A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:08:19 · Pablo Srugo, Anurag Goel
[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? [00:08:31] S0: Oh, I think people were really used to having to configure a bunch of things. Yeah. I mean, it depends on what you were using, but, like, AWS was and kind of remains a nightmare if you wanna spin up a simple server. And then there were some tools that worked for the front end. I think Netlify and Vercel at the time were good for the front end. But there was nothing that lets you spin up this combination of a simple server really quickly along with the database and also a, let's say, a Redis instance or a background worker, all of that together, especially at a reasonable price point and with modern features, like things like private networking built in, things like HTTP three, HTTP two protocols built in. So there were some other tools, older things that had been around for a while, but they were kinda stuck in the past. And so modern developers really responded to what Render had to offer, and they still do. And that's still driving our word-of-mouth. I mean, we're signing up hundreds and hundreds of thousands of developers every month, and that's all word-of-mouth. We're not driving that through ads.
00:09:39 · Pablo Srugo, Anurag Goel
[00:09:39] S1: And to be clear, even back then, that would mean you go from doing that manually, which is not just takes a long time, but it's just like annoying stuff that's preventing you from getting your app to production, which is what a developer well, they're doing it for themselves or somewhere else. Like, that's what they wanna do with the thing they've built. And now you can just you connect your repo. It's live presumably minutes. Like, is it that quick? Or was it that quick? [00:10:00] S0: Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's less than a couple of minutes in a lot of cases. And I think the main thing that Render gives you, when I think about it, isn't just the ease of getting started. It's also the reliability, security, stability that you need as your application scales. So there's a bunch of platforms out there that'll make it easy to get started. And when you need features, when you're getting more users, when you're getting production scaling, then they are either not reliable or they don't have the features or something else happens and that forces you to migrate away to something like AWS, and then you have to build everything yourself. The render promise is that you don't have to. That we continue to build capabilities into our systems. So you can start out at paying us $7 a month, but then you can also become a company that is so big you're paying us millions and millions of dollars every year, which companies do now.
00:11:00 · Pablo Srugo
[00:11:00] S1: That makes sense. And, you know, I'm I'm driving at the time to value thing because I think what you're talking about now is what affects usage and retention and expansion and all that also critical thing. And you you mentioned earlier the difference between virality and and word-of-mouth. Right? Like, virality, social network, you need other people on that product to make it better for yourself. Word-of-mouth, you don't really get anything. You're not doing it for the, you know, the referral bonus points or whatever, generally speaking. You're just doing it because you you wanna be the first to know. You wanna tell your friends. You wanna help you. Whatever it is, but it it isn't like a clear transaction. So when do you do it? You do it when you're so wowed by the product so quickly, and you expect the person you refer or you tell about this product, they're gonna be wowed quickly. Like, if you know they're gonna have to onboard for three weeks or two weeks or even four hours, you're like, yeah. You may know, try this thing, but it's gonna be a bit of work. You know? Like, you you don't wanna be the guy that whereas if you know, hey, you're gonna do this thing, and right away, you're gonna see value, you might tell 10 people, guys, you have to try this thing. And that's, you know, that's just one thing the founder can always think about is whatever your longer term value is, how do you get them to if you really want word-of-mouth, it's not gonna come from the referral incentives almost never. I mean, Dropbox maybe, but rarely. Right? It's it's gonna come from getting somebody to that wow woman quick that they organically just want to do it. They wanna tell their friends because the the social cost is low.
00:12:21 · Anurag Goel, Pablo Srugo
[00:12:21] S0: Yeah. However, there are counterexamples where time to value was actually really high, but word-of-mouth was awesome. And, you know, the canonical example here is superhuman, the mail app, where you actually had to go through an interview before you got access to it. And I I don't think you have to do that anymore, and the app has been acquired or merged with someone else anyway. But the point was everyone was raving about superhuman at one point, but then you to get in, you had to get on a call with someone and spend thirty minutes to actually get access to superhuman. So that's a very different kind of setup. [00:13:03] S1: Very counterintuitive. Yes. That's true. I mean, for every startup rule, there's there's a lot of exceptions to it. So now let's let's go now that we know kind of where where that moment was, where you where you felt like things were working. You know, we'd love to to go through this story a little bit, especially the before. I mean, why do you decide to start a company? And what what was kind of the original the idea? What's the origin story here?
00:13:03 · Pablo Srugo, Anurag Goel
[00:13:03] S1: Very counterintuitive. Yes. That's true. I mean, for every startup rule, there's there's a lot of exceptions to it. So now let's let's go now that we know kind of where where that moment was, where you where you felt like things were working. You know, we'd love to to go through this story a little bit, especially the before. I mean, why do you decide to start a company? And what what was kind of the original the idea? What's the origin story here? [00:13:25] S0: So having been that early at Stripe, and, you know, I stayed there for almost five years, I was at a point in my career where, you know, I didn't really have to do anything. I didn't have to work. Stripe had done really well. And so I asked myself, how can I best spend the rest of my life? And it wasn't just me. My wife and I both sort of asked this question of us together. And I think the answer was we would like to contribute back to the world in a way that we're excited by. And for me, building things and building teams and organizations was and remains incredibly exciting in the service of solving a large problem. And I spent almost a year and a half thinking through fairly deeply which problems would appeal to me enough so I could spend ideally the rest of my career on them. And I looked at health care. I looked at real time infrastructure.
00:13:25 · Anurag Goel, Pablo Srugo
[00:13:25] S0: So having been that early at Stripe, and, you know, I stayed there for almost five years, I was at a point in my career where, you know, I didn't really have to do anything. I didn't have to work. Stripe had done really well. And so I asked myself, how can I best spend the rest of my life? And it wasn't just me. My wife and I both sort of asked this question of us together. And I think the answer was we would like to contribute back to the world in a way that we're excited by. And for me, building things and building teams and organizations was and remains incredibly exciting in the service of solving a large problem. And I spent almost a year and a half thinking through fairly deeply which problems would appeal to me enough so I could spend ideally the rest of my career on them. And I looked at health care. I looked at real time infrastructure. [00:14:26] S1: I'd love to go deep on this year and a half because it's often skipped, and it's exceptionally important because then a lot of things come out of that. Like, where you start is the end point of that year. So we'd love to kind of go through that in in a good amount of detail, just how you thought about it, how you broke it down, why you look to the space that you looked at, and so on.