A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:47:07 · Pablo Srugo, Andrew Antos
[00:47:07] S0: I see this especially, I would say, on marketing. I even experienced it firsthand on the Product Market Fit Show in the sense that I could do thirty things to try and grow it. Let's cut it into shorts. Let's put it on YouTube and LinkedIn, and Twitter, and this, and that. I see it in startups all the time, where it's like you hire a VP of Marketing and they're like, OK, let's do all the obvious stuff, right? Nothing wrong with trying it, but the idea has to be in order to cut everything and then do one or two things well. Because doing twenty things that are all incremental that also everybody else is doing. It's not, it's not going to get you where you want to go. [00:47:39] S1: Exactly, right. For example, we don't run any Google ads. We have zero ads, right? Yeah, and exactly like a traditional VP marketing comes in. It's like, oh, you're not running ads. That's part of the playbook. You need to be running ads, right? You know, one of the things that we're finding is like, well, you know, we'd rather allocate capital to do events, right? Whether our own events or third party events. We spend enormous amount of our marketing budget on events. Because that's the number one way to do it and so, and sometimes like interview these people, right? I'm telling them about the business. Like do you worry about the fact that everything is one channel? I was like, no, because the channel is working super, super, super well. So I don't worry about that. I would worry if it was not working.
00:47:39 · Andrew Antos, Pablo Srugo
[00:47:39] S1: Exactly, right. For example, we don't run any Google ads. We have zero ads, right? Yeah, and exactly like a traditional VP marketing comes in. It's like, oh, you're not running ads. That's part of the playbook. You need to be running ads, right? You know, one of the things that we're finding is like, well, you know, we'd rather allocate capital to do events, right? Whether our own events or third party events. We spend enormous amount of our marketing budget on events. Because that's the number one way to do it and so, and sometimes like interview these people, right? I'm telling them about the business. Like do you worry about the fact that everything is one channel? I was like, no, because the channel is working super, super, super well. So I don't worry about that. I would worry if it was not working. [00:48:23] S0: Perfect. Well, listen, let's stop it there. I'll ask the question that we tend to end on, which is what would be your top piece of advice for an early stage founder that's still looking for product market fit?