Founders in Arms
01:04:41 · Jean-Denis Greze, Immad Akhund, Rajat Suri, S8
[01:04:41] S2: And then you can [01:04:42] S0: talk about, like, what are the factors that makes, like, a strong product market fit, which, I guess, I could I could entertain her, but it's a longer story. [01:04:50] S1: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of elements to it. Right? Sometimes it could be a launch that gets people attention. Sometimes it could be, like, winning a major customer. Like, for when I asked them for Presto or when we won Applebee's, We have to put our tablets on their tables. That's when we... That's when everyone started taking notice of us. It's like, oh, you know, big chain is using you guys now. Right? And so, like, you know, there there tends to be moments, and you never know when that moment will come. It could come five years into your journey as it did with Presto. Right? It took many years to get to that moment. And so you never know when things will will break out. I mean, you could look at companies like Hugging Face. Right? And, you know, their winding journey to get into product market fit and took many years, and they did and many pivots in. So... But you are looking for those moments, and when those moments happen, you gotta capitalize on them. It was happening [01:05:37] S0: with Town. [01:05:37] S1: Right? So... [01:05:41] S2: Go ahead. [01:05:42] S8: You know, how do you define the success, like, metrics internally and externally? Like, for example, do your business for Town? Like, what is the ROI that you're demonstrating? And other metrics, it's very different with AI native.
01:05:42 · S8, Immad Akhund
[01:05:42] S8: You know, how do you define the success, like, metrics internally and externally? Like, for example, do your business for Town? Like, what is the ROI that you're demonstrating? And other metrics, it's very different with AI native. [01:05:56] S0: So the question was how do you define success in one of the metrics? I have, like, maybe a controversial opinion, but the only thing that matters is how much worse profit you're making. So I feel like people can spend a lot of time justifying success in lots of different metrics and, like, your core metrics should be gross profit. You can have, like, secondary KPIs, but maybe it's controversial. Do you
01:05:56 · Immad Akhund, Jean-Denis Greze
[01:05:56] S0: So the question was how do you define success in one of the metrics? I have, like, maybe a controversial opinion, but the only thing that matters is how much worse profit you're making. So I feel like people can spend a lot of time justifying success in lots of different metrics and, like, your core metrics should be gross profit. You can have, like, secondary KPIs, but maybe it's controversial. Do you [01:06:18] S2: think that's controversial? I mean, I think in... Yeah. The world's gross profits. No. No. No. No. So I was... Like, we just... We only look at, like, revenue and willingness today. Okay. Like, I think, you know, I think we're not yet at the the gross profit stage, but we will be hopefully one day. But for me, it's it's willingness today. It's... It tells you very quickly whether you build a feature that you try to charge for, do people value it or not. It... You we have a seven day trial, so we find out pretty damn quickly if people are willing to pay when we try a new marketing campaign, when we, you know, incentivize a certain new sharing flow that should go viral, when we introduce a feature that's cost extra tokens. Like, we found out really quickly whether people are are willing to do that. And the second one for us is NRR, which might be different for other people, but it's not just initial willing to to pay, but are are are you willing to pay more over time? Because that tells us we're going deeper into providing value to you. You're finding more things to automate in your work. So those are the two main ones for us.
01:07:18 · Immad Akhund, S3
[01:07:18] S0: I would I would add. I was maybe being too reductive. I think especially early on, like, retention churn is, like, also super important, which, like, NRL kinda speaks to it. But, you know, you wanna have... I I did... Like, very high retention and, like, something that, like, you know, maybe everyone knows this, but, you know, like, in d d thirty, like, thirty days later, what percentage are still using it? Sixty days later, you want that to tail off and, ideally, tail off, like, very high. Capital. [01:07:52] S3: You mentioned very briefly this, like, from a marketing perspective, this verticalization that you wanted to be the... That each of them should see it as AI for this category. [01:08:02] S0: But I imagine most of the [01:08:03] S3: categories you're going after has some kind of, like, AI competitor, whether it's, you know, AI for car dealerships or AI for investment banking would like to implement their beta or, like, AI for customers involved and so on. So, like, do you see it as effectively competing in, 20 different verticals? Or how how are you thinking about [01:08:21] S0: --.
01:08:23 · Jean-Denis Greze
[01:08:23] S2: Yeah. So the question is, you know, I talked about how one one thing we're betting on is verticalizing our product for each different persona. And the question is, well, then aren't you competing with a vertical AI product for every AI... For every vertical? And you mentioned, like, maybe, the core and GoPro, for example. So first of all, I think our... My broad thesis is that vertical AI, if it's not a vertical where there is a, like, legal risk compliance reason for it to exist, will not be successful in this generation of software because the capabilities are the same. Like, as the ad gets better the harness gets better and it can run a computer and it can it can run a browser, the, like, difference between different verticals, such as what gets done, means less and less. That's not true of certain verticals like legal or payroll or, I think, or banking where there's, like, real reasons why you want someone to think about the different risk profile in that area. The things for us that work for us is, like, recruiting and sales and, like, medical scheduling. Like, these things that don't really have that same element. So the reason why horizontal will win, in my opinion, is because I get to amortize my development cost and my grant, like, much more efficiently than other people can. And so that's that's, like, the bet that we're making. And then number two, we are using AI to verticalize our entire marketing and onboarding journey. And so we're able to very, very quickly, like, have experiences that are specific to different users in different markets. And so I think we're getting to places where they... It's not that they aren't, like, vertical AI solution, but, like, vertical AI for recruiters, like, in terms of workflow management, is not a really fruitful market. It's not a huge market. There's nobody that's building a great product for that. You have people building great product for, like, sourcing in Silicon Valley, like Juicebox, but we are, like, it's different kinds of recruiters that are using Town. And so I actually think we we have a lot of greenfield. But there are areas where it just won't work. Like, we're not doing lawyers, you know, because that doesn't make sense.
01:10:31 · Jean-Denis Greze, S9, Immad Akhund
We're not doing, like, AI for HR management because the risk matters so much that they want someone who's thought about an agent that's, like, thoughtful, big HR decision. But a lot of the world, a lot of small businesses and mid market firms, like, are not that specialized. They want more general solutions. But, you know, TBD. I think it's like these second opinion that I have about the world that, you know, maybe I'm homeless. You know what I mean? And it just doesn't work out. So [01:11:01] S9: How do you balance, like, having a very ambitious big vision, like, proposition with you know, being focused on a few things and, like, specifically kinda, like, orienting yourself toward killer use cases. I feel like if you look at, like, some of the biggest Internet companies, they kinda, like, focus on one thing, like Amazon started with books or PayPal started with email based payments that they all, like, gradually scaled up. But in the world that we are in today, it's actually... Like you mentioned, like, you can do vertical and horizontal, you know, potentially both together. Like, do how you balance those things and saying, I'm gonna focus on one thing and create, like, insane customer delight for just the small audience and and scale from there on as opposed to kinda, like, say, I actually can't have a really big vision today. And I just wanna, you know, like, build toward that. [01:11:53] S0: Good question. You wanna take it first? I I