A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:08:21 · Pablo Srugo, Ali Khokhar
[00:08:21] S1: So tell me about the origin story. Now that we know that moment when things started to find click, there was a year before that where presumably it wasn't clicking yet. Right? But maybe just start with that, like, just a little bit of not not maybe your full background, but right before you started Amigo, what were you doing, and and why did you decide to start this business in the first place? [00:08:37] S0: Yep. So I started my career at Google, spent time there, and then went to a company called Upwork. I was at the internal incubator there, building sort of net user to one product surface area, of like new bets for the business, new ventures. And obviously, lot of the focus Upwork, like world's largest labor marketplace, we started thinking through what does it mean to be able to deliver high quality sort of knowledge work through the form of agents. Right? So a lot of my sort of thesis and initial thinking was in that space. I left to start Amigo, which initially the thesis was similar in the sense of is there really high value labor or knowledge work that is super expensive, super hard to find, supply constrained, that we can build and train these agents for that can then go deliver that quality of work. Right? So it wasn't healthcare only in the beginning, that was the more generalized thesis.
00:08:37 · Ali Khokhar, Pablo Srugo
[00:08:37] S0: Yep. So I started my career at Google, spent time there, and then went to a company called Upwork. I was at the internal incubator there, building sort of net user to one product surface area, of like new bets for the business, new ventures. And obviously, lot of the focus Upwork, like world's largest labor marketplace, we started thinking through what does it mean to be able to deliver high quality sort of knowledge work through the form of agents. Right? So a lot of my sort of thesis and initial thinking was in that space. I left to start Amigo, which initially the thesis was similar in the sense of is there really high value labor or knowledge work that is super expensive, super hard to find, supply constrained, that we can build and train these agents for that can then go deliver that quality of work. Right? So it wasn't healthcare only in the beginning, that was the more generalized thesis. [00:09:25] S1: You know, that was the wave. I mean, end of twenty two is ChatGPT. '23 is people figuring out what AI really is, and '24 is when the wave was actually just starting, I would say, for AI agents. Is that what drove you to say, I I I gotta get in on this wave. I gotta I gotta do something with AI agents. It's too big to ignore.
00:09:25 · Pablo Srugo, Ali Khokhar
[00:09:25] S1: You know, that was the wave. I mean, end of twenty two is ChatGPT. '23 is people figuring out what AI really is, and '24 is when the wave was actually just starting, I would say, for AI agents. Is that what drove you to say, I I I gotta get in on this wave. I gotta I gotta do something with AI agents. It's too big to ignore. [00:09:39] S0: For me, it was a month after ChagiPT came out, I started raising the alarm bells saying, hey, what happens to a company like Upwork that is very labor heavy? Right? That is a labor market. That was all I was doing all day long was thinking about that problem space. Right? And so February '23 is when I actually quit my job. [00:09:58] S1: It's very interesting, like you're literally at the place where it's probably most vulnerable because it's that extra work that you don't need to hire a full time person for. You're like, throw it to Upwork, throw it to Fiverr, throw it to these places that just get it. It's the first to go.
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.