Founders in Arms
00:08:01 · Jean-Denis Greze
There was a blank page on the Internet on our website, which is town.com. It said, we're an applied AI company and had some bullshit blog. And then the upper right, there was a sign in button that we added. And you clicked signed in, and it was like, please connect your Gmail and give us all the rights to your Gmail. Like, you know, like all the people who click people I don't know who, but I do know who after the fact. But random people that we didn't ask went to our web page, clicked on sign in, clicked on connect Gmail, looked at all the disclaimers. They're like, cool. That sounds good for me. They signed in for that. And then they saw the world's worst interface where you could basically just have an LLM rule running on top of your email. That was the initial product. So you could write a rule like, oh, if it's an email from a VC, just archive it. If it's an email from a potential lead for my business, star it and label it important and draft a reply. It was very basic. It was just, like, rules that humans could set. And for every... That would be called every email. It was quite expensive. And people just started using it, and it was like... We came back from the holiday vacation after Christmas, and it was, like, I don't know, 15 VAUs or something. We're like, 15 DAUs? Who are these people? Where are they coming from? And it kept it kept growing, and then it was, a week later, it was, like, I don't know, 30 DAUs. We're like, that's weird. What's going on? And so then my cofounder and I, we were like, everyone stop what else you're doing. We're gonna spend a month and a half building the AI on top of Gmail.
00:09:33 · Immad Akhund, Jean-Denis Greze
[00:09:33] S0: And But so it was the... It was 30 users that gave [00:09:36] S2: you enough confidence? Yeah. I I mean, if you've ever built a PLD product [00:09:40] S0: We're getting... Where are they coming from? They were telling each other about it. Is that how [00:09:44] S2: it was? Yeah. I think part of it was having town.com and having done tax. I think people were actually coming who were, like, wanted us to do tax with them from before. [00:09:53] S0: Because there's a decent number of years.
00:09:53 · Immad Akhund, Jean-Denis Greze, Rajat Suri
[00:09:53] S0: Because there's a decent number of years. [00:09:54] S2: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. People randomly showing up. Then there was VCs who signed up because VCs are always checking out what your startup is doing. So there's some of them that signed up for it. And then some of the VCs told some of their portfolio companies, and then some of the tax people told more tax people. And, yeah, it just kept on growing. In PLG, if you can get a 100 users, you can get a million users. Like, it's very... If you... No sales. PLG really means that you're not talking to anybody. You're not doing any marketing. There's... The onboarding is whatever it is. And if you can get people to sign up, retain, and word-of-mouth to get other folks, like, that is the definition of product market fit. It's very hard to do, but we got lucky into it. And so after that, we started listening to users and the product. When was this? It's like February... By... I mean, we started building, like, December 10. We started getting the first user right before Christmas. We came back from Christmas to, like, 15 to 20. A week later, we told the whole team to only build the product. We said we would... To give ourselves a month to build a better version of it. It went in private data in, like, mid February where we started, you know, tweeting about it, doing basic marketing. And by that, [00:11:05] S1: we had couple 100 users. And and how is it today? How how are we scaling from a couple 100? It's February this year, right, we're talking about? Yeah. This is this year.
00:11:05 · Rajat Suri, Jean-Denis Greze
[00:11:05] S1: we had couple 100 users. And and how is it today? How how are we scaling from a couple 100? It's February this year, right, we're talking about? Yeah. This is this year. [00:11:15] S2: That's right. It's less than twelve months. Yeah. Well, we launched Vermeil in June. And... Yeah. I mean, we don't talk about the numbers too much, but we're... We've added, over a million each of the last two months in terms of ARR. It's tens of thousands of users. It's paid, so you have to pay $1,549.99 or $1.99. So, you know, it's like... It could be a pretty expensive product, but I think it delivers enough value to be worth that. It's still mostly word-of-mouth, although we started marketing, which I'm pretty excited about, paid marketing and influencer marketing and all the things that you do. But mostly, it's still people try it. 85% of people don't like it. 15% of people like it enough to pay. And then those people tell someone else about it, and and we make it easy for them to tell someone else about it, and then they they bring more friends, and it grows. Cool. [00:12:05] S1: And and so I'm new to it. Myself, looking at it before we had this talk, and, like, what... You know, as someone who is, like, already using CloudCheck, TBD, why would they use Town?
00:12:15 · Jean-Denis Greze
[00:12:15] S2: I mean, to... Today, I would say the the main trade offs are, first, it can do much more and it's much more proactive than those two products in the market. Number two, it's pretty simplified for the mainstream user. So I would say, like, Claude Code or Claude Code can do most of what we do. But you you kinda gotta know what skills are, and you gotta know what connectors are, you gotta set up your routines around email and around meetings. And most people don't wanna do that. They just want something that works out of the box. So that's... The main reason is our users are not using any of these tools, and they're busy. They're smart, but they're very busy, and so they don't have the time to do all the setup that's necessary. And then what's interesting and funny is that we have users at companies where they built their own version of Town, and they wrote me an email like, hey. My version is better. And then two weeks later, they write an email just like, hey. I'm tired of, like, upkeeping my thing because it takes real effort, right, to keep a product at edge, then they start using our product. I think it's easy to look at these things and be like, oh, I could build that. Because you could build that. You could build it in a week, and it would be more custom to you, and you might like it better. But then because the technology's moving so fast, you don't you don't wanna spend every weekend making your little, like, personal AI better for you. So that's a big part of it. Then there... Sorry. There's, like, meta talk. Yeah. So we sell to businesses. So it's PLG, but then we sell to the business. And I think that some points that resonate with businesses because they're true is, look, two years ago, if you were a business, you would have bet on OpenAI, and that would have been a bad bet. If you're coding, you should have bet on Claude. So for us, it's like, look, no one knows who the winner is going to be at the labs, and so you probably actually want the interface or product provider for you to be lab neutral because I don't care who wins. I will use the models of anybody that are right for your workload, that are the right price, the right level of intelligence. And so that argument, when you go to mid market firms, like 500 to 2,000 employee firms, like, it really resonates.
00:14:19 · Jean-Denis Greze, Immad Akhund, Rajat Suri
And we have a lot around how we how we treat data, how we let the business own the data, like, how we are model neutral. That that is, like, meaningful. Are all buyers gonna buy into that? No. Probably not. But it's such a huge market that there is, like, a big chunk of it where you can you can win with that kind of differentiation. That's structural. Right? OpenAI, I mean, it could, I guess. But they're... I don't think they're waking up anytime soon and, like, you know, peddling cloud models to their users. [00:14:47] S0: Well, Grump did this thing where they are peddling Anthropic and OpenAI, which is [00:14:52] S2: very Well, they need money. Yeah. But that's because they make money on the Anthropic models. Right? Because the Anthropic models... I I... My interest... I don't know. My guess is that by [00:15:01] S0: the way. Yeah. [00:15:02] S2: They're selling anthropic models that are served on their data centers because they have the deal. And so I think they make money they make money on that immediately. [00:15:11] S0: You seem kinda relaxed, but, like, I feel like... Like, how does it feel to be at the center of this kind of... You know? Yeah. Like, I feel like everyone is, you know, instinct, muse, rock. Like, it's... It seems like the center... I know you're saying, like, oh, this is, like, different, but, you know, a lot of these people will also try to go off next [00:15:31] S1: to me and then. Right?