A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:09:15 · George, Pablo Srugo
[00:09:15] S0: Okay. A few things, but it's messy, so forgive me. So I started my career at D. E. Shaw, which is like a hedge fund, and my cofounder went to Penn. So we had some roots and people would people will respond on LinkedIn if I message selfishly because we have fancy LinkedIns. B, many companies are massive in fintech. Like if you can touch the flow of money, I'm not gonna recite the examples, you can build a very big business. The best case outcome is you can somehow index global payments, which is what we're aiming to do. And c is just it goes back to the second thesis. It was an incredible use case for AI. There's so much unstructured data. It is like purpose built to use the models. And then we had a number of ideas, some of them were derivative ideas of what's in the market already today, some of them were quite boring, some of them were innovations, and I made a fancy Figma as if we have them all, And I went to people like, I was like, hey, Pablo, like, we're building this company, it's called Atlas. We're called Atlas at the time. And I already built these five products, which one do you wanna pay for? Kinda acted as if we have it. Like made a very fancy landing page, made each slide as if I have the solution and just was like, which one of these do wanna buy? I have them all. [00:10:25] S1: So you like each person, it's not like you you you AB tested it. Like each person you would pitch all five products to and just see which one resonated the most? [00:10:33] S0: Yeah. Precisely.
00:10:33 · George, Pablo Srugo
[00:10:33] S0: Yeah. Precisely. [00:10:35] S1: I'd never heard of that, to be honest. Like and I talked to a lot of founders about customer discovery, but I never heard of just give, like, the buffet kind of playbook. Right? Like, here are, a five potential ideas and just it's usually one by one. Like, it's usually very serial. It's interesting you did it that way. [00:10:48] S0: I don't think we're very good at discovery. What we ended up with is what I think is like analogous to customer success, which is it's a no brainer problem. So like there's respectfully no PMF risk. What we do, we get people pays fast, we sold what account receivables. Every business has this problem with just the customer support. And it's just execution risk, like we're builders, but I don't think we're very good at discovery, so I would not necessarily like advise my like smorgasbord of slides. I think it may have been confusing to some CFOs that we spoke with. [00:11:18] S1: But and yet, like, I mean, you say you say, you're not good at it and yet it got you to identify the problem pretty quickly?
00:11:18 · Pablo Srugo, George
[00:11:18] S1: But and yet, like, I mean, you say you say, you're not good at it and yet it got you to identify the problem pretty quickly? [00:11:25] S0: Yeah. We we put in some hours and I think we're fortunate with a few meetings. We were also very deliberate about not asking for help. Like, we wanted to make sure that we can do this part and, like, eat shit ourselves. But, yeah, we we got there. And then I think what got us over the top was the same, like, anxiety that I had sitting on the floor, which is we just felt like we have to jump off a cliff and build. Like, at some point, I think you have to just, like you just kinda have to go for it. [00:11:49] S1: Yeah. The the stupid thing we say is, like, you have to be in the market to win the market, which is at some point, you gotta get in there and do something in order to actually have a potential building something big. I have two questions. I'll ask one then the then the other. The first one is you you said you had these five ideas. Can you just again, because I'm always thinking of the mindset of a founder who's like, okay. I get, you know, how you could end up in fintech because maybe you're credible and it matches all your your other checklist. Like, how do I come up with great ideas? Right? So you had five. Some were better than others, I'm sure. But what was the process for just even coming up with these ones?
00:12:19 · George
[00:12:19] S0: Yep. I like how you're doing this because you're really teasing out whatever, like, alpha I have to maybe help someone. In in some capacity, I think it's good. I had a doc on my phone of like all these tailwinds that I think are happening in the world, everything from like nuclear to education to just like crazy things, completely our fog and all even to fintech. And so there was a fintech bucket and some of these ideas were married to tailwinds, like a structured data and payments. Then another bucket of ideas that spawned a slide in that presentation was, how do I say this nicely? Companies that I think are attacking a big market, but are executing poorly. I just think I can do better. Even without LMs, okay, I'll say one complete thesis. If a company is bought by a private equity firm, that typically to me means that A, it's a big market, the B people are sharks, but B, the B firm will like rip out the people, they'll go through like a period of fast growth and they're sell it. There's gonna be a period of like two to four years where I can pounce. Someone already did the diligence for me, they think it's a big market. One example for this is sales tax. Like there was a company that was purchased by PE from Cold, Oliveira and sales tax, they're for 9,000,000,000. And then now we have Enrock and Sphere, etcetera. So we have an equivalent of that in Myspace. That's another angle that I used to help with that idea.
00:13:38 · Pablo Srugo, George
[00:13:38] S1: And you were just like, you're you're really deducing these ideas. Like, you're looking at the market one way or who's there, who can I who can I crush off? And then the other one is just like, okay, what are big tailwinds that we could apply to fintech, for example? [00:13:49] S0: I tried all the things. I mean, I ran a company before this. I was responsible for, like, 100 people in the last company, did all the things, I tried to think of like, what problems did I have? And I spent ten years in consumer. What problems did I have in my company? What problems what would I pay for? What brings me joy? What am I good at? Like what are other founders that I know? None of that stuff works for me. I couldn't come up with anything. Like, I mean, there's like the ubiquitous stuff, like hiring is very hard. Like I wish I could hire more engineers faster, but I didn't wanna build a recruiting company. But I could never come up with anything based on, my experience and my personal pain.
00:13:49 · George, Pablo Srugo
[00:13:49] S0: I tried all the things. I mean, I ran a company before this. I was responsible for, like, 100 people in the last company, did all the things, I tried to think of like, what problems did I have? And I spent ten years in consumer. What problems did I have in my company? What problems what would I pay for? What brings me joy? What am I good at? Like what are other founders that I know? None of that stuff works for me. I couldn't come up with anything. Like, I mean, there's like the ubiquitous stuff, like hiring is very hard. Like I wish I could hire more engineers faster, but I didn't wanna build a recruiting company. But I could never come up with anything based on, my experience and my personal pain. [00:14:26] S1: So that's how you get this list. The other thing that I I think is really important is one of the things that I think founders struggle with until they have the experience is what does validation really look like? There's the simple one, which is here's, like, $20,000. Go build it. Okay. Cool. Validate it. Right? But there's always, like, a level before that where you're pitching something. It's like people always smile and nod and whatever. So you gotta differentiate that from eyes lighting up, this is a real thing. What did you see? You pitched five ideas. You kind of almost had this baked in, like, you know, way to compare. The one that you went with, which I assume ended up being Monk, like, what did you see? What did you hear that told you that this was the best idea?