A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:04:56 · Pablo Srugo, Tushar Mishra
[00:04:56] S1: And when was this, by the way? [00:04:57] S0: Like, what year? This was 2023. [00:04:59] S1: When did you start the business? [00:05:00] S0: We started the business late twenty twenty. [00:05:03] S1: Okay. So it's like two and a half, almost three years into the business when you have this big product market through moment. [00:05:08] S0: Absolutely. [00:05:09] S1: Where were you at before that? Like, what what kind of customers were you selling to and kinda how are they using the product? [00:05:15] S0: So before that, we were doing a lot of iterations of the product. So we would launch a product and then we would try to improve it. Most of our customers were six units, somebody who was using in California. They had a small restaurant. [00:05:29] S1: And was that still like franchisors or this was somebody that just owned like six restaurants, they wanted their managers to kinda like use the app? [00:05:36] S0: It was a mix. So it was still not completely focused. So some of them were non franchisee. They just had six restaurant. They wanted the managers to use it. We had one or two like franchisees, but none of the brands. So this was the first brand that we really got. [00:05:51] S1: How did you close this brand? Walk me through the kind of sales process. It's always hard to get your first meaningful logo.
00:05:51 · Pablo Srugo, Tushar Mishra
[00:05:51] S1: How did you close this brand? Walk me through the kind of sales process. It's always hard to get your first meaningful logo. [00:05:56] S0: Yeah. So we were sending out a lot of outbound messages. We got them interested. We walked them through the demo. They really thought that what we have built solves the current burning problem that they have, which is they're trying to grow and open a ton of locations, but they don't know how to support those locations. And so they decided to give us a try. What we knew from our experience back launching the first product that we'll probably get into was free means nothing and we'll not really get feedback. So we basically told them the pricing, we agreed on a pricing, we signed an agreement, we told them as part of the agreement, we give you like a one month pilot. But if that is successful and these are the success criterias, it rolls into a full annual contract. They agreed to that. They were like, okay, if it doesn't work and they had a back out clause. So if it doesn't work, then we don't owe you anything. We were confident that we could sort of make it work. So the next one month, we did the onboarding. They set up a few workflows and they started using it. And then organically, they signed up all 50 of their locations. [00:06:59] S1: And so now let's let's go back a little bit in time. Like, late twenty twenty, you started this business. What were you doing just before you started this business? Like, what's the kind of origin story here?
00:06:59 · Pablo Srugo, Tushar Mishra
[00:06:59] S1: And so now let's let's go back a little bit in time. Like, late twenty twenty, you started this business. What were you doing just before you started this business? Like, what's the kind of origin story here? [00:07:06] S0: So before starting Delight Tree, we used to run a company called Servitor, which was doing customer experience management for multi location businesses. So it was a similar kind of industry, but not particularly focused on franchisees. We had hotel chains, restaurant chains, DTA chains and our customer. And they would use SurveyDev to aggregate their customer reviews from different online channels and then have one dashboard where they could look at those reviews and reply to those reviews. We exited that company in 2020 before sort of starting Delight Tree and sort of there was an overlap between when we were trying to do both those things. [00:07:42] S1: Where did this idea come from for Delight Tree? [00:07:45] S0: During the last few quarters of running the last company, what we were really trying to do was this whole space of aggregating reviews was commoditized. Right? There were so many vendors that were doing it. We thought our differentiation was this NLP engine that we had on top that would analyze unstructured text data and tell them what's happening across different locations. This was before NLP was still not a solved problem. [00:08:09] S1: The world has changed so much, man. It's absolutely insane.
00:08:09 · Pablo Srugo, Tushar Mishra
[00:08:09] S1: The world has changed so much, man. It's absolutely insane. [00:08:12] S0: Exactly. Yeah. And then now you can just... Like, on Google, ask, hey. Analyze all my reviews and tell me what's happening. [00:08:18] S1: It's it's crazy, man. [00:08:20] S0: Yeah. So why we were trying to find out, like, how do we grow? And and we knew that our company was profitable, but we knew that in order, like what we wanna do was really something big. And so in order to differentiate, we were trying out new different things. And one thing that was really bothering us was even though we're giving these insights and we think our analytics are so great, nobody's actually using them. What was happening was you had these marketing teams who were looking at the dashboard. If there's something interesting, they'll pass it on to the ops team, ops team to the regional manager, regional manager store owner, store owner to the guy working there and there was no tracking of any of this happening. So one feature that we launched during the last few quarters of the company was we would automatically create a task from the insight that's getting generated and send that as an email to the GM of the location. And that started to get a lot of attention from our customers. [00:09:11] S1: So it's, for example, what, like, oh, bathroom's really dirty, one star. Oh, you guys came to the bathroom, something... Just a super example, but
00:09:11 · Pablo Srugo, Tushar Mishra
[00:09:11] S1: So it's, for example, what, like, oh, bathroom's really dirty, one star. Oh, you guys came to the bathroom, something... Just a super example, but [00:09:17] S0: something like that? Exactly. So we get a lot of reviews, bathrooms are dirty. So we'll send a task to the GM of the hotel saying, hey, clean the restrooms and click a picture. [00:09:27] S1: Gotcha. [00:09:27] S0: So it was that simple. When we launched that, our customers started asking, can we create our own tasks? Can we add like schedule or a deadline to the task? Can I have this task repeating? Start getting a lot of these questions, which got us very interested in sort of this problem. We thought there were so many to do list task management apps, like shouldn't this be a solved problem? But turns out it's not because the way these businesses work is very different. You have frontline team members, you have HQ, you have somebody who's at the location, you have local compliance laws, you have Oshkol, a bunch of different things. So we knew majority of the world work as frontline employees don't work behind a desk and software for them will look very different. So that was a very, very exciting problem sort of for us. That's when we got an opportunity to also exit our last company. There was a channel manager who was already selling to hotels and we had a lot of customer. They wanted some of our solutions. So we decided, okay, let's just focus on this. So that was sort of the genesis of Elite. V, which is this insight that we had from our last company.
00:09:27 · Tushar Mishra, Pablo Srugo
[00:09:27] S0: So it was that simple. When we launched that, our customers started asking, can we create our own tasks? Can we add like schedule or a deadline to the task? Can I have this task repeating? Start getting a lot of these questions, which got us very interested in sort of this problem. We thought there were so many to do list task management apps, like shouldn't this be a solved problem? But turns out it's not because the way these businesses work is very different. You have frontline team members, you have HQ, you have somebody who's at the location, you have local compliance laws, you have Oshkol, a bunch of different things. So we knew majority of the world work as frontline employees don't work behind a desk and software for them will look very different. So that was a very, very exciting problem sort of for us. That's when we got an opportunity to also exit our last company. There was a channel manager who was already selling to hotels and we had a lot of customer. They wanted some of our solutions. So we decided, okay, let's just focus on this. So that was sort of the genesis of Elite. V, which is this insight that we had from our last company. [00:10:27] S1: So this is kind of the the idea of the task management piece. Right? So walk me through who do you decide to build this for? Like, in the old company, were tied to whatever customers you have, so you built them for those customers in the hotels or whatever. Now you're like, okay. Task management for somebody HQ to the stores. Like, where do you go with this?