A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:24:09 · Tushar Mishra, Pablo Srugo
[00:24:09] S0: So back then, our quota was about 800,000 a year. [00:24:13] S1: Okay. So these guys are closing multimillion. Yep. And that... Like, if I if I kinda say back to you, if, like, mid twenty three, land this first one, you know, you'd probably roll with them, you know, till the end of twenty three, and then you start kind of truly running a motion, going outbound, but it's kind of like you're hunting. You're... Because nobody knows you for most of '24. And then as people, you know, the referrals start to trickle in, they start to build themselves. And it's really in 2025 when you start to see that kind of pull from the market because the the growth is kinda self fulfilling. [00:24:41] S0: Yep. Absolutely. As of 2025, we grew almost like more than 4x from start of the year. And it was happening in two ways. So one, we were signing up new logos, but also some of the logos that we signed in 2024, they were also growing. So, we had a brand who started with us when they were less than 10 locations. They grew to about 100 locations. So our NRR was also climbing a lot. [00:25:03] S1: Well, what's NRR? Like over over a 120, [00:25:06] S0: assume? End of twenty twenty five, it was close to a 140. [00:25:09] S1: Wow. Okay. Yeah. So that's like best... Like best in class is over one twenty. So you're like best best in class, 140.
00:25:09 · Pablo Srugo, Tushar Mishra
[00:25:09] S1: Wow. Okay. Yeah. So that's like best... Like best in class is over one twenty. So you're like best best in class, 140. [00:25:15] S0: So we started to get that and because the product was sticky, we didn't have a lot of churn. So any churn that we had was during onboarding. So when we sign a logo and this is again, which is once you find product market fit, you get good at, like, one thing, and then you have to start to get better at the other thing, which was... We were still not great at onboarding, and we're still learning. [00:25:34] S1: I'm really worried because listen, like, you've been listening for, like, what, ten, twenty, thirty minutes now. Clearly, you like it. And the thing is, the next episode is way better, and you're gonna miss it. You're gonna miss it because you're not following the show. So take your phone out and hit that follow button. Onboarding is the non sexy thing I keep hearing about, like, over... And I feel it with my companies. It's like, you've gotta figure out onboarding. It's so predictive of future retention and and expansion. It happens right away. You've gotta get on it. It's pretty crazy. [00:26:01] S0: Absolutely. That that that was the biggest lie. Like, we had a ton of logos that we signed that could just never onboard. And because we didn't have a great process and we could never take them there. But if you have the onboarding right, it's a sticky customer. At the