A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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
00:13:22 · Mike Murchison
[00:13:22] S1: A great question. I remember. So we, we had, but Boris and Angela from version one Ventures led our l uh , led our pre-seed rounds at the time was a $500,000 round into volley . And, you know, we are about two years into volley , and David and I look at each other in one day, and we go, you know, we're, we've just spent 15 hours doing customer service all day. Like, we're not building volley right now. Like, we're off trying to do, figure something out. It's clear that vol , we've done this for long enough , it's clear that volley isn't really working. There came a time where early in this transition where of course I needed to communicate to , uh, our investors that, you know, we were, the original idea they invested in was not something that we were currently pursuing anymore. And I, I distinctly remember going to , uh, tell Boris this Boris words , and who, by the way, is still on ADA's board today. Uh , so he's seen the full, the full journey. But at the time when we were volley , I was so nervous as a founder about telling him our lead investor that we were essentially had failed and are moving on to work on something new. And we didn't know what that was yet. We haven't read a single line of code for this new thing. In fact, we're just doing customer service manually for a bunch of different companies. And I, I wrote , I was so nervous. I wrote out, I was , I didn't trust myself to be able to convey what I wanted to convey just through memory. So I've printed out a speech that I wanted to read to Boris. We met up for lunch on Spadina . We sat down and Boris asked , how are things going with Volley ? And , uh, the waiter comes by before I can answer and, and says, do you want anything to order? And I said, no, <laugh> and I, and I take out my piece of paper, and I, I am like, Boris, if you don't mind, I just wanna read this to you. I start reading to him how, you know, we, we started on this journey to reimagine search. We learned a ton about scale, trying to learn a lot about user engagement, rapid feedback loops between product and engineering teams and customers. And it wasn't working like we thought it would. I had this whole, the whole part of the speech was all about, you know , I totally understanding what your money back. I'm so sorry to disappoint you.
00:15:41 · Mike Murchison
You know, I get how like, if, if this is like no longer aligned with what your investment thesis is, like, whatever that means , I , I didn't know any better. And Boris looks at the paper, pushes it to the side and says, no problem. What are our ideas? What are we gonna do next? That's awesome. I start talking to him about, look, we're doing this customer service. We think there's something in this space. You know, we think it's really important to understand the problem really intimately at a like, really, really deeply, you know, a couple minutes later, Boris . Okay , sounds , seems interesting. Um, you should talk to, So-and-So , um, he made an introduction to someone who , uh, worked at Shopify because at the time, Shopify, of course was scaling super quickly and had customer service problems. And sure enough , um, you know, fast forward , ADA is born, Shopify is a customer of Ada . And , um, you know, we , we , um, we made it through a successful pivot, which I'm sure we'll get into more about how that actually happened in detail. But the , the point is that the, for me, there was such a profound lesson there about what it really means to be founder friendly as an investor, and how I think some of the most difficult challenges associated with entrepreneurship, namely changing your core idea and what your core pursuit is , your core identity. They really do require a certain amount of breathing room and just support, you know, the last thing that would've been helpful in that situation would've been, you know, are you sure you don't want to , you sure you want to make this move would be to challenge the idea or force us to lean into, you know, what we had originally pursued, you know, or to, you know, or to just to , to bow out and not be supportive. But that was a core moment in our company's history. And, you know , it's a core reason why , um, you know, I'm so grateful to be, to be partnered with, with Boris and Angela.