A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:30:39 · Jonathan Awad
[00:30:39] S0: discourse on this, but not a lot of like the reality behind the scenes. The reality behind the scenes is that we made a bunch of Figma mock-up demos that we pretended were real. And I would play people through that and get their takes. And I hit up genuinely every single possible person that I had ever met in years of financial services, who I thought was either at a company who could share data or was one to two degrees separation away from someone who could share some data. And it was so many people. And I think people just totally underestimate what I mean by that. Like I'm talking all day. You're LinkedIn-ing, you're texting. Like I'm sending hundreds and hundreds of messages, hundreds and hundreds a day. I think the scale of it is just super underestimated. And the only way to really do that, and I don't know if this is too much information, this is what worked for me, is I, it was so much caffeine. It was so much Adderall. I worked so much. Like I definitely worked 100 hour weeks. I think people say 100 hour weeks, 120 hour weeks. And like a lot of it, when you actually like watch them, like imagine like a movie or a video, they're kind of on their phone, like scrolling a bunch of time. And like, they're kind of watching on Twitter, they're like whatever. They're doing a bunch of nothing. I was like urgently, frantically messaging people. Because I knew something that was very simple. You can't just ask for something. That's the problem. You have to catch up with them. And be useful to them. And be valuable to them. And then, humans are so reciprocal in nature, then they'll just want to help you. But the reason that you have to start frantically, urgently doing that today, is because there's a load period though. Like that's like months of time. Then you have to start today. The clock will have to start at some point. First touch, second touch, third touch, hang out, coffee, invite to an event, introduce them to somebody, hand them some sort of a resource. What I love them back in the day, that's really handy actually, is market maps. Either you make a market map, or you go and grab somebody's market map. I had three or four market maps, just at the ready, copy paste message, and I'd send it to people. And they'd be like, wow, this is super useful actually. So just do like a ton of great research.
00:32:54 · Jonathan Awad
There's been a bunch of great tweets, a bunch of great like LinkedIn posts, that people do, that's just really great resources. And I always just leave people with that, if not introduce them to someone. But the amount of outreach I did. Well,
00:33:08 · Pablo Srugo
[00:33:08] S1: let's talk about that. Like this is one of the, one of the two deep dives I want to do is, is kind of generating top of funnel, right? And so I think it seems like this is going to be key. And then even the bottom of funnel stuff, the credibility piece, we'll probably do both of those, because they seem to tie into ultimately getting everybody to cooperate and share data with you, which is how you even build a product. So let's go deep on that. Like, maybe it's the same now, but let's go back then, because this is what we're talking about. What is an average week for you? Like a hundred hour weeks, sometimes I do the math. Like I do not work on it hour weeks, right? But I'm, I'm not a founder, right? So it's just, it really is different. I've been a founder and it's, it's funny. Like I think any VC that hasn't been a founder just really doesn't know. I mean, it's just so different. The workload is so different. The pressure is so different, but sometimes I think about a hundred hour weeks and I'm like, man, how does that even math out? So let's maybe start there. Then we can talk about the tactics, you know, what you're messaging, what you're reaching out on LinkedIn, et cetera. But I think detail is the key. So somebody can actually measure themselves against that and be like, what more could I be doing to just get more, more certainty,
00:34:04 · Jonathan Awad, Pablo Srugo
[00:34:04] S0: more deal flow? Yeah. So I think the easiest way to think about it is there's your time in meetings and then there's your time outside of the meeting and then the prep and the followup and all of that. And then there's a time on like the weekends, right? So the time in me, like, I mean, I'll just share like my calendar, like my calendar. And I definitely look over here, 43 hours a week in meetings, 35, 38, 46, 43, 25. This week I was traveling a bunch. 33, 53, 40, 40, 51, 41, 63. That's just meetings. Yeah, exactly. So, but like for anyone listening, I mean, [00:34:41] S1: this is a calendar that's just stacked like full day and you're doing 40 hours, 50 hours in a meeting, which obviously doesn't count the prep time. [00:34:47] S0: It doesn't count like all the other work that's going to come out of it. [00:34:50] S1: You know, there doesn't count any of the other stuff that you're doing. [00:34:53] S0: And it's just like you're in meetings. And that's the thing that makes like the difference is you have to be so, so, so urgent about trying to capture every single minute. It's just every single minute. And I think people kind of miss that of every, you can always raise more money. You cannot raise more time. You don't have, we don't have time. It's a great Elon Musk quote. He's like, if we don't work with extreme urgency, we have zero chance of accomplishing X goal. He was talking about multi-planetary big, big goal. Yeah. Big, big, [00:35:30] S1: big goal.
00:35:30 · Pablo Srugo, Jonathan Awad
[00:35:30] S1: big goal. [00:35:30] S0: But he's like, if you're not so, so, so, so, so urgent, what are you doing? Why are you doing it? Like you're going up against people with, I mean, I'm single, like no kids. Like I have nothing else that I care about more than bass layer. And I have friends who work just as much more than me. Your weekends are fully stacked. Like every single minute is totally dedicated to this. And I mentioned like Adderall caffeine. Like I sleep, I sleep six hours probably a night and I go to the gym five days a week. But besides those two things, essentially like I've cut out anything that doesn't help me grow, evolve, learn, get better at my craft and like get better and meet more people. It's that's who you're going up against. I mean, obviously to bring up the easy examples, like the Corgi guy, it's a little ridiculous, but I kind of get what he's getting at. Seven days a week, he sleeps in office, whatever that is. Like it would help though, right? It definitely would push you further and faster. And obviously they raised three times this year. They went from like a bill to four bill valuation. It's clearly working no matter what anybody says. Like if your goal is to do X, there are ways to do it that are extremely uncomfortable, extremely painful and extremely lonely, quite frankly, right? Like I obviously have tons of friends, but I don't see them very often. I have tons of work friends and like other types of friends. Yeah, this is, I mean, it's not about, you know, recommending or not recommending at the end of the day. It's like,
00:36:51 · Pablo Srugo, Jonathan Awad
[00:36:51] S1: if you want to build a multi-billion dollar company, you're going to compete at a global scale. And if you have competitors who are deciding to work the way you're working, then somehow you're going to produce like two X or three X, the output per hour for you to actually compete with them. Like you're either going to have to figure that out, which is in theory possible. And I'm sure there's going to be somebody that's like, Hey, I built a big company and I, I never worked this hard, but that that's what you're going up. That's just a reality. And then you got to decide like how you want to kind of, you know, tweak your odds, you know, and, and how much work you want to put in to still be able to perform, you know, relative to that. Yeah. I think it's just so important because my, [00:37:26] S0: I think like the success that we had was in a very specific type of method that just takes so much time and so much effort, [00:37:35] S1: which is just really outreaching and being as valuable as possible. Yeah. So tell me about that. Like you're, you're going on, like, let's start with outreach, right? Like back then, especially who are you reaching out to or getting intros?