A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:17:21 · Tushar Mishra
[00:17:21] S0: Absolutely. So... And I can talk through some of the evolution there. Right? So when we started out, it was simple task management. People set up one or two checklists and then they didn't set anything up. So nobody used it. When we started having conversations and these conversations are not about why aren't aren't you using the product, we just want to understand, okay, let's go back to the pain. You still cannot figure out if somebody opened the store at 7AM. How does that person know that they need to open the store at seven What are the things that they need to do in order to open the store at 7AM? So start to do more research and try to figure out how do you think about that problem. That's when we learned that most of what these employees do at the location is coming from this binder that's often in the back office called standard operating procedures or ops manual. So the first product evolution was we said, okay, you have this ops manual, we would make it digital. Right now it's in pen and paper. Your brand, when they want to make a change, it takes too long for you to actually teach something to the employee, you need to refer back to the pages. If they need answer to a question, they need to ask you. So you make it as true. They can ask questions whenever they have a problem and then rolling that out becomes easy. So there was just a digital SOP. So now there are some companies like knowhow and think Trane will start that way that do that, like documenting your ops processes. So that was sort of the first iteration. Now that worked and we got a few customers who were really interested in this. In fact, we got one convenience store chain that had about 28 locations and they were just starting to franchisee and they were like, Okay, no, we really need this. But that's when we started hearing, this is great. We have these SOPs. But eventually what we want to do with these SOPs is actually teach employees these SOPs. And today, how we do that is we get these two hour long videos from HQ that the 16 year old kid doesn't want to watch or doesn't actually understand anything if they watch. And so it's mostly the supervisor that I'm paying more than everyone else. I'm paying $35 an hour. He's wasting two, three hours sort of every day to teach these employees.
00:19:25 · Tushar Mishra
And because my attrition is extremely high, most of these pieces are running through new set of employees every few months. That is a big, big cost for me. So the second evolution was, okay, now how do you take these SOPs and make it teachable, coachable to their frontline employee? And this is where the first discipline and product market fit was important because when you get into the realm of training, depending on who you talk to and who you listen to, it's very easy to start building an LMS. An LMS is a learning management system. Like, there are big ones. It's SCORM. We'll again move to that two hour long video that no kid wants to watch. So our approach to that was, again, outcome driven. Hey, you wanna teach this guy? He's on TikTok all the time. So I'll have these like whatever manual that you have. I'll break it down into snippets that they can watch. And by the way, you can just record a video. You don't need high level production of somebody like cutting a veggie, here's how you saw it, and actually upload it in your training. So that was the sort of the second evolution of the product, which was a big, big unlock because that's how we got a ton of new leads and new customers. So from a positioning perspective, literally our email used to say TikTok style training, and we got a ton of leads sort of through that. Now as we started to do that and these businesses started to take us seriously and wanted to use this or roll it out or test it out. We now started getting more, which is an extension of that. So now you've taught my customer what to do, but I still need to find a way to figure out if they're actually doing that thing or not, which is again going back to the task of the checklist portion. So now I have the SOP. I've taught your employee. But now from that SOP, I can also almost make that SOP actionable. So I can generate a list automatically from that saying that here are 10 things that you have to do every morning. And then instead of forcing it on them every day, I can pick and choose. So here's a new employee. They have to do it every seven days and then it goes away. And then it randomly comes in and we do a check. So So that was sort of the third evolution. From there, it came, okay, now you have my SOPs, you have my employees. I have this Excel sheet that I have to maintain where I actually add all my franchisee information.
00:21:34 · Tushar Mishra, Pablo Srugo
This is the owner. This is where the location is. And then here are some of the things that I save on Drive. Can we all put it in your platform? So that's how you slowly start to move towards that system of record kind of approach. So that's something that you learn by customer. But at the same time, we were also doing research on the market and on the industry and trying to understand really talking to everybody from large brands to small brands and try to understand what does their tech stack look like? Like what are the gaps there? Or what are the things that they're using? What are the things that they're not using? And became very clear that there's really not a lot of tech built for this industry. There are a few legacy providers. But then it's a scattered point solution approach to solving every problem. There's no underlying system of record. It's either of that or using Sheets and Excel and printouts, etcetera. So we knew that the opportunity to actually aggregate these use cases in one single place was really, really, really, really valuable. [00:22:32] S1: This happened before this customer in 2023 that you're aggregating this or is that after? [00:22:36] S0: Parallel. Parallel. Okay. So you were kinda, like, ready for them when that happened. Exactly. So so so when we landed this customer, we had most of these elements already, like, baked out, where now this... The customer could sign, like, a $50,000 agreement with us for a year.
00:22:36 · Tushar Mishra, Pablo Srugo
[00:22:36] S0: Parallel. Parallel. Okay. So you were kinda, like, ready for them when that happened. Exactly. So so so when we landed this customer, we had most of these elements already, like, baked out, where now this... The customer could sign, like, a $50,000 agreement with us for a year. [00:22:50] S1: Now fast forward a little bit. You you signed this customer, and then I'm looking at your fundraise history. I'm curious what happened in 2025, like, least based on Crunchbase, and correct if it's wrong, but, you know, you raised 5,000,000 at the beginning of twenty five, another 14 or 15,000,000 at the end. And then just about a month ago, you raised another 25. So it seems like there's some real inflection point that happened since, you know, the last year and a half. Is that accurate? Yep. What led to that? So I
00:22:50 · Pablo Srugo, Tushar Mishra
[00:22:50] S1: Now fast forward a little bit. You you signed this customer, and then I'm looking at your fundraise history. I'm curious what happened in 2025, like, least based on Crunchbase, and correct if it's wrong, but, you know, you raised 5,000,000 at the beginning of twenty five, another 14 or 15,000,000 at the end. And then just about a month ago, you raised another 25. So it seems like there's some real inflection point that happened since, you know, the last year and a half. Is that accurate? Yep. What led to that? So I [00:23:12] S0: think the biggest shift has been as we got this formula right and those initial customers that we had really started to get the value, we started to get a lot of referrals. And every event that we would go to, there would be a customer who's using the Lightly and they would say, Oh my God, the Lightly is so amazing. It's helping us. We stop using these four things that we were doing and now just using sort of the Lightly and I get all my work done. That was important. But most importantly, we had amazingly overwhelming feedback from owners. So franchisees and frontline employees were actually using the app. They were getting a lot of value from it. So that rolled into us winning sort of a lot of deals. So for example, in Q4 of twenty twenty five, we were still three reps of sales reps in our team. Out of those three sales reps, one of them hit 2.5 x of their quota, the other one hit almost three x of their quota, which is we closed more revenue in q four of twenty twenty five than we did in all of last two years.
00:23:12 · Tushar Mishra, Pablo Srugo
[00:23:12] S0: think the biggest shift has been as we got this formula right and those initial customers that we had really started to get the value, we started to get a lot of referrals. And every event that we would go to, there would be a customer who's using the Lightly and they would say, Oh my God, the Lightly is so amazing. It's helping us. We stop using these four things that we were doing and now just using sort of the Lightly and I get all my work done. That was important. But most importantly, we had amazingly overwhelming feedback from owners. So franchisees and frontline employees were actually using the app. They were getting a lot of value from it. So that rolled into us winning sort of a lot of deals. So for example, in Q4 of twenty twenty five, we were still three reps of sales reps in our team. Out of those three sales reps, one of them hit 2.5 x of their quota, the other one hit almost three x of their quota, which is we closed more revenue in q four of twenty twenty five than we did in all of last two years. [00:24:07] S1: What's quota, for example, for a rep? [00:24:09] S0: So back then, our quota was about 800,000 a year.