A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:08:15 · Jonathan Awad, Pablo Srugo
[00:08:15] S0: it's financial services, right? So financial services, they're not going to make a one month, two month decision, two week decision. Snap decision of changing their whole compliance program, their whole risk program. You know, [00:08:27] S1: the funny thing about customer success, you're talking about like getting back to people quickly. I find it's the most, out of all the things you need to do to get customers, win customers, retention, referrals, all that stuff, right? You think about sales, marketing. Customer success is like the most in your control. Like everybody could have this SLA. Everybody could reply under 20 minutes if they just did it. You know what I mean? And the impact that that has on retention and referrals is massive, right? Like you tell people about the fact that you love this company because whenever you have a problem, they just get back to you right away. You know, you're never going to churn from that if you're getting any value from the product, you're not going anywhere. [00:09:04] S0: The delta between expectation and reality is the happiness delta. I've always thought of it like that. They expect this, you give them this, and it could just be as simple as, I remember frustrated Slack, I hear you, thank you so much for calling that out, we're going to get on it right away. And you respond right away and you don't shy away [00:09:24] S1: from it, you don't duck,
00:09:24 · Pablo Srugo, Jonathan Awad
[00:09:24] S1: from it, you don't duck, [00:09:25] S0: you don't cover. You're just like, yes, I see you, I hear you, thank you so much, we're on it. And you take that punch in the face with a smile because feedback is a gift. It's really just up to you and how you handle it. And you know, the other thing, this is something I've noticed is like, the faster you reply, the more you can get away with what you just said. In other words, if I reply in a minute, I can tell you, [00:09:45] S1: hey, we're on it, we'll get back to you because it's like, okay, you just got it. If you wait a day, now you're kind of stuck because you kind of have to resolve it. You can't get back a day later and be like, we'll be on it. It's like, what do you mean? You just saw it? What's wrong with you?
00:09:55 · Jonathan Awad
[00:09:55] S0: It's just so human. And I love that. You're so right, by the way. The faster you respond to an email, the faster you respond to a Slack, the less it can say and the less you can do in that moment and the more you get away with. And so I love that SLA, like onboarding at Baselayer employees and I'm like, hey, look, we can get into the product. We can get into the industry. We get into all that stuff. Here's how we operate because this is excellent and this is what excellence is. And I've seen it before. We have investment banking background. Investment banking, it's so normal. SLA 20 minutes. SLA two minutes. Yeah, right. What else are you doing? That's the attitude. What are you, sleeping? Yeah, exactly. Who said you were allowed to sleep? Like literally, that was the energy. No matter what time of night, no matter if it's on the weekend. Weekend? What do you mean? It's just Saturday. And so I brought that energy plus, you know, the tech side of things, like a little bit more fun side of things. I'm not sure of being like this militant investment banking thing to the company. It's an expression though of, it was so good how reliable they were, how consistent they were, how on top of things they were. You knew you were going to get an answer. I loved that. And I was, I admired it so much. And it was just so excellent the way to operate that I totally agree of like, you can be like, act, we'll get back to you. And then you have like way more time and way more grace. Totally agree. So let's go back to the beginning.
00:11:15 · Pablo Srugo, Jonathan Awad
[00:11:15] S1: I mean, obviously 20 deals closed all straight means not only did you have something people wanted, which led them to a demo, but you'd build, you know, the right enough solution that you beat whatever other competitors, whatever else they might've been considering. So tell me a little bit like, you know, 2023, 2022, whenever it was that the idea kind of came, like what was happening? What were you doing? And what was kind of the origin for, for Baselayer? You know, it's really interesting. [00:11:36] S0: I've been in financial services, fintech, et cetera, Jason for the last 15 years. So I did investment banking, you know, JP Morgan, UBS, Lazard, and that was M&A. So banks buying banks, bank buying lenders. You knew a little bit about it. You don't really understand what's going on, but like generally how they operate. And then I started a fintech and that's a whole story. We can get into that. Real estate, stock exchange, et cetera. And then just went to a series of smaller startups. So I went to one, underwriting automation, did something cool, went to an even smaller one. [00:12:06] S1: Did it fail or work? What was the end outcome just of that startup, the first one, [00:12:10] S0: the fintech one? TLDR, we were very early to fractionalizing real estate. [00:12:16] S1: A lot of people in 2016
00:12:16 · Pablo Srugo, Jonathan Awad
[00:12:16] S1: A lot of people in 2016 [00:12:17] S0: was like, is this on the chain? Is this on chain? I was like, no, it's not on chain. We went way more difficult. Not difficult. That's not true. There's no juxtaposition. It was just not on chain. We filed a brand new security, Reg D security, SEC finner registered. We're a licensed broker dealer and we were trading app. So it was like, we're JP Morgan, Robinhood, NASDAQ in one, basically. And we created a brand new security and it was a licensed, like an ATS. So that's for alternative trading system. Instead of NASDAQ, which is a stock exchange, we did an ATS. There's only 12 licensed ATSs in the world. And we tried to just IPO buildings. When I say try, we IPO'd four buildings, raised about 30 million bucks. And you could buy a piece of a building that way you can buy a piece of a company. It's just then COVID came and destroyed commercial real estate. And it was very difficult to raise that in the wake of COVID. And we were up for a series B and then we ended up selling the company. I was chief investment officer. I wasn't the CEO. So I didn't really get that experience. I didn't have as much management experience. I didn't have as much like, how do we make money experience? And yeah, so I'm a first time CEO, second time founder. For anybody that's in that like close, but not CEO, [00:13:24] S1: how big of a difference is the load, you know, like the pressure of CEO, founder and founder and anything else, any other title?
00:13:24 · Pablo Srugo, Jonathan Awad
[00:13:24] S1: how big of a difference is the load, you know, like the pressure of CEO, founder and founder and anything else, any other title? [00:13:32] S0: What a good question. What a difference. The amount of small, random or big random things that just fall on your plate. Elon Musk has this amazing quote. [00:13:43] S1: He's like,