A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:04:52 · George, Pablo Srugo
[00:04:52] S0: I think it's a tier zero question. I would not listen to anything I'm saying this because I'm a nobody and still figuring this out. My stance on this is following your energy. And like, if you have energy and if chasing this idea brings you curiosity, then yeah. I think the question is insanely good because the Valley and everything around us valorizes like pain tolerance and, you know, you read about the guys at Notion, they suffered for four years, went to Japan and suffered more, then now it's revenues have to go in. But, yeah, following your energy and thinking about all the signals that's my take. [00:05:21] S1: I like the energy as a concept. I thought about that a lot myself. It's like, it carries through, like, even when you think about hours work, like, how all in are you? And it's like, how much time you're at the desk? Like, how much are you gonna count this? You're gonna count that? But it's really all about energy. Like where does your energy go? You wake up in the morning, what are you thinking about? At night, you're watching a movie, you zone out, you're zoning out to what? Like that's where your energy is going, that's what's pulling you.
00:05:21 · Pablo Srugo, George
[00:05:21] S1: I like the energy as a concept. I thought about that a lot myself. It's like, it carries through, like, even when you think about hours work, like, how all in are you? And it's like, how much time you're at the desk? Like, how much are you gonna count this? You're gonna count that? But it's really all about energy. Like where does your energy go? You wake up in the morning, what are you thinking about? At night, you're watching a movie, you zone out, you're zoning out to what? Like that's where your energy is going, that's what's pulling you. [00:05:41] S0: I I I will say that like today, it's so easy to build things. It's certainly easier than it was a year ago. And I think a lot of people jump around. I jump around quite a lot. I do think you have to like commit hardcore to a thing. I don't wanna say like how many months. Our stance was like at least six months to a year, like hardcore, obsessed, like crazy hours, sell it, code it. I do think there's, like, a specific amount of, like, sweat you have to put into it before you can build conviction of, oh my god. I'm losing my energy versus, oh, I'm just, like, you know, I'm just tired. [00:06:11] S1: Once you give the money back, are you in kind of this valley of despair or are you kinda like ready to go? Like, where are you at? Talking about energy, where are you at?
00:06:11 · Pablo Srugo, George
[00:06:11] S1: Once you give the money back, are you in kind of this valley of despair or are you kinda like ready to go? Like, where are you at? Talking about energy, where are you at? [00:06:18] S0: Despicable. Sitting on the floor at South Park Common seven days a week, like reading books, rethinking my life. Super miserable. I would not wish it was my worst enemy. I mean, it's kind of interesting, but also like quite miserable because I felt like time is running out to build something epic. And then especially with the ones around us and I felt like I'm gonna miss my window. What year was this? [00:06:39] S1: Like where are we at timeline wise? [00:06:40] S0: Summer fall twenty twenty four. [00:06:42] S1: Yeah. Okay. I did say it. There's already a lot of, like, AI native startups having built and kind of growing around you. [00:06:49] S0: Yeah. People are taking off. Right? I was miserable. But then I met my cofounder who is incredible and an amazing human and is, like, one of the main reasons why I even decided to go at it again. And then we did it, like, a new set of discovery, which I think is your question like. [00:07:02] S1: How'd you need your cofounder? That that's also a big one. [00:07:04] S0: Very lucky. I always strongly recommend South Park Commons. It's a community for founders slash engineers that people just wanna tinker. We'll introduced there. [00:07:13] S1: And he was like, was it kinda like you were technical, he was technical, like one of these kind of compliment situations?
00:07:13 · Pablo Srugo, George
[00:07:13] S1: And he was like, was it kinda like you were technical, he was technical, like one of these kind of compliment situations? [00:07:18] S0: I feel odd saying this, but the person that introduced us felt like we're both very intense and that was the reason for why. And then we would just spend time together. We're, like, trained for a marathon at the same time. We're both running a lot, and we didn't even think about cofounding. We just talked about life. [00:07:36] S1: And so when does the idea come together? Like, okay. You guys are gonna build something. Obviously, it's gonna be something AI. Do you have any ideas of what you wanna do? What problems you wanna solve? Like, what's the starting point?
00:07:44 · George
[00:07:44] S0: We had a few principles. So one is from this Cartesio, from this QA thing. One is like it has to be a massive market. We have to it's gonna sound obscene, but we have to see some path to go public or to make a company that will do, you know, 100,000,000,000 top line, not not valuation, but top line. And the main reason for this is like smart ambitious people wanna work with fast growing companies. There's only like so much yapping that I could do to motivate the team. People wanna look at grass and go up into the right. And so a, big market, b, actually use AI, not like a bolt on, not nice to have. I thought it would be a travesty for us to build a business where we're not using what the labs are doing. And three, and I still have this in all the recruiting docs. And at the time, it was about Sajeet and Sam. Now it's Claude. But at the time, I was very worried about Microsoft and OpenAI. And so we wanted to pick a problem where we would not get nuked by Sam and Microsoft. We can skip the reasons for why I was worried about those two. But I would much rather compete against respectfully all the founders than the labs. And so those are the three things. Don't get nuked by the labs, build something very big, and actually use AI at the application layer. And we picked fintech and we did discovery, and then we landed on this AR.
00:08:56 · Pablo Srugo
[00:08:56] S1: It's easy when you start with a clear pain point or a problem to solve how you would go to try to build that company. Not to say it's easy to build the company, but the steps are clear. When you start how you started, which is top down, so I've seen other founders do that, what I always wanna know is how do you go from there to the first thing? Like, you mentioned fintech. How did you narrow all that to fintech, for example?