A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:06:13 · Mike Murchison
[00:06:13] S1: Know, it was a few fold , a few reasons. Like, one was just this deep belief that, you know, software is a service. We know this as like, you know, people who work in the SaaS industry. The , the , the word service is a really important word. It , it's, you know, we don't tolerate an experience where in the physical world where we , we don't like to tolerate experiences where we pay for something and, and we don't get what we paid for, you know , the, the , the service bar in the, in the software world. You know, I think we just had a sort of visceral reaction how low that was. Um, so maybe that was the , the first thing. The second thing was that I think that the, the world, the , the paradigm of talking to your customers less, you know, it was really , really born of an era where people really weren't making as many data informed decisions. And it might've been because a lot of this information wasn't digitized to begin with. Very , if you're running a , a legacy contact center and you're doing millions of phone calls a day, and those are analog phone calls, very difficult to mine that data extract insights and, you know, inform your decision making . And that's really where, you know, customer service was born. It's through the, the telephone. However, you know, in the digital era where we can actually start to make use of this information, you know, you can do more with this, it becomes much more action, much more useful. And so I, I felt as though the technology was actually quite a bit ahead of the strategy, and that seemed like an opportunity for us in building volley felt like we, we really should be, we knew our success had come from really rapid feedback loops between our users and our product teams. You know, the , the question was, why , how do we, if that works at a small scale, it should work at least as well at a big scale, maybe even better if we had more data. So how do we figure out how to solve that problem? That was the, that was the question.
00:07:56 · Pablo Srugo, Mike Murchison
[00:07:56] S0: I see. And at first solving that problem was, was not so much about starting a new business venture, it was just about making volley better, right? [00:08:03] S1: It was, and I, you know, I went through this, you know, this really difficult period where it started to become clear that, hey, maybe this customer experience opportunity was, is is a bigger one, a more difficult problem to solve than the one we were trying to solve with Volley . But yes, initially this was about a curiosity we had around, you know, solving a , a problem that we were experiencing as, as the leaders of Volley and not as a, you know, as a, oh , this is a pivot opportunity, or this is a new business venture. It was, it was about solving our own, our own operational challenge. [00:08:37] S0: So maybe let's, let's walk through some of the steps, right? So you , you mentioned first you call a bunch of VPs and customer success and, and you validate the idea that they're thinking about it that way. And, and , and that, that that is the current paradigm. What do you start doing? What are the first few steps you start taking towards fixing customer success, at least, you know, within volley at first?
00:08:58 · Mike Murchison
[00:08:58] S1: Yeah. So I think , uh, step one, and hopefully this is helpful for, you know, the entrepreneurs in the audience who are thinking about, you know, perhaps in their own companies or were exploring a pivot themselves. For , for me, what was most useful is we, we first heard, confirm that there was a pattern that the same problem was manifesting across industries. Like, that was, that was a very important, a very important learning. And the way we knew that was pretty simple. I mean, picking up the phone call, you have a 10th phone call in a row, and people are saying almost, they're all using the exact same phrases when they're describing the problem and they're reacting to it the same way. So I al you almost feel like, like an anthropologist, like you just sort of get to a point where you can kind of predict what someone's going to say in response to one of your questions. So that was, that was step one s . Step two was, was really the , the commitment to understanding this problem at a much deeper level. And for, for us, you know, making that commitment meant going back to these VPs and asking if we could join their team , uh, as agents. And seven of them said yes. So our, our belief there was, okay, we, we, we have this, we , we, we've, we've identified there's this problem across industries. Now let's understand it more deeply. The way to understand it more deeply in our view was to experience the pain firsthand as manually as possible. And so we became customer service agents, and we were the frontline customer service reps for seven different companies.
00:10:28 · Pablo Srugo, Mike Murchison
[00:10:28] S0: And that was you and your co-founder, like as your CEO of a startup that's funded. You take some time to be an agent for another company. [00:10:36] S1: Yeah, yeah. [00:10:37] S0: How much time are you devoting to this? Like how are you making that work?
00:10:40 · Mike Murchison, Pablo Srugo
[00:10:40] S1: Well, I mean, this is, there's a gradual transition between Volley and ada . Um, but we became full-time customer service agents. So, you know, we were, we were, we were employed by seven different companies at one point, all at the same time. And we lived and breathed customer service <laugh> for the better part of a year. I mean, this was, this was an intense, an intense period, definitely the, one of the low lights of my entrepreneurial career. Like at that point, I just, I couldn't , um, I , we , a lot of folks, and one of the pressures you face as, you know, as a , as a founder is, especially in the early days, a lot of folks are asking you what you're doing. Like, what, what , what is your job? What do you do? It's one thing to justify that, you know, explain that when you have, you know, a couple hundred employees and you know , you know you're financed and you know, you, you , it's clear what your company, your company actually creates value much harder to do that in the earlier days. And you know, I , I'm someone, you know, who, you know, I , I I, I found it difficult to be in a situation where, you know, it was very difficult to explain what we were doing. The only the only people who really knew what we were doing were David and I, and we were just obsessed with learning. We were just obsessed with learning how difficult and painful it can be to provide, to scale customer service, you know, from the, from the ground up as a frontline, as a frontline employee. So that , that was the second step. [00:12:03] S0: Had you
00:12:03 · Pablo Srugo, Mike Murchison
[00:12:03] S0: Had you [00:12:03] S1: Paused the , the third step, [00:12:04] S0: Had you paused Volley at that point? Or like, I'm just , I'm curious when you decided, yeah, let's move to this thing and how that, that decision was made. [00:12:12] S1: So I think, you know, the, this is, this is the behind the scenes . You know, what , what's the real story when I think about this story? I think of it as a immediate moment, immediate transition. There was Volley and then there was the path to Ada. The reality is that there was a messy transition between the two , and there were moments where we were running both, there were moments where Volley was sort of put into a , um, was was sort of put into maintenance mode and was still, was still operating. There were, there was a period where we were, you know, fully into, you know, what became ada , but we're fully doing customer service manually. But everyone thought that we were still working on Volley. So there, you know, it was a , it was a messy sort of gray area , gray gray period. But the, the , the actual where our time was going was pretty quickly, pretty quickly shifted away from volley towards, you know , doing manual customer support and , um, and investing in, in trying to learn as much as as possible through that experience. [00:13:12] S0: Was it just the two of you? Did you have other employees? Did you have other stakeholders that you needed to tell them we're not spending any more time on Volley ? How are those, how did those discussions go? It's