A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:13:58 · Pablo Srugo, Arvind Jain
[00:13:58] S1: You got now this core group of engineers. You have the funding. You need to build the product. Do you just go heads down and build or do you partner with some design partners to figure out the subtleties of it? How do you make that MVP work out? [00:14:11] S0: You absolutely have to have people. There's no way to build a product, especially like this one, without any design partners. That was the first task. As we started to think about technology, I was, although I'm an engineer, but I had all, any non-engineering task, whether it's ordering coffee for the office or figuring out design partners, those are my tasks. Actually, it's very interesting. I followed a very different process than typical. I didn't actually go and hit my friends and say that, hey, can you actually take this product and give me feedback because I felt they'll all be very nice to me and they will do it. Even if they don't have a need. I actually went on LinkedIn and I would actually do call outreach to people, and I would like, look, I'm building a product this. Do you have this problem? If you have this problem, I would love to talk to you and get your feedback so that I can build my product with direction from you. That was the journey that we went through. Did a lot of – [00:15:13] S1: Do you remember the specifics of that? I'm curious. Did you have to send 100 of these to get 10? Do you remember how high level, how much volume you need to go through?
00:15:13 · Pablo Srugo, Arvind Jain
[00:15:13] S1: Do you remember the specifics of that? I'm curious. Did you have to send 100 of these to get 10? Do you remember how high level, how much volume you need to go through? [00:15:21] S0: Yeah, I had to do a lot. I don't think I was getting one out of ten responses. Maybe I was initially, but then I was the BDR for my company for the first two years. The response rates would be low. I've sent thousands of outreaches. I'm looking for – and I understand everybody's busy, but when you get the response, that's from a person who has that pain because they're responding to somebody who they don't know, right? Somebody who has no brand in terms of nobody knew about our company, but so that means the problem must mean something. The problem is an acute pain for them because that's when they're responding. [00:16:02] S1: To be clear, your message wasn’t, hey, I'm building this thing. Do you want to buy it? It was very much, you might have this problem, let me ask you a few questions. That’s how you framed it in the early days. [00:16:13] S0: Yeah, it was never about selling. Those outreaches were never about selling because in fact, we actually were not selling the product. We had no pricing. We had no plans to make revenue. That was an intentional decision we made that we would actually not even charge for our product for the first two years.
00:16:13 · Arvind Jain, Pablo Srugo
[00:16:13] S0: Yeah, it was never about selling. Those outreaches were never about selling because in fact, we actually were not selling the product. We had no pricing. We had no plans to make revenue. That was an intentional decision we made that we would actually not even charge for our product for the first two years. [00:16:26] S1: I'm curious. In those two years, how did you structure the team? Because you can easily, given the funding you had, I mean, you could build a very big team or you could keep it small, five to ten. I'm just curious how you structured it. [00:16:38] S0: We got the team to about 20 people. That was our goal, which is large. Sometimes for companies you don't start that way, but we knew that this is a difficult problem. Search requires a lot of R&D, lots of technology to be built. We wanted to build a team of about 20 people and divide it into three different areas part of our technology stack. We felt that that was basically a good team to actually make a lot of progress and build a great product. Then we stayed there. It was like I would say we got to about ten people within the first five months. Then gradually we got to 20 over the next five months. By the end of the first year, we were more than 20. Then we stayed out there for some time. There was a sufficient strength that we had in our engineering team to keep making a lot of progress.
00:16:38 · Arvind Jain, Pablo Srugo
[00:16:38] S0: We got the team to about 20 people. That was our goal, which is large. Sometimes for companies you don't start that way, but we knew that this is a difficult problem. Search requires a lot of R&D, lots of technology to be built. We wanted to build a team of about 20 people and divide it into three different areas part of our technology stack. We felt that that was basically a good team to actually make a lot of progress and build a great product. Then we stayed there. It was like I would say we got to about ten people within the first five months. Then gradually we got to 20 over the next five months. By the end of the first year, we were more than 20. Then we stayed out there for some time. There was a sufficient strength that we had in our engineering team to keep making a lot of progress. [00:17:28] S1: You mentioned taking a different approach. I mean, I can see it because if you go for two years building a product without necessarily charging for it, you're certainly not following the Eric Ries Lean Startup, fast iteration, MVP approach. Why not? Why didn't you just build the MVP, the lowest thing that somebody would pay for, put it out and just do what most startups tend to do?
00:17:28 · Pablo Srugo, Arvind Jain
[00:17:28] S1: You mentioned taking a different approach. I mean, I can see it because if you go for two years building a product without necessarily charging for it, you're certainly not following the Eric Ries Lean Startup, fast iteration, MVP approach. Why not? Why didn't you just build the MVP, the lowest thing that somebody would pay for, put it out and just do what most startups tend to do? [00:17:45] S0: Yeah, because we had a fundamental belief in the problem that we were solving. We didn't feel we had to pivot. Our journey was not about that we are going to actually try something, we're going to learn something, we're going to change it and irate. Sometimes we talk about product market fit here. For me, I think there was something about this problem. I had no doubts that we will solve this problem, but I also was aware listening to customers, we can get a lot of different ideas. There are some decisions that you have to make, which are fundamental yourself.
00:17:45 · Arvind Jain, Pablo Srugo
[00:17:45] S0: Yeah, because we had a fundamental belief in the problem that we were solving. We didn't feel we had to pivot. Our journey was not about that we are going to actually try something, we're going to learn something, we're going to change it and irate. Sometimes we talk about product market fit here. For me, I think there was something about this problem. I had no doubts that we will solve this problem, but I also was aware listening to customers, we can get a lot of different ideas. There are some decisions that you have to make, which are fundamental yourself. [00:18:19] S1: That's pretty incredible. I'm trying to make sense of it. I mean, there is analogies, right? If you look at hardware as an example, whether you take the iPhone or now the Vision Pro or whatever, you just can't iterate at that level. You have to have – you of course talk to customers, but at some point, you got to have that leap of faith, that conviction that puts you in a room for two years, so to speak, and builds a thing that really delivers value. I guess the challenge is when you, let's say, go against the grain. In your example there, the market's saying one thing, you're like, no, I'm sticking on that vision. Obviously, you might end up two years later and the thing you built, nobody wants. I'm just curious how you think about that. How do you balance that? Even your advice to founders, because on the flip side, the Lean Startup method is so ingrained that almost everybody is just blindly running that motion. Maybe in some cases it just doesn't apply.