A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:40:01 · Andrew Antos
[00:40:01] S1: So we do quarterly planning sessions. We don't believe in longer than ninety day cycles at the company. So we do these quarterly review sessions. It's basically with an extended executive team. We actually use this database thoroughly and basically see, OK, what are the core patterns? What are the core problems? Or what are the things that are working really well? And how can we double down on them? Make a shortlist, right? And then circulate it to everybody that we talk about it, and then we typically pick a couple of bets. And some of these bets have more of a go to market or customer success shape. Some of them have more product shape and we say, OK, this quarter we're gonna validate these. Usually it's four to five hypotheses. We assign it, we say, OK, what would success look like. I think that's critical. I think the qualitative stage of product market fit happens only very, very early, right? You launch it in an event and everybody wants to talk about it. It gives you conviction to take the next steps. But once you become a little bit bigger, once you launch more product and so on. Then it becomes tricky and you need to be very quantitative about it. And so we typically just spend a lot of time on, what's the startup metric that would give us confidence to basically resource it on an ongoing basis? So one of the things, for example, when we launched our MCP. We're like, we need one hundred users in nninety days. Otherwise, we're not going to consider this to be a huge success. Maybe we just are not that useful, right? And so then we focused, we had a clear person owning it, and we're like, OK, your job is to figure out how to get one hundred users on this. And we define the users like somebody who uses it this much, this frequently, and so on. And so setting that initial metric directionally. So then you can clearly say it's working or it's not working. So you can either kill the bet or you can resource it more heavily, is critical.
00:41:53 · Pablo Srugo, Andrew Antos
[00:41:53] S0: What are some other examples of experiments that you've run, especially things to improve? I imagine once you're over $10 million and you're kind of scaling. You're taking every single part of your funnel and you're trying to tweak things. You're like, how can we get a little more leads? How can we improve conversion from MQL to SQL? How can we improve lead, whatever it is, right? I'm curious on maybe some of those where you're like, oh, this part of the funnel is not great. Let's try two or three experiments and then kind of how you thought about that. [00:42:18] S1: I can actually give you an example. I'm sitting in one of our experiments right now, so. [00:42:22] S0: There you go.
00:42:23 · Andrew Antos
[00:42:23] S1: So we did this rebrand, right? To really show, A, we're not finance only, but we're supporting HR and sales teams, and operations teams, marketing teams. Kind of across the entire enterprise operation and then the second thing is, I think it's reflecting our ambition, right? We have a $100 billion ambition that, you know, we think we can really build this company brain for every single Fortune 500, for every single Global 2000 company and so we were like, OK, what are some of the unique ways we can communicate these two ideas? And so one of the ideas that we had was, we did this report where we surveyed a few hundred enterprise executives and we built this entire report. It's called the State of Agentic Work and so we built this report. But so many companies do reports like this, and then they end up like a brochure that you can pick up somewhere, or they end up as a PDF that you can download behind a gate. And so what we've done is we took the twelve most interesting data points or learnings. We commissioned artists to create a visual representation of each of these twelve metrics. We've rented a space at the University Avenue in Palo Alto for an entire month of August. It was like a pop up store. It's a pop up data art gallery. Everybody should come, by the way. It's open every day, twelve to six, for the month of August and just experience the problem statement that we're solving, and the solution in kind of a completely different way, right? And we're tracking very closely now how many people come in. How many are our ICP versus how many people are just visitors and ICP we're tracking, both for hiring and for enterprise. And so you continuously need to do kind of interesting, unusual things and nine out of ten fail. But the ones that work, they work exponentially better. So that was one of the big bets for our Q3.
00:44:17 · Pablo Srugo, Andrew Antos
[00:44:17] S0: Gotcha, I guess the other question I was going to ask is, I assume every single experiment has at least one metric that's assigned to it. That's specific, that kind of has a clear failure/success bar? [00:44:27] S1: Yeah, correct and you can see the ramp usually very early, right? I think doing this for a while, you know, usually you don't actually need to see all ninety days for something to play out. You see the ramp, right? So you know, OK, my expectation is this, this would be success and I think my mental model has changed a lot. I thought when we started ten years ago, my mental model was most things will work incrementally, right? And some things will not work but most things will work incrementally and my mindset has completely shifted. I think it's like nine out of ten things don't work and they might look like they're working incrementally but that's really. It means that it's not working, but the one out of ten things works so well that it carries everything else. [00:45:17] S0: It is very, I mean, most people will talk about it like. There is no silver bullet, you just have to do everything. But it's almost like you do have to do everything in order to find the silver bullet. That really does kind of move the needle. [00:45:29] S1: Yeah, exactly and it's a silver bullet for part of the business, right? And so you do one, so you need to continue, you need to build a machine that finds one or a few silver bullets every quarter.
00:45:29 · Andrew Antos, Pablo Srugo
[00:45:29] S1: Yeah, exactly and it's a silver bullet for part of the business, right? And so you do one, so you need to continue, you need to build a machine that finds one or a few silver bullets every quarter. [00:45:41] S0: But it's, for example, your problem is specifically, I need to get more demos booked. Once I get a demo, it's great. Let's say, OK, you're going to try ten things but it's not like every single thing is going to get you. Most things are going to barely move the needle, and therefore, in your opinion. They're basically useless and then you're going to find one or two things. Those are going to move the needle, and then you just go all in on those until they stop working.
00:46:03 · Andrew Antos
[00:46:03] S1: Exactly, and I think it's because people are applying how big companies are working. So if you have lots of scale, if you have one hundred thousand employees, you're a really big company. Then doing these incremental things really matters and you need to cover all your bases. You need to be omni channel, and you need to have ten different routes to market. And you need to have fifty different support models, and you need to do all of that. And that's true for a big company. But when you're a smaller company, and you want to grow fast. And you want to become that big company that can do everything. You need to figure out these things that work exponentially better. Because, I mean, to your earlier point, you cannot increment your way out of slow growth, right? It's usually something to do with the market structurally, like you have some kind of a problem. So even if you increase your conversion rate by five percent and you do all of these things. It's not going to magically 10x your business and so you need to continuously find these new things. Completely novel ways to address the market, to get that outsized, you know, distribution and value benefit.