A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:25:38 · Pablo Srugo, Andrew Antos
[00:25:38] S0: Crazy, insane. [00:25:40] S1: And so, we saw that. And so, we were like, well, how do we do right by our customers, right? Because these are people who believe in you. They give you money to solve their problems. You always need to optimize for the customer first. We were weighing these options, right? Should we be supporting this internally? Should we be doing something else? What we ended up finding is we have this incredible partner that was supporting some of our implementations already. We worked with them for a couple of years. It's a professional services firm and they were like, can we take over this business and manage it for the benefit of your customers? That was a win win because they were able to support our customers really well, they were able to understand the product, they were able to continue the operations without any interruption, as well as they were able to take care of the team, right? So they literally took every single person who was supporting the product and brought them over. And so we optimized for the customer, we optimized for the team, and so we effectively sold the business to the partner, and focused the entire company on this new incredible business.
00:26:47 · Pablo Srugo, Andrew Antos
[00:26:47] S0: You love this show. You don't want to miss the next episode. Why would you? So hit that follow button. Trust me, it's in your own best interest. So what I want to go deep on now is back to that product fit moment. You spoke a little bit here and there about what that product was, but I'm curious on the origin of that product. You mentioned you built it for yourself. I'm curious, what it was, how you used it and then. How you thought about and the way that you demoed it, and launched it. Because obviously that provoked a lot of interest. Just love to learn more about that. [00:27:15] S1: So we were implementing AI in practice, right? The way I describe the business is like a mini Palantir for complex financial processes. And so, we would have the same kind of motion where we would have FDs or consultants coming in and they would spend a lot of time trying to understand the process. How do you actually do work, right? [00:27:34] S0: This is for the finance teams that you were serving.
00:27:37 · Andrew Antos
[00:27:37] S1: Yeah, yeah and it's one interview after another, right? Imagine having ten Zoom calls a day or eight Zoom calls a day. Each an hour long, and just asking people, OK, can you show me how you do work? I was like, oh, you click on this in Salesforce and what does it do next? It's like, oh, and then you do this spreadsheet and then you do this pivot table, and then you send this Slack message, and then you do that. And these complicated business processes in enterprise run on exceptions. You have one happy path and that applies to twenty percent of things and then eighty percent is an exception of some kind. It's like, oh, if you see this customer, you need to do this or if you see this partner, this button doesn't work. You need to put it in a spreadsheet and do something else. That's how the reality is and so, it was always really painful and we would just be writing that down, documenting it and so on. And then we got some AI note takers, it was a little bit better. But what we've built was this little tool. Where you could take a Zoom recording with a customer that's showing you the actual thing and turn it into a business requirements document. Basically write up, this is how the process works, with screenshots, exactly what's happening, all these exceptions. Which would be a few hours of time of an FDE and we would just do that in two, three minutes. And it felt like magic to a lot of people. So that's how it started. So we solved the problem of how do you go from, I want to automate something in enterprise, find what I want to automate, how do I want to do it, and actually build the agent or set of agents to solve it.
00:29:10 · Pablo Srugo, Andrew Antos
[00:29:10] S0: Is it similar to like a Scribe AI? We had her on the show. [00:29:14] S1: Not really, I think about that more like a standard operating procedure tool. [00:29:18] S0: Right, yes. [00:29:19] S1: This is how people do, I want to produce a standard operating procedure. The way we think about it is more like we're a context layer or a company brain. It's a new data plane, how work gets done, how people make decisions, how they get approvals, how long things take, and do that at scale through observation. Rather than building SOPs to help people onboard. [00:29:43] S0: And so that is what you demoed at that event? [00:29:46] S1: That is what we demoed. It was a super light thing. It could do one small process at a time, right? Didn't have all this sophistication. We have customers that have tens of thousands of processes in the system now. Didn't have any of the sophistication and clearly it hit a nerve. That's what people actually want. That's what they need.
00:29:46 · Andrew Antos, Pablo Srugo
[00:29:46] S1: That is what we demoed. It was a super light thing. It could do one small process at a time, right? Didn't have all this sophistication. We have customers that have tens of thousands of processes in the system now. Didn't have any of the sophistication and clearly it hit a nerve. That's what people actually want. That's what they need. [00:30:03] S0: Given that you've gone through this three times and obviously had different levels of inflection with each product launch. One of the things I've noticed speaking with a lot of founders that found Product Market Fit is, Product Market Fit has more often than not little to do with go to market. VCs especially, and I think a lot of early stage founders, first time founders, obsess over go to market. How are we going to grow? Should we optimize this? Optimize that? And a lot of the people who are in the position that you were with. Especially your first product, where it's growing but just not growing that fast. Their first idea is like, it must be a go to market problem. It just must be like, I'm just not that good at sales. I need a new salesperson. It must be that I just don't know how to get demos. Oh, my demo close rate is just not high enough. It's got to be something in the demo and my view has become, yes, you can optimize from forty percent to fifty percent through better go to market. Let's say on a demo to close, you can do that. You're not going to get from ten to fifty. That's not going to happen. I'm curious what your reaction to that is.
00:30:58 · Andrew Antos, Pablo Srugo
[00:30:58] S1: I totally agree. I mean, that was our first reaction too was like, OK, let's figure this out. Ultimately the team sometimes makes fun of me. Because I wake up early every day and oftentimes think about the market, and the team makes fun of me that I say, well, the market speaks to you, right? Or things like the team is saying, Andrew is just listening to the market in the morning. But I completely agree with you, because as long as you're showing it to people, as long as there's a way for them to discover. There's some basic level of discoverability and you're doing something that people really want. Then it takes off, right? And then I think if you're good at sales or good at marketing, and good at building product. That's like a difference between good and great. [00:31:45] S0: Yes, it's an accelerant. [00:31:47] S1: Exactly, but it's not a difference between good and bad. [00:31:50] S0: So let's go into two tactical areas that we're going to go deep on. The first one actually gets a segue because you're talking about listening to the market. Everybody talks about listen to your customers, listen to what your customers say, voice of customer, all these sort of things. You've kind of built that into almost a science. I mean, you told me about a whole process that you have of making sure that you're constantly getting what your customers are saying and how your customers are talking about your product. Tell me kind of what you've set up there and then maybe we can go in more detail.