A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:01:06 · Anurag Goel, Pablo Srugo
[00:01:06] S0: Thank you. I'm really happy to be here. [00:01:08] S1: So you're on quite a ride. I mean, you were employee number eight at Stripe, which is a pretty crazy accomplishment on its own. And then you started Render a few years ago, kind of 2018, 2019, and you raised $250,000,000. You just just raised a 100,000,000 at a $1,500,000,000 valuation. So it's been quite the hockey stick ride, and we're gonna talk you did a lot of things differently. So we're gonna talk a lot about how you you made every piece happen. But let's start with the early stage climax moment, right, which is product market fit. Tell me, when did you feel like you found true product market fit?
00:01:44 · Anurag Goel
[00:01:44] S0: Yeah. For Renderer, there was definitely a sense of people saying amazing things about the product and then just wanting more. And before we had launched, everything was fine. We could ship things at our own pace. There were no customers asking us for things. And we took our time. We got the product to a point that we were proud of. And then when we launched, we suddenly started getting all these pulls from customers saying, hey. I love this, but I really want this other thing. I love this other thing, but now I want this other thing. And it felt very much like we were just trying to keep up. And that, to me, is always a great sign of product market fit when your product doesn't have all the features, but what you have is valuable enough for people to truly invest their time in it and to take the time to ask you for more things. Because the worst thing that can happen is people don't care about your product. Right? And then they just move on. And they don't need new features. But when you build something that is incomplete, that people are willing to try, to use, to pay you for, and they want it to get better, for us, that happened shortly after we launched in as part of TechCrunch Disrupt in 2019. TechCrunch has this annual competition, which is also shown in the HBO show Silicon Valley. And we ended up competing and winning that show that year. Not the show, the competition. That led to a lot of new users coming in, and all of these people wanted more things. They continue to be users, but they wanted more things because the platform was pretty early back then. But that was a first instance of like, okay, I think we're really onto something here.
00:03:34 · Pablo Srugo
[00:03:34] S1: Let me dive deeper on that. Like, I would agree that what you're saying is like a necessary condition for product market fit. The question to you is when do you know that it's sufficient? And, you know, I'll give you an example. Was talking to a startup actually earlier today that I would argue doesn't yet have true product market fit. They don't have that, like, hyper growth that tends to follow from this. They do have users. They do have people that like the product. And so, I mean, there's a lot of times you put out products and nobody really cares. Obviously, that's the worst. But there's a lot of people that have a product that they'll say, yeah, there's an amount of users that that do like it. They they use it. They love it. And yet they never get hyper growth. They never get the true outcomes of product market fit. For you, what's the difference between that and kind of what you were feeling?
00:04:14 · Anurag Goel, Pablo Srugo
[00:04:14] S0: I think people have to love it enough to tell other people about it. So you have to have this viral word-of-mouth growth. It doesn't even have to be viral. It has to be word-of-mouth. And so every person who uses it is like, why isn't my friend using it? Or why am I not sending it to this other person who could also use it? And this doesn't happen with all domains. Right? For a lot of products, you typically don't have other people who need the product. So for Render, though, it was very clear because fundamentally, we allow application developers to host their applications online. And when you think about it, application developers love trying new tools. And when they find something they really like, they love to tell other people about it. And it might not be one to one. They might write a blog post about it. They might write on Hacker News about it. And so you have to create natural growth. You can't just rely on ads and feed people into the funnel. All of that is useful and necessary as well. But you don't really have product market fit until you're growing naturally. And that usually happens when your users are spreading the word. [00:05:28] S1: And what would you say, having been through it, lived through it, is the number one driver of word-of-mouth? Because I agree. If you get word-of-mouth, it's a huge tailwind for well, frankly, as long as you have it. It is a massive strategic competitive edge, whatever you wanna call it. But what do you think is the main driver of getting that?
00:05:47 · Anurag Goel
[00:05:47] S0: I think it's a combination of all the different things that make your product sufficiently differentiated and sufficiently valuable for the right audience. So it can't be everything to everyone. You really have to pick who you're building for. And then you have to make sure that it's different enough from what it already exists out there because, you know, you know, you might as well use the other product. What's special about yours? And then different in the right ways that creates value for your customers. So you can't expect different results if you're simply building what the other folks are building. So you have to think about what your difference is, whether it's developer experience in our case, or it's some combination of pricing and how all the systems how how your different services connect to each other. It's the set of features that you provide at that price point. A lot of those things have to be collectively different. So people are saying, okay, well, I've tried all these other things, but this is the thing that works best for me. And it's really important to identify who that customer is. Because until you do that, you can't actually build a differentiated product that that customer needs. So I would say a lot of startups end up making this mistake early on of trying to build everything for everyone. And I know that everyone talks about this mistake, but you have to make tough choices. And you had to start with a segment that you think you can build the best product for and the most differentiated product for.
00:07:24 · Pablo Srugo, Anurag Goel
[00:07:24] S1: Based on many of the founders that I've interviewed on this show, I've got a a bit of a theory and frankly, from some of the founders that have told me themselves, like, that time to value itself is a big indicator, leading indicator of word-of-mouth. I'm curious for your product, is that true? Do you get value quickly? Like, where does a developer see the value? How do they see the value? [00:07:43] S0: Yeah. So we optimize for people getting to running a live application as quickly as possible. So all you have to do is connect your GitHub repo and render spins up a server for you with your URL, all the certificates taken care of, all the settings. You have to do basically nothing to get a simple server up and running other than connect your Git repo. And that to us is the fastest way in many ways to get a server up and running, which is why if you go to our website today, our hero image still says the fastest path to production. [00:08:19] S1: What was the before and after? Like, things have obviously changed a lot. But when you launched this in, like, 2019, 2020, what was the was it a current state unfair you gotta do all that manually? Or, like, what were people used to relative to what you offered?