A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:32:17 · Andrew Antos
[00:32:17] S1: Yeah, basically, so what we do is we have every single conversation with customers recorded, right? Obviously you always have consent, but everybody's being recorded now, right? So whether it's a Zoom meeting or Google Meet meeting or whatever that is. There's some kind of recording, typically Gong or something else and then it all goes into Salesforce. And then from Salesforce, what we then do is we take all of the data. We enrich it with usage data, we enrich it with how many tickets and what type of tickets through Linear people are submitting. How many times they're reaching out to support over email or over phone. We basically take all of the communications with customers and we put it into what we call C360, Customer 360 database. So it's a super rich database of basically all interactions with the customer and how much they're using the product, and what ways they're using the product. So we have that data plane and then we basically built a bunch of different agents on top of it that are constantly looking and giving us these, weekly reports and insights. Like what do people hear? So do they have a positive sentiment or a negative sentiment? You can then slice the data. Is financial services trending positive or trending negative? Is software trending positive or trending negative? Are you hearing specific phrases, right? One of the things that you can do now is, give me basically an analysis of similarity of how the customer is talking to us, versus is it highly variable, right? And industries where the customer is saying the same words effectively again and again are usually industries where you can grow faster. Segments where you can grow faster than when you see a lot of entropy. They're describing the problem differently and so on. So we have this kind of monitoring layer that gives us these continuous insights, or continuously tweaking the messaging, the decks, the way we speak, the way we describe the problem, the way we ask questions and so on. And all of it is just about, OK, how do you go from that good to great? How can you increase conversion rates? How can you support your customers better? How can you drive more value? What are the ways that you drive value to the customer? And so, that's kind of the heart of the company now.
00:34:33 · Pablo Srugo
[00:34:33] S0: So let's kind of break that down. I mean, the first one is you got to get this data. Obviously everybody's recording everything these days, so that's a no-brainer. But it's more about when are you reaching out to customers? Why are we reaching out to customers? And when you do that, what sorts of things are you purposefully asking? Because at the end of the day, we're just going to record a conversation. If the conversation is of little value, then you're going to get a transcript that's of little value. So you've got to elicit that. So I'm curious what you do on that side to capture stuff that matters.
00:35:00 · Andrew Antos
[00:35:00] S1: You need to have that enrichment layer. I think people make the mistake that they're like, oh, I just record everything and then I'm going to reason on top of everything. Because also a lot of people don't want to reject people, right? And so you might have a very positive sales discussion, sales first meeting, but it doesn't translate into the next step, right? And so, you actually need to build the data layer with all these other types of data. So you can see, OK, well, whatever an existing customer is telling you has the highest priority, the highest weighting, right? Whatever a customer that's quickly progressing through the pipeline or progressing at the rate that you want them. We also treat that at a very high rate. If you have somebody who just gives you a first meeting and then it goes away. Then we're discounting that opinion. We're still digging into it, right? Because it could have been something, could have been our targeting. It could have been the way we pitched somebody from that specific industry and so on. So we still look at that, but in aggregate that's a little bit less valuable than what the people who are already working with you are telling you.