A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:33:04 · Pablo Srugo, Shmulik Fishman
[00:33:04] S1: One thing that I find is hard is when you go in and you say you're going to save X hours, right? Do you make that a dollar value? How do you get as hard as possible on the clarity of the savings? [00:33:15] S0: Again, with Equifax, they have a rack sheet, and we've, in a non-sophisticated way, given pretty big discounts against the Equifax rack sheet. We can just articulate savings against your Equifax bill. Another thing that we would do in the early days and we still do it today is we would ask our clients share with us. What are you spending on verification services every year? You spend it already. The reason why we're asking is because we want to reduce your cost, right? Tell us what you're spending. We want to give you a proposal that's cheaper, and it's also a great way to get market intelligence on what price points are, what people – what businesses are spending on this product. [00:33:52] S1: Those are the two things and you're selling B2B is, one, find a way to kind of get credibility, which is this idea of, obviously, if you're from the space, from the industry, but otherwise, design partners, getting things for free and just being able to get the product to a certain level. The second piece is proving out clear ROI, whether you're adding revenue to them to – or you're affecting KPI of that department or reducing costs, but the harder the better, right? The softer, oh, it's efficiency. Oh, it's time saving. It's four hours a week, whatever. It's just hard to rise to the top of the list and get the adoption you’d need.
00:33:52 · Pablo Srugo, Shmulik Fishman
[00:33:52] S1: Those are the two things and you're selling B2B is, one, find a way to kind of get credibility, which is this idea of, obviously, if you're from the space, from the industry, but otherwise, design partners, getting things for free and just being able to get the product to a certain level. The second piece is proving out clear ROI, whether you're adding revenue to them to – or you're affecting KPI of that department or reducing costs, but the harder the better, right? The softer, oh, it's efficiency. Oh, it's time saving. It's four hours a week, whatever. It's just hard to rise to the top of the list and get the adoption you’d need. [00:34:23] S0: People like analysis that has dollars and cents in it. There's no reason to get more fancy. [00:34:28] S1: Let me finish off on these two questions. You raised a Series A. You start building out all these APIs. When do you have a sense that the – it's still a bit of an idea? I mean, obviously, you have customers. You have some revenue, but it's a bit of a thesis. I'm going to invest in all this infrastructure, and revenue will come out the other side. When do you start to get the feeling, okay, know what? This is actually working. My idea that I had on paper is becoming reality.
00:34:28 · Pablo Srugo, Shmulik Fishman
[00:34:28] S1: Let me finish off on these two questions. You raised a Series A. You start building out all these APIs. When do you have a sense that the – it's still a bit of an idea? I mean, obviously, you have customers. You have some revenue, but it's a bit of a thesis. I'm going to invest in all this infrastructure, and revenue will come out the other side. When do you start to get the feeling, okay, know what? This is actually working. My idea that I had on paper is becoming reality. [00:34:58] S0: Once SoFi and LendingClub and Checkr and Newrez and Fannie Mae – once we started to get these sort of logos just piloting with us – and the reason why we are where today is because of these investments with clients we made several years ago. It takes 12 months, sometimes 24 months for a client to really use us for their main verification flow, but once these enterprise names start to use our service and give us positive feedback, it was happening in the 2021, ‘22 timeframe. That's when I was like, okay, we have a real business here. It's still subscale. In many ways, Argyle is subscale today if you're comparing us to Equifax, but I think, once those logos started to use us, it wasn't a – the game got much more serious. [00:35:53] S1: Would you say that's when you felt like you had true product market fit?
00:35:53 · Pablo Srugo, Shmulik Fishman
[00:35:53] S1: Would you say that's when you felt like you had true product market fit? [00:35:57] S0: The product market fit I felt pretty early, even in the gig space, because it just was such an addictive product. Even with Level Goals, you just – they just wanted to use it for every loan they transacted with. I didn't realize how big the business was until we exited the gig space or until we went to all types of income. A good way to know product-market fit is if you have a lot of clients that are addicted to using your product and keep using it day after day, and that we had. [00:36:28] S1: Perfect. Then the final question we like to end on is, if you could go back, whether at the beginning of this startup or the beginning of your first startup, with one piece of advice, what might that be?
00:36:28 · Pablo Srugo, Shmulik Fishman
[00:36:28] S1: Perfect. Then the final question we like to end on is, if you could go back, whether at the beginning of this startup or the beginning of your first startup, with one piece of advice, what might that be? [00:36:38] S0: Gosh. I don't know if it's advice. I wish that we did – even as much planning as we did, we've rebuilt Argyle several times. I think we're on API v3, and a lot of that is because we were just – we were so interested in just tinkering, building, getting feedback, building again. I do think that that has – at several junction points has slowed us down. We've had to convince clients to pivot over to the new version of our API because we rebuilt it from scratch because we realized it was wrong, and some of that is just we could have been more strategic about the product or the infrastructure we were building and be more thoughtful about it. I encourage people to – it's great to build an MVP. When you build the real version of it, be super thoughtful. It's okay if it takes a little longer than you want it to. It will pay dividends later. [00:37:27] S1: We'll stop it there, Shmulik. It was a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you for jumping on the show. [00:37:32] S0: I enjoyed it.
00:37:32 · Shmulik Fishman, Pablo Srugo
[00:37:32] S0: I enjoyed it. [00:37:34] S1: I just gave you content that you liked so much. You actually listened to the end. Guess what? You didn't pay a single dollar. Not only that, I didn't even put any ads in your face, so you just got a bunch of content for free. Now that I've delivered that value, I'm asking for something in return. Open your app, open Apple Podcasts, open Spotify, open whatever app you use to listen to this and hit that Follow button. It's actually going to help you because it's going to help you make sure you don't miss out on the next episode, which you like so much that you listen to the whole thing.