A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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?
00:10:44 · Tushar Mishra
[00:10:44] S0: So since we were already sort of in the space, multi location physical businesses, we knew that space really well. And he knew that this problem is more exaggerated when you have multiple locations and especially when you have employees in the location who don't work behind a desk. So who cannot use something on your desktop, you need mobile as the main way in which you will interact with software. So we wanted to focus there, but we still were not very clear about who the actual customer would be. And the most natural intuitive place for us to go to was some of the customers we had in our old company that were interested in sort of this kind of thing. One of them was incidentally a franchise owner who had a few subway locations. And they decided to be like our design partner or somebody who's building the app with us. But very foolishly, since we were coming off that high of our last company, we thought, yeah, we got this. And so we built the app and we quickly launched it and quickly scaled that to about 200 locations, which is reach out to another owners without knowing. So there were some people who own like Canadian stores. So we had people who own external level locations. We had people who own Burger Kings. It was mostly in sort of that food kind of series. We had one guy who owned, like, a few Planet Fitness locations as well. So those were typically customer. There was one brand which was not franchisee at all. It was just a chain of restaurant. But those are the guys that we eventually, like, signed up on the platform.
00:12:09 · Pablo Srugo
[00:12:09] S1: You're generally from this space, you have access to these customers. And you had most of the idea right, but you didn't get that PMF moment until, like, almost three years later. What happened? Like, what what was some of the big learnings that had to happen in those three years to kinda get you there?
00:12:22 · Tushar Mishra, Pablo Srugo
[00:12:22] S0: The first mistake we made was launch our app and our assumption was we make it free, we sign up a bunch of customers, they start running a few checklists. As they get addicted to the app, now we turn on monetization and then our revenue would go like this. So that was sort of the main purpose and we quickly got traction. So we got even more excited. Okay. This is working and now we just need to turn the faucet on and it's gonna like... We'll scale to 1,000,000 in revenue. That moment never happened because since the customers were not paying anything, they did not have a lot of skin in the game. They found the concept interesting. They would set up one or two different checklists, but then nothing would happen after that. So they rolled that out and we would see there's actually nobody using the app in these businesses. Right? Like there's there's there's nothing happening. So we knew that what we have probably makes sense from a problem perspective because the messaging is sort of working. But we still don't have that repeatability. I don't have a way to reach out to those customers in a repeatable manner. And we definitely don't have product market fit because none of them are actually using the product and none of them are paying us a single dollar. [00:13:31] S1: When you get this 50 location customer, they're finally willing to pay you, you know, post pilot or whatever, they're willing to pay you. What was the difference between them and and the customers you had so far?