by myself as a solo founder who, you know and I'm I come from a non technical background, so I was in growth and marketing and product. And so because I wasn't in engineering, was like okay great, like what's the only real skill set that I should have is like being able to sell, right? Like navigate the market, understand demand, and being able to sell. And at the time if you think back, there's no clock code, there's no lovable, there's no coding agents, there's no ability to prompt your way into a prototype. This is like old school stuff. Right? And so my entire thesis early on was true validation of demand of an idea is dollars exchanging hands. This was like a very, very specific intentional thing I did. I can go talk to 50 of my friends and be like, what do think about this idea? And everyone's like, they don't wanna offend you. They're like, that's a great thing. [00:15:01] S1: A 100%. [00:15:02] S0: And so I was like, no no no no no. None of that is real validation. Validation is dollars exchanging hands. So I was very anchored on when somebody pays me for something, I know that this is a real problem that they have that they're willing to pay for. Right? Seems very obvious and simple, but I know a lot of like early stage founders, even friends of mine, get stuck in the trap of like, this makes sense to me, so let's just go build it. Or like, I talked to seven people and they said this is a good idea, so it must be a good idea.
00:15:02 · Ali Khokhar, Pablo Srugo
[00:15:02] S0: And so I was like, no no no no no. None of that is real validation. Validation is dollars exchanging hands. So I was very anchored on when somebody pays me for something, I know that this is a real problem that they have that they're willing to pay for. Right? Seems very obvious and simple, but I know a lot of like early stage founders, even friends of mine, get stuck in the trap of like, this makes sense to me, so let's just go build it. Or like, I talked to seven people and they said this is a good idea, so it must be a good idea. [00:15:27] S1: It's because psychologically, you just and I know exactly what talking You want to go. You don't wanna like, you wanna let's go. Let's sell. Let's build. Like, let's get started. And slowing down the problem is if you do that and you get it wrong, you will spend years pushing a boulder up a hill because you never really got to the moment that you're about to talk about. But but, yes, it's extremely common.
00:15:27 · Pablo Srugo, Ali Khokhar
[00:15:27] S1: It's because psychologically, you just and I know exactly what talking You want to go. You don't wanna like, you wanna let's go. Let's sell. Let's build. Like, let's get started. And slowing down the problem is if you do that and you get it wrong, you will spend years pushing a boulder up a hill because you never really got to the moment that you're about to talk about. But but, yes, it's extremely common. [00:15:48] S0: Exactly. So I'll just tell you the full journey basically. I left and, like, I had this concept of, okay, agents, quote unquote, that are gonna deliver some of service, but like where do we start? Right? Because like again, I come from a background of like uppercase horizontal, what category should I begin? Is it copywriting? Is it is that too late? Is it like Jasper's already done that? What is next on the bulk air? I started by just going to a lot of my smart friends and being like, what are you using ChatSuite for? Very classic. Right? To get a sense of like, what are interesting use cases that are that seem very odd at first. Right? Because I'm like, it's so early on, don't I wanna just want and everyone was like, yeah, copywriting. Copywriting. I'm like, okay, cool. What else? And I had a couple of people tell me that they were using it for coaching. Like, personal coaching, leadership coaching, personal development, health coaching. They were using it for motivation, etcetera, etcetera. I was like, oh, interesting. Weird, but interesting. Okay. Let me pull on that thread a little bit.